Peter Hopkins

Masculinities in place: situated identities, relations and intersectionality

It is the work of Peter Jackson in the early 1990s that is often attributed the status of being the first work within geography to focus explicitly upon the social and cultural constructions of masculinities. In his ‘programmatic paper’ (Berg and Longhurst 2003: 353), Jackson (1991: 209) observed that ‘the experience of men as men has scarcely yet been addressed’. As Rose (1993) demonstrates, much research within the discipline of geography is masculinist, seeing the world from the perspective of men but rarely bringing it to analytical attention. The consequence of this, of course, is that this perspective is universalised, whilst largely overlooking the experiences of women. The sense within much early feminist geographic scholarship was that geography had been written by men, for men and about men and therefore, women have been marginalised. As van Hoven and Hörschelmann (2005: 1) note, ‘geography has long been a discipline dominated by men and one about men’. It was not until the 1990s then that a more critical geographic scholarship started to develop that engaged with the concept of masculinities, especially the idea of hegemonic masculinity and of the place of men within the discipline (Berg and Longhurst 2003). Despite the proliferation of popular ‘books about men’ (Connell 1995: ix), Jackson’s comments were echoed almost 15 years later by van Hoven and Hörschelmann (2005: 5) who note that ‘while feminist geographers have critiqued the discipline’s neglect of women’s experiences effectively, there has been a notable lack of attention to the formation of masculine identities and spaces’. In stark contrast, there has been a rapid growth within the social sciences and humanities of the new field of ‘masculinity studies’ (Adams and Savran 2002). A number of scholars (Connell 1995, 2000; Kimmel 1995; Mac an Ghaill 1996; Messner 1997; Seidler Social & Cultural Geography, Vol. 10, No. 8, December 2009

Young People, Place and Identity

Introduction Part 1: Researching Young People, Place and Identity 2. Research with Young People 3. Ethical and Methodological Considerations Part 2: Scales 4. Body 5. Home 6. Neighbourhood and Community 7. Nation 8. Global Part 3: Themes and Sites 9. Institutions 10. The Street and Public Space 11. Migration, Mobilities and Transition 12. Urban-Rural 13. Conclusion

Young muslim men in Scotland: inclusions and exclusions

Young Muslim men, by virtue of their age, religion and complex masculinities, are marginalised in human geography. This article builds on research with young Muslim men aged 16–25 who live in Scotland to show how signifiers of Muslim identity have gained prominence following the events of September 11th 2001. The discussion considers what this means for the multiple ways that young men negotiate their national identities as Scottish Muslims.

Global Events, National Politics, Local Lives: Young Muslim Men in Scotland

In this paper I explore the influence of global events on the lives and experiences of young Muslim men living in postdevolution urban Scotland. Expanding upon understandings of scale, I highlight the complex ways that scale is struggled for and over, and in doing so challenge the notion that young people are disengaged from, and apathetic about, mainstream politics. Drawing on the young mens reactions and experiences of the global, nation, state, and local scales following 11 September 2001 and the subsequent war in Iraq, in this paper I include the voices of minority ethnic youth in political geographies and understandings of political participation.

Young people, masculinities, religion and race: new social geographies:

Ideas about race and racism have been a centrepiece of social geography for as much as 50 years, yet it was not until the 1990s that markers of difference rooted in religion, masculinities and generation achieved the same critical attention. Moreover, while all of these literatures are now well established in the discipline, relatively few studies – within or beyond human geography – have sought to bring them together. Focusing on recent research about race, religion, young people and masculinities, from within human geography as well as from neighbouring disciplines, I suggest various ways in which human geographers might seek to include the experiences, identities and practices of young racialized and religious men in their future research. In engaging with the lived experiences of young people whose voices are usually silenced, often unheard and frequently distorted, this article seeks to explore some of the ways in which masculinities and the experiences of young people may be mediated by the geographies of racism and religion. Initially offering a brief summary of some of the recent trends in the geography of race and racism, religion, youth and masculinities, I then suggest ways in which an agenda for research with young racialized and religious men might be taken forward.

Pre-flight experiences and migration stories: the accounts of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children

Much work about transnational migration and mobility overlooks the active role of children in such processes and experiences. This paper counters the omission from the literature by exploring the pre-flight experiences and migration stories of unaccompanied asylum-seeking children in Scotland. In doing so, we demonstrate that unaccompanied minors experience a range of traumatic situations in their countries of origin including, the death or persecution of family members, war, forced recruitment and personal persecution. In their experiences of transnational migration processes, the majority are brought by an agent, with accounts of smuggling and trafficking being minimal.

‘Blue Squares’, ‘Proper’ Muslims and Transnational Networks: Narratives of National and Religious Identities Amongst Young Muslim men Living in Scotland

Despite the volume of research about identities of various shapes and forms, few studies have explored young people’s narratives of nation and religion. Drawing on research with young Muslim men in Scotland, this article employs Floya Anthias’s ideas about narratives of location, dislocation and positionality in order to seek a deeper understanding and appreciation of the young men’s national and religious identities and affiliations. Although the majority of the young men identify as Scottish Muslims, the meanings and associations of these identity markers vary in strength, nature and meaning, and the young men are also connected with a global network of identifications linking them with family heritages in Asia and Africa.

Ethical issues in research with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children

This paper offers reflections on some of the ethical and methodological issues involved in doing research with unaccompanied asylum-seeking children. Drawing upon a Scottish Refugee Council funded research project with unaccompanied minors and service providers, I highlight some of the complications involved in conducting ethical research with unaccompanied children. Focusing upon issues of ethical approval and research design, access and obtaining informed consent, privacy and confidentiality and finally dissemination, I demonstrate the ways in which conducting ethical research is often context dependant and varies according to the particular situation, needs and experiences of the children involved.

Retheorizing the Postsecular Present: Embodiment, Spatial Transcendence, and Challenges to Authenticity Among Young Christians in Glasgow, Scotland

This article explores and extends the geographies of postsecular theory. Despite growing claims of secularization, religion continues to be a highly public and rapidly diversifying issue, and of growing interest to geographers. We identify the spatial elements of postsecular theory, and consider how spatial approaches, particularly feminist work, that emphasize lived religion and embodiment might provide an alternative to existing analyses. Increasingly present in recent geographical work on religion, these approaches challenge the discursive, political, and social constructions of secularization and its theoretical claims and, we argue, are essential for the continued development of interdisciplinary postsecular approaches and analyses. Drawing on recent empirical research, we apply this argument to the religious subject constructions of young Christian-affiliated people living in Glasgow, Scotland. Their conceptions of authentic faith are intimately bound up in ideas of authenticity and embodied transcendence, which are both reinforced and challenged by particular historical and contemporary meanings of Christian identities. In conclusion, we reflect on the broader empirical and theoretical implications of our research for postsecular approaches to the study of religion and society.

Introduction: Spaces of Multiculturalism

In his 1998 book We Are All Multiculturalists Now, American sociologist Nathan Glazer argued, not without some regret, that multiculturalism had won the ‘culture wars’ in the United States, overturning social and political norms that had dominated American life until the 1960s (Glazer, 1998, p. 10). Glazer spoke of the widespread rejection of assimilation as an ‘imposition of the dominant culture’ and its replacement by a position that encouraged ethnic and racial minority groups to retain their distinctiveness. Cultural difference, from the multiculturalist standpoint, was no longer something to be maintained by families in the privacy of their own homes; rather, ‘culture’ had become a matter requiring public affirmation and validation, especially in schools and universities. Glazer was not alone in his assessment of multiculturalism’s growing influence in Western societies. Will Kymlicka (2001, p. 6), for instance described a “clear shift in public opinion towards viewing minority rights not just as a matter of discretionary policies or pragmatic compromises, but as a matter of fundamental justice” requiring codification in legislation. Far more sanguine in his outlook than Glazer, Kymlicka argued that the decoupling of societal membership from assimilatory nationalisms would serve in the long run to foster the integration of immigrants and minorities. Multiculturalism’s victory, however, seems to have been short-lived judging by the dramatic shift in tone in the academic literature at the start of the new millennium. Hesse (2000), for instance, speaks of the steady ‘demise of multiculturalism’ in Britain since the late 1980s, while Kundnani (2002), also writing in the British context, comments that the events since 9/11 had ‘sounded the death knell for multiculturalists’. Mitchell (2003) laments the shunting aside of multiculturalist principles in Canadian, American and British education policy and the concomitant promotion of neo-liberal discourses emphasising competitiveness and individualism. And lest any doubt remain about multiculturalism’s moribund state, Joppke (2004) documents the decisive shift in many Western immigrant-receiving societies away from multiculturalism and the adoption of a raft of policies—many of them formulated by ‘impeccable liberals’—that compel immigrants to conform to host society norms.