Gurchathen Sanghera

‘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.

Methodological dilemmas : gatekeepers and positionality in Bradford

Abstract This paper explores the ever-evolving relationship between gatekeepers and the researcher, and the ways in which it may facilitate, constrain or transform the research process by opening and/or closing the gate. We explore the methodological issue of positionality and discuss the ways in which gatekeepers drew on different axes of the researchers identities – religion, ethnicity, gender and age – in ambiguous and contradictory ways. In analysing this relationship, we locate the discussion within its historical context, as we contend that contextuality influenced the way gatekeepers positioned the researcher. This paper draws on the field experiences of the first author in four inner-city neighbourhoods in Bradford, West Yorkshire, a northern city with a well-established Pakistani Muslim community that has become synonymous with the Rushdie affair and the 1995 and 2001 urban disturbances.

Social capital, educational aspirations and young Pakistani Muslim men and women in Bradford, West Yorkshire

Drawing on research with the Pakistani Muslim ‘community’ in inner-city Bradford, West Yorkshire, this paper critically engages with relevant debates on social capital and educational aspirations. It examines the processes and mechanisms in the accumulation of social capital within the family and the immediate community, to demonstrate how three sets of interpersonal relationships (parent-child, child–child and between co-ethnic peers) facilitate educational aspirations among a group that has traditionally been portrayed as under-achieving.

Encountering Misrecognition: Being Mistaken for Being Muslim

Exploring both debates about misrecognition and explorations of encounters, this article focuses on the experiences of ethnic and religious minority young people who are mistaken for being Muslim in Scotland. We explore experiences of encountering misrecognition, including young peoples understandings of, and responses to, such encounters. Recognizing how racism and religious discrimination operate to marginalize people—and how people manage and respond to this—is crucial in the struggle for social justice. Our focus is on young people from a diversity of ethnic and religious minority groups who are growing up in urban, suburban, and rural Scotland, 382 of whom participated in forty-five focus groups and 224 interviews. We found that young Sikhs, Hindus, and other south Asian young people as well as black and Caribbean young people were regularly mistaken for being Muslim. These encounters tended to take place at school, in taxis, at the airport, and in public spaces. Our analysis points to a dynamic set of interconnected issues shaping young peoples experiences of misrecognition across a range of mediatized, geopoliticized, and educational spaces. Geopolitical events and their representation in the media, the homogenization of the south “Asian” community, and the lack of visibility offered to non-Muslim ethnic and religious minority groups all worked to construct our participants as “Muslims.” Young people demonstrated agency and creativity in handling and responding to these encounters, including using humor, clarifying their religious affiliation, social withdrawal, and ignoring the situation. Redressing misrecognition requires institutional change to ensure parity of participation in society.

‘LET'S TALK ABOUT … MEN’: Young British Pakistani Muslim Women's Narratives about Co-Ethnic Men in ‘Postcolonial’ Bradford

In media and political representations, Muslims have been constructed as ‘ultimate Others’ who pose a threat to western human rights, democracy and freedoms. These representations, however, are gendered. Muslim men and women are positioned in ambiguous and contradictory ways: Muslim men are often represented as embodying a masculinity that is inherently misogynistic, controlling and dangerous and, more recently, associated with radicalization and Islamic terrorism, while Muslim women are presented as victims of patriarchy, passive and voiceless. This essay explores the complexities of the gendered social worlds of Pakistani Muslim men and women, and provides an intimate analysis of urban lives in ‘postcolonial’ Bradford, West Yorkshire, UK, through the narratives of young British Pakistani Muslim women about co-ethnic men. Situated in their everyday lives, the essay explores how young Pakistani Muslim women at times adopt methods of ‘strategic essentialism’ to critique and resist co-ethnic men and masculinities. Adopting an interpretivist approach, this essay draws on research conducted with young Pakistani Muslim women in Bradford.

Young people’s everyday securities: pre-emptive and pro-active strategies towards ontological security in Scotland

Abstract This paper uses a framework of ‘ontological security’ to discuss the psychosocial strategies of self-securitisation employed by ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland. We argue that broad discourses of securitisation are present in the everyday risks and threats that young people encounter. In response and as resistance young people employ pre-emptive and pro-active strategies to preserve ontological security. Yet, these strategies are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction as young people withdraw from social worlds or revert to essentialist positions when negotiating complex fears and anxieties. Drawing on feminist geographies of security the paper presents a multi-scalar empirical analysis of young people’s everyday securities, connecting debates on youth and intimacy-geopolitics with the social and cultural geographies of young people, specifically work that focuses upon young people’s negotiations of racialised, gendered and religious landscapes.

exploring symbolic violence in the everyday: misrecognition, condescension, consent and complicity

In this paper, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of ‘misrecognition’, ‘condescension’ and ‘consent and complicity’ to demonstrate how domination and violence are reproduced in everyday interactions, social practices, institutional processes and dispositions. Importantly, this constitutes symbolic violence, which removes the victim’s agency and voice. Indeed, we argue that as symbolic violence is impervious, insidious and invisible, it also simultaneously legitimises and sustains other forms of violence as well. Understanding symbolic violence together with traditional discourses of violence is important because it provides a richer insight into the ‘workings’ of violence, and provides new ways of conceptualising violence across a number of social fields and new strategies for intervention. Symbolic violence is a valuable tool for understanding contentious debates on the disclosure of violence, women leaving or staying in abusive relationships or returning to their abusers. While we focus only on violence against women, we recognise that the gendered nature of violence produces its own sets of vulnerabilities against men and marginalised groups, such as LGBT. The paper draws on empirical research conducted in Sweden in 2003. Sweden is an interesting case study because despite its progressive gender equality policies, there has been no marked decrease in violence towards women by men.

Familial geopolitics and ontological security: intergenerational relations, migration and minority youth (in)securities in Scotland

ABSTRACT This paper discusses the family as a site of geopolitics. Bridging scholarship in feminist geopolitics, political psychology and sociology, we explore the psycho-social dynamics of family life and theorise the family as a multi-scalar, relational site of security. Original data collected with ethnic and religious minority youth in Scotland are presented alongside an analysis of how family relations, at interconnected scales, mitigate against and/or re-inscribe broad geopolitical narratives of security. We employ the concept of ontological security (OS) to analyse the role of the family, and the relationships within it, on shaping youth securities. We discuss (1) how family histories and intergenerational experience shape young people’s sense of security; (2) how young people negotiate and resist family norms and values that reproduce securitizing geopolitical narratives; and (3) how young people find security when family is absent or indeterminate. In each case, we analyse how geopolitics operates through family life. The paper makes two key contributions: first, we use original empirical data to theorise ethnic and religious minority youth securities; second, we show the value of OS as a conceptual tool for understanding psycho-social dimensions of familial geopolitics.

‘Living Rights’, Rights Claims, Performative Citizenship and Young People – The Right to Vote in the Scottish Independence Referendum

ABSTRACT This paper examines the rights claims-making that young people engaged in during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum when the right to vote was extended to 16- and 17-year-olds for the first time in the UK. Understanding citizenship and rights claims-making as performative, we draw on the novel idea of ‘living rights’ to explore how young people ‘shape what these rights are – and become – in the social world’. They are co-existent and situated within the everyday lives of young people, and transcend the traditional idea that rights are merely those that are enshrined in domestic and/or international law. We explore the complex and contested nature of rights claims that were made by young people as ‘active citizens’ in the lead up to the referendum to illustrate how the rights claims-making by young people is bound up with the performativity of citizenship that entails identity construction, political subjectivity (that challenges adult-centric approaches) and social justice.

Educational Achievement and Career Aspiration for Young British Pakistanis

In this chapter we report on research conducted between 2004 and 2006 in Slough and Bradford which investigated the educational aspirations and experiences of young British Pakistani Muslim men and women.1 Our research, funded by the Leverhulme Trust within a wider programme on migration and citizenship, sought to understand the extent to which young British Pakistanis were making progress in terms of educational achievement and employment in relation to their peers and in relation to the wider findings of successive reports on the differential achievements of ethnic groups (Modood and Shiner, 1994; Modood et al., 1997). Our qualitative study explored the attitudes and dispositions towards education and career aspirations held by a range of young people including both those who had achieved a measure of success (entry into higher education, for example, or professional qualifications) and those who had left compulsory education with few qualifications including those who remained unemployed. One starting point for this research was work by Zhou (2000, 2005) on the high academic achievements of Asian-Americans (particularly those of Vietnamese and Chinese heritage) which posited the role of ‘ethnic social capital’ as being particularly significant in promoting academic achievement through the enforcement of familial and community norms. We wanted to see whether similar forms of ‘ethnic capital’ (Modood, 2004) also operated within Pakistani Muslim communities and whether they were significant in shaping improved educational outcomes for young people.