Claire Dwyer

Negotiating diasporic identities: Young British South Asian Muslim women

Abstract Recent work by cultural theorists has celebrated the “cultures of hybridity” associated with diasporic populations. This paper draws upon research undertaken with young British South Asian Muslim women to explore some of the everyday dilemmas of negotiating diasporic identities. I begin by emphasising the contextual and contingent ways in which diasporic identities are expressed. Diasporic identities are always configured through gender, and I illustrate how the respondents negotiate diasporic identities in relation to both changing familial gender ideals and gender relations and against racialised gender stereotypes. Finally, I consider how the young women are exploring possibilities for reworking gender identities by drawing on alternative diasporic identifications.

Explaining Educational Achievement and Career Aspirations among Young British Pakistanis: Mobilizing ‘Ethnic Capital’?

This article offers an explanation for recent trends that indicate higher numbers of young British Pakistani men and women pursue higher education compared to their white peers. Our qualitative research provides evidence for shared norms and values amongst British Pakistani families, what we term ‘ethnic capital’. However, our findings also highlight differences between families. The Bourdieuian notion of ‘cultural capital’ explains educational success among middle-class British Pakistani families. We argue, however, that insufficient attention has been given to the relation between education and ethnicity, and particularly the role of ‘ethnic capital’ in ameliorating social class disadvantage. Our research also recognizes the limitations of ‘ethnic capital’ and traces the interplay of ethnicity with gender and religion that produces differences between, and within, working-class British Pakistani families. We also emphasize how structural constraints, selective school systems and racialized labour markets, influence the effectiveness of ‘ethnic capital’ in promoting educational achievement and social mobility.

Qualitative methods: are you enchanted or are you alienated?

Copyright

‘From cricket lover to terror suspect’ – challenging representations of young British Muslim men

In contemporary media and policy debates young British Muslim men are frequently described as experiencing cultural conflict, as alienated, deviant, underachieving, and as potential terrorists. In this article we seek to convey the everyday negotiations, struggles and structural constraints that shape the lives of young British Pakistani Muslim men in particular. We draw on interviews with British Pakistani Muslim men aged between 16 and 27 in Slough and Bradford. These are from a broader project, which focused on the link between education and ethnicity, and analysed the ways in which values and norms related to education, jobs and career advancement are accommodated, negotiated or resisted in the context of their families, communities and the wider society. A range of masculinities emerge in our data and we argue that these gender identities are defined in relational terms, to other ways of being Pakistani men and to being men in general, as well as to Pakistani femininities. While we recognise the fluidity, instability and situatedness of social identities, we also illustrate the ways in which masculinities are negotiated at the intersection of gender, ethnicity, class, religion, age and place and enacted within contexts which are themselves subjected to racialised and gendered processes. Our findings offer a varied and contextual understanding of British Pakistani masculinities.

Embodying Nationhood? Conceptions of British national identity, citizenship, and Gender in the 'Veil Affair'

This article reports on a study of mediatised public discourses on nationhood, citizenship, and gender in Britain, and analyses the ways in which these accounts may be utilised in the cultivation of particular kinds of social identities. We distinguish our approach at the outset from other lines of inquiry to report on a macro level exploration of an event in which these value discourses were operative, namely the national the press reaction to the former Home Secretary and Foreign Secretary Jack Straws 2006 comments on the Muslim face-veil or niqab. The article traces and analyses the interactions and intersections of completing but overlapping accounts of nationhood, citizenship, and characterisations of the role of Muslim women. It identifies interdependent clusters of responses that illustrate the ways in which the niqab is a ‘contested signifier’ in contemporary social and political life, and the ways in which nationhood, citizenship, and gender feature prominently in its signification.

Commodifying Difference: Selling EASTern Fashion

In this paper we explore the contested spaces of contemporary commodity culture through case-study research with two fashion companies that are involved, in linked but contrasting ways, with the production and marketing of cultural difference. One company, the British-based womens wear firm EAST, is striving to extend its high-street presence via a generalised ‘ethnic’ aesthetic, combined with culturally constructed notions of design individuality. The other firm, the Indian-based company Anokhi, has a more ambivalent relationship with the commercial ‘mainstream’, emphasising its use of traditional hand-block printing methods, combined with a sense of social responsibility and ethical commitment to its workforce. The case studies demonstrate that cultural difference is actively constituted through the process of commodification, justifying an emphasis on the production of difference as well as on its consumption. We draw on in-depth interviews and participant observation with key actors in both firms, examining how the meaning of goods is shaped as they move along the commodity chain from production to consumption. We examine the retail spaces and marketing strategies of the two firms and explore (via focus-group research) the further transformations of meaning and value undertaken by consumers as they purchase and wear these clothes. We conclude that commercial culture is a contested space characterised by competing discourses and practices, the outcome of which can only be determined empirically.

Qualitative methods III: animating archives, artful interventions and online environments

In this report we review recent work in geography which engages with innovative qualitative methods, focusing on three selected arenas: the archive, artistic collaborations and online engagements. Qualitative archival research illustrates the tensions around assembling accounts and incorporating uncertainty as geographers strive to animate the archives. Collaborative artistic endeavours, whether through participatory video, artistic installations or co-curating exhibitions, open new arenas for geographers to engage research subjects as well as possibilities for unfolding uncertainty into research practice. An exploration of the use of online environments for research also presents new ways to develop research collaboration and participation. Geographical experiments raise questions both about ethical frameworks for online research and about the ways in which power hierarchies may, or may not, be challenged.

Qualitative methods II: minding the gap

In our last review we drew together work exploring interactions between the performativity of research practices and the spaces of qualitative research (Davies and Dwyer, 2007). In this, we focus on the oscillating political subjectivities mobilized in research by human geographers and other qualitative researchers. In many ways this draws on a similar body of conceptual work; one characterized here as an unsettled dialogue between a recognition of relationality in social science methods and some provocations from psychoanalytic insights. However, our emphasis is on different arenas of geographical research. We look instead to the research practices of geographers working in a variety of public, policy and political domains, to trace their engagements and achievements with different ways of articulating ‘publics’, whether participatory, deliberative, oratorical or computational. These are issues we have been dealing with in our own research on deliberative processes (Davies and Burgess, 2004; Davies, 2006) and education, ethnicity and social capital (Shah, 2006; Dwyer et al., forthcoming), and they are raising methodological questions in human geography research and beyond. What follows is organized around identifi cation and discussion of a series of gaps this questioning has opened up – of the gaps between research context and policy application, between different enactments of public geographies, between articulation and silence, and between deliberation and calculation – within the multiple settings in which qualitative researchers are engaged.

The institutionalisation of Islam in The Netherlands and in the UK: The case of Islamic schools

Abstract This article compares the institutionalisation of Islam in The Netherlands and in the UK by considering the establishment of state‐funded Islamic schools. State‐funded Islamic schools exist in The Netherlands, while in the UK such schools have so far been opposed. The article focuses on the political decision‐making process at both the national and local level in each country. In particular, it examines the ideological construction of ‘Muslims’ embedded in the debates engendered by this decision making process. In our analysis of the debates over the establishment of two particular Islamic schools in Brent and Utrecht we stress the contested nature of the term ‘integration,’ the interpretation of which has been central to the debate. We conclude that despite differences in enabling legislation in the two countries there are many similarities in the ways in which Islamic schools are often opposed at the level of local decision making.

Beyond “Angry Muslims”? Reporting Muslim Voices in the British Press

In this article we discuss the significance of how a variety of self-consciously Muslim actors have become increasingly discernable in public and media discourses in Britain. We show how within news reporting itself there is an observable variety of Muslim perspectives and that this marks a positive contrast with the more limited range of argumentation (publicly reported at least) at an earlier period in the emergence of British Muslim identities in the late 1980s at the time of the Rushdie affair. We maintain that a discussion of these developments would benefit from a vocabulary that can analytically describe the boundaries between, and content within, a variety of Muslim voices, as well as evaluate what their inclusion in mainstream public discourses implies for an understanding of more macro concerns around citizenship and nationhood. This article makes a tentative contribution to this goal by critically evaluating the inclusion and representation in the national press of British Muslim voices. We wish to draw attention to the ways in which the British case illustrates how relational notions of Muslim “fundamentalism” and “moderation” are present within the inclusion and representation of Muslim voices within news reporting. This can be illustrated by how Muslim actors are characterized as angry, ambiguous, and approving. What is crucial to note is that this amounts to more than simply including Muslim voices of fundamentalist anger.