Leah Bassel

Struggles for Institutional Space in France and the United Kingdom: Intersectionality and the Politics of Policy

This article uses intersectionality as an analytical tool to explore struggles for institutional space in policy processes in two ostensibly contrasting contexts: “republican” France and the “multicultural” United Kingdom. Specifically, the article undertakes within-case analysis of three policy processes. In France, we discuss the debate over laicite , or secularism, the subsequent formulation of the March 2004 law banning the wearing of religious signs in state schools, and the creation of the High Authority for the Fight Against Discrimination (HALDE). In the UK, we examine the problem definitions, language, and subject positions constructed by the 2008 Single Equality Bill. The result of these analyses is that institutional actors employ similar (though not identical) practices in relation to intersections, which have similar outcomes for minority groups on either side of the English Channel. Through what we term a “logic of separation,” institutional actors severely curtail the “institutional space” available to minority ethnic groups to make complex and intersectional social justice claims. Even though France and the UK are often portrayed as opposites with regard to constructions of citizenship, we argue that these seemingly differing traditions of citizenship end up having a similar effect of misrecognizing minority women and mens experiences and demands.

Minority women and austerity : survival and resistance in France and Britain

In the first book of its kind, Bassel and Emejulu explore minority women’s experiences of and resistances to austerity measures in France and Britain. Minority women are often portrayed as passive victims. However, Minority women and austerity demonstrates how they use their race, class, gender and legal status as a resource for collective action in the face of the neoliberal colonisation of non-governmental organisations, the failures of left-wing politics and the patronising initiatives of policy-makers. Using in-depth case studies, this book explores the changing relations between the state, the market and civil society which create opportunities and dilemmas for minority women activists. Through an intersectional ‘politics of survival’ these women seek to subvert the dominant narratives of ‘crisis’ and ‘activism’.

Solidarity under Austerity: Intersectionality in France and the United Kingdom

In this article, we argue that in order to understand and counter the asymmetrical effects of the current economic crisis, intersectional analyses and coalition building are required. Our research aims to address a tendency in some intersectionality research to underplay or sideline social class and capitalist relations (Anthias 2012, 6, 15; Skeggs 2008). Our goal is to expand intersectionality to questions of political economy that are not typically viewed through this lens (Strolovitch 2013, 168). Sophisticated theorizations of social locations, divisions, processes of differentiation, and systems of domination (Dhamoon 2011) within intersectionality literature can thus become tools to name and challenge the effects of the economic crises that are deepening social and economic inequalities in Europe.

Minority women, austerity and activism

Based on their study of minority women’s activism in the context of the economic crisis in Scotland, England and France, the authors question how well third sector organisations, policy-makers and social movements have responded to minority women’s perspectives and needs arising from austerity and racism. Apart from being disproportionately affected by the cuts, minority women are also undermined by dominant discourses which can (mis)represent them as either ‘victims’ or ‘enterprising actors’. There appears, from the excerpted interviews, to be a disconnect between minority women’s experiences and analyses of their precarity, their desire to take radical action and the compliant and domesticating projects and programmes that are currently being offered by some of their third sector ‘allies’.

Speaking and Listening: The 2011 English Riots

This article explores the challenges and opportunities for political listening (Bickford 1996) following the events of August 2011, with a specific focus on the role of the media and citizen responses to media coverage. While the aftermath of the riots hardly gives rise to starry-eyed optimism, I explore an interaction – a conference on media and the riots – where political listening took place and provided the possibility to break down binaries of ‘Us and Them’ that have dominated public debate during and after the disturbances. I argue that although incomplete in this particular instance, political listening can provide the possibility to break out of limiting, damaging binaries and generate alternative spaces to listen, speak and act differently which expand public debate and enrich democratic life.

Intersectional Politics at the Boundaries of the Nation State

This article explores what it means to take women’s agency seriously and to fulfill the potential of intersectional politics. If we accept the central tenets of intersectionality, that axes of oppression are simultaneous and interacting, then we must interrogate the framing of current debates over women’s rights around the tension between gender and religious/cultural accommodation. It is argued that the unfulfilled potential of intersectional politics leads to the denial of intersectional voices. This potential can only be fulfilled by enabling participation that goes beyond responding to predetermined positions to permit the exercise of meaningful power in the construction of contexts. These claims are illustrated through analysis of the debate over so-called ‘shari’a tribunals’ in Canada. The debate is juxtaposed with the experiences of Somali refugee women who instead assert interacting and simultaneous challenges that combine the axes of religion, legal status, ‘race’, class and gender.

Whose Crisis Counts? Minority Women, Austerity and Activism in France and Britain

In this chapter we examine minority women’s institutionalised precarity in pre and post crisis France and Britain. Minority women must negotiate a paradox of misrecognition—they are simultaneously invisible and hypervisbile in the constructions of poverty, the economic crisis and austerity in these two countries. Even though minority women experience institutionalised social and economic inequalities, too often their experiences and perspectives are erased or devalued by social movement ‘allies’ and policymakers alike. Despite their calculated erasure, minority women are organising and mobilising in innovative ways to resist their inequality and advance their intersectional social justice claims.

Contemporary Grammars of Resistance: Two French Social Movements

This article analyzes two social movements in France: the ‘Mouvement des Indigènes de la République’ [Movement of the ‘Indigenous’ of the Republic], and the ‘Réseau Éducation Sans Frontières’ [Education without Borders Network]. It explores the kinds of borders and underlying struggles that these social movements bring to light, and how their actions redraw borders. In these borderlands, actors in the two French resistance movements oppose exclusions and attempt to delegitimize the collective understanding of ‘la République’ that underpins them. This analysis builds on previous research demonstrating that social movements can succeed instrumentally in mobilizing participants when they resonate with and draw on participants’ ‘lifeworld’ (Edwards, 2008; Habermas, 1987). Moreover, I insist on the expressivist quality of these actions as performances of democratic freedom (Beltrán, 2009; Drexler, 2007). Finally, I consider some limitations and the broader lessons for border challenges.

Caring subjects: migrant women and the third sector in England and Scotland

ABSTRACT We situate racialized migrant mothers as political actors in the landscape of austerity in England and Scotland. We explore the possibilities of a politics around caring work. We ask: What “caring subjects” are possible, under austerity? A “politics of care” can challenge the dichotomy between private caring and public citizenship practices. However, we argue that the shift from a “culture of care” to a “culture of cuts” poses significant challenges to this politics in third sector spaces, particularly when processes of racialization are brought to the fore. We move beyond “reductionist economism” to explore how the current economic crisis is also one of social relations. The re-privatization of caring and reproductive work generates new forms of subjectivity and social reproduction. Within the supposed “monolith” of neoliberalism, a multiplicity of subjectivities are engendered which open some spaces for resistance and subversion.

Making political citizens? Migrants’ narratives of naturalization in the United Kingdom*

Abstract Citizenship tests are arguably intended as moments of hailing, or interpellation, through which norms are internalized and citizen-subjects produced. We analyse the multiple political subjects revealed through migrants’ narratives of the citizenship test process, drawing on 158 interviews with migrants in Leicester and London who are at different stages in the UK citizenship test process. In dialogue with three counter-figures in the critical naturalization literature – the ‘neoliberal citizen’; the ‘anxious citizen’; and the ‘heroic citizen’ – we propose the figure of the ‘citizen-negotiator’, a socially situated actor who attempts to assert control over their life as they navigate the test process and state power. Through the focus on negotiation, we see migrants navigating a process of differentiation founded on pre-existing inequalities rather than a journey toward transformation.