Prelims

Half Title Page

Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies

Title Page

Contested Belonging: Spaces, Practices, Biographies

Edited By

Kathy Davis

Halleh Ghorashi

Peer Smets

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands

United Kingdom – North America – Japan India – Malaysia – China

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Emerald Publishing Limited

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First edition 2018

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ISBN: 978-1-78743-207-9 (Print)

ISBN: 978-1-78743-206-2 (Online)

ISBN: 978-1-78743-250-5 (Epub)

Contents

About the Contributors

Tineke Abma is Full Professor in Participation and Diversity and Co-Head of the Department of Medical Humanities at the VU University Medical Center Amsterdam and research leader in the Amsterdam Public Health research institute. Formerly she was an Endowed Chair Client Participation in Elderly Care. Her background is in the social sciences and her work located at the crossroads of the social sciences, humanities and medical sciences. Her main interests lie in strengthening the participation of patients and their inclusion in society and participatory action research. Her work has been recognized and awarded for its social value and impact on society.

Floya Anthias is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Roehampton and a Visiting Professor at City University and the University of East London. Her main academic writings have explored the intersections of social divisions and identities, different forms of stratification and how inequalities and belongings interconnect. She developed the concept of translocational positionality as a way of addressing some of the difficulties identified with concepts of identity and intersectionality. She has published in top peer-reviewed journals. Floya’s books include Woman Nation State (Palgrave, 1989); Racialised Boundaries: Nation, Race, Ethnicity, Colour and Class and the Anti-Racist Struggle (Routledge, 1992); Ethnicity, Class, Gender and Migration: Greek Cypriots in Britain (Ashgate, 1992); Gender and Migration in Southern Europe (Berg, 2000); Into the Margins: Migration and Exclusion in Southern Europe (Ashgate, 1999); Rethinking Anti-Racisms (Routledge, 2002); Paradoxes of Integration: Female Migrants in Europe (Springer, 2013); Contesting Integration, Engendering Migration (Palgrave, 2014) and Work and the Challenges of Belonging (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2014).

Milena Belloni is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the European Research Council project ‘Homing’ at the University of Trento, Italy. Before moving to Trento, she was a Post-doctoral Fellow in Modern Italian Studies at the American Academy in Rome and a Post-doctoral Researcher in Refugee Studies at the Centre for Migration and Intercultural Studies of the University of Antwerp. Her PhD thesis ‘Cosmologies of Destinations: roots and routes of Eritrean forced migration towards Europe’ won the Maria Baganha IMISCOE 2016 Award for the best doctoral dissertation in migration studies. Her research interests concern refugees’ trajectories to Europe, family reunification procedures, the role of families in migration choices, migrant smuggling refugees’ livelihood strategies in urban areas and ethnographic methods. She has published in the Journal of Refugee Studies, the Journal of Immigrant and Refugee Studies, Human Geography and the International Journal of Comparative Sociology.

Paolo Boccagni is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the University of Trento. He is also the Principal Investigator of the ERC StG project HOMInG – The Home-Migration Nexus: Home as a Window on Migrant Belonging, Integration and Circulation (2016-2021). His main research areas include transnational migration, social welfare, care and diversity. On issues of home and migration, he has published articles in Housing, Theory and Society (2014), in the Journal of Housing and the Built Environment (2017) and in Housing Studies (2018). He has also published the monograph Migration and the Search for Home: Mapping Domestic Space in Migrants’ Everyday Lives (Palgrave, 2017).

Tine Davids is a Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. She teaches and conducts research on gender, politics, globalization, gender mainstreaming, feminist ethnography and (return) migration, and has published internationally in these research areas. She specializes in these issues in Latin America, particularly Mexico and Central America. Some of her recent publications include ‘The Micro Dynamics of Agency: Repetition and Subversion in a Mexican Right-Wing Female Politician’s Life Story’ in the European Journal of Women’s Studies (2011); ‘Embodied Engagements: Feminist Ethnography at the Crossing of Knowledge Production and Representation’, an introduction with Karin Willemse of a co-edited special issue of Women Studies International Forum (2014); Women, Gender and Remittances (co-edited with Ton van Naerssen, Lothar Smith and Marianne Marchand; Ashgate, 2015) and !A Todo Madre! Una Mirada Multidisciplinaria de las Maternidades en México (co-edited with Abril Saldaña and Lilia Venegas; INAH/ITACA, 2016).

Kathy Davis is a Senior Research Fellow in the Sociology Department at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her research interests include sociology of the body, intersectionality, travelling theory and transnational practices, biography as methodology and critical and creative strategies for academic writing. She is the author of many books, including Reshaping the Female Body (Routledge, 1995), Dubious Equalities and Embodied Differences (Rowman & Littlefield, 2003) and The Making of Our Bodies, Ourselves: How Feminism Travels Across Borders (Duke, 2007). Her most recent book is Dancing Tango: Passionate Encounters in a Globalizing World (NYU Press, 2015).

Melanie Eijberts is a Lecturer at Amsterdam University College, where she teaches The Global Identity Experience and Classical and Modern Anthropological Thought. She holds a bachelor of arts in social sciences (summa cum laude; major tracks: anthropology, psychology and sociology) from University College Utrecht and a diploma in American studies from Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts. She received her master of science (cum laude) in comparative studies of migration, ethnic relations and multiculturalism from the University of Utrecht in May 2006. She received a PhD (cum laude) from the Department of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research investigated the sense of belonging and participation/integration strategies of women of Moroccan and Turkish descent in Amsterdam and Rotterdam.

Katherine Pratt Ewing is Professor of Religion and Director of the Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life at Columbia University. As a cultural anthropologist, she has conducted ethnographic fieldwork in Pakistan, Turkey and India, and among Muslims in Europe and the United States. Her research has focussed on debates among Muslims about the proper practice of Islam in the modern world, including current ACLS-funded research in northwest Africa. Recent writings include ‘“Islam is Not a Culture”: Reshaping a Muslim Public for a Secular World’ (2015), ‘From German Bus Stop to Academy Award Nomination: The Honor Killing as Simulacrum’ (2013) and ‘Naming our Sexualities: Secular Constraints, Muslim Freedoms’ (2011). Previous books include Arguing Sainthood: Modernity, Psychoanalysis and Islam (Duke University Press, 1997), Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin (Stanford University Press, 2008), and the edited volumes Shariat and Ambiguity in South Asian Islam (1988) and Being and Belonging: Muslim Communities in the US since 9/11. Russell Sage Foundation (2008).

Halleh Ghorashi is Professor of Diversity and Integration at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. From 2005 to 2012 she held the ‘PaVEM’ Chair as Professor of Management of Diversity and Integration, also at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Dr Ghorashi was born in Iran and came to the Netherlands in 1988. She has published nationally and internationally in English, Dutch and Persian languages. Her research involves issues of identity, diaspora and managing diversity in organizations. Currently she is focussing on the questions: why is it important to be culturally sensitive in this culturalist world, and how can cultural sensitivity be created while at the same time avoiding culturalism?

Alice Hertzog is a Social Anthropologist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich. She is interested in how migrants shape the cities they move to and the places they come from, with a focus on translocal urban development. Her current doctoral thesis investigates patterns of migration and urban development along the Guinea Gulf in Benin. Alice has a degree in social anthropology from Cambridge University and a master’s from L’Ecole Urbaine at Sciences Po (Paris). She spent three years as an international scholar at L’Ecole Normale Supérieure d’Ulm (Paris) where she conducted research in the migrant neighbourhood Belleville. She has worked with cities, foundations, artists, museums, NGOs and think tanks.

Jayne O. Ifekwunigwe is a Visiting Associate Professor in the Social Science Research Institute at the Center on Genomics, Race, Identity and Difference at Duke University and was a former reader in anthropology at the University of East London (UK). She has also taught in both the African and African American Studies Departments at Duke University and the African, African American and Diaspora Studies Department at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Trained as an urban and medical anthropologist, her scholarly and teaching interests are interdisciplinary and include comparative ‘mixed race’ identities, the gendered and generational politics of global African diasporic formations and visualizing cultural and heritage tourism in urban spaces as well as, more recently, the medical anthropology of race, ‘mixed race’ and genomics. She has conducted visual and ethnographic research in the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa, and has published and presented her work widely.

Melissa Kelly is a Visiting Researcher with the Borders in Globalization Project at Carleton University, Canada. She holds a PhD in human geography from Uppsala University, Sweden, and was a postdoctoral fellow (2014–2015) with the Narrative Study of Lives Programme at the University of the Free State, South Africa. Her research interests include transnationalism and integration, and specifically how migrants develop a sense of belonging to spaces and places. Her (2013) dissertation, Onward Migration: The Transnational Trajectories of Iranians Leaving Sweden, used narrative methods to explore the experiences of people of Iranian origin who have made multiple international migrations over the course of their lives. In addition to her dissertation, she has published articles and book chapters on citizenship, identity and belonging in the global Iranian and Indian diasporas. Her current work considers the experiences of other categories of migrants: international students in South Africa and Canadian retirees in Florida.

Elif Keskiner is currently working as a Postdoctoral Researcher on the FP7 project Reducing Early School Leavers in EU at Erasmus University Rotterdam. Her project investigates youth transitions following early school leaving and constructions of alternative biographies by young people who are labelled as ‘at risk’. Her research interests cover a wide range of subjects in sociology such as youth transitions, descendants of migrants, social mobility patterns and elite formation, social capital formation and development of various forms of capital among minority youth as well as educational inequality. She has published numerous articles and book chapters on these topics. In 2017, she co-edited a special issue with Maurice Crul in Ethnic and Racial Studies called ‘The Upcoming New Elite among Children of Immigrants’ and she is currently working on a monograph called Generation in Transition, which will come out with Springer. 

Leila Kian graduated from the University of Amsterdam with a BA in clinical psychology (2008) and an MA in international relations (2012). Based in Amsterdam, she currently conducts background research for sociologically themed documentaries, books and films. Her main research interests include gentrification, cultural appropriation, second-generation immigrants and intersectional feminist phenomenology.

Ali Konyali is a Researcher at the Institute for Migration Research and Intercultural Studies at the University of Osnabrück, Germany. He is also a PhD candidate within the framework of the ERC-funded ELITES: Pathways to Success project in the Department of Public Administration and Sociology at Erasmus University Rotterdam, the Netherlands. He studied arts and culture and European studies at Maastricht University, the Netherlands, as well as international migration and ethnic relations at Malmö University, Sweden.

Margarethe Kusenbach is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of South Florida, Tampa. Her research interests include cities and communities, emotions and identity and sustainability and disasters, as well as qualitative methods. Her current work investigates issues of home and belonging among lifestyle migrants and marginal social groups. In 2013, she edited a book (with Krista E. Paulsen) titled Home: International Perspectives on Culture, Identity, and Belonging with Peter Lang Publishing. She has published numerous articles and book chapters in the United States and in Europe and is currently working on a monograph.

Hannah Leyerzapf studied cultural anthropology at the University of Amsterdam, focussing on identity politics, social and religious activism, empowerment and multiculturalism. She wrote her master’s thesis on the empowerment of Muslim women with a Moroccan background in Rotterdam. Since 2010, she has been a researcher and teacher in the Department of Medical Humanities at VU University Medical Center and the Amsterdam Public Health research institute. Here she has conducted several research projects on client participation; joint decision-making and empowerment in health care, elderly care and psychiatry and care ethics, diversity and interculturalization in healthcare organizations and academic medicine. Her PhD project centres on diversity in healthcare teams from an intersectionality and critical diversity perspective.

Helena Oikarinen-Jabai currently works as a Senior Researcher on the project Young Muslim’s and Resilience – A Participatory Study, at Helsinki University, Department of Social Research. Her research interests are interdisciplinary, and she is particularly interested in how performative, sensory and artistic practices and different ways of knowing can be applied in research settings. She completed her PhD in art education at the University of Art and Design in Helsinki. She also has a licentiate’s degree in philosophy and master’s degrees in psychology (intercultural communication), cultural anthropology and education (gender studies). She has published numerous articles in scientific books and journals and has produced many books and media productions related to her research.

Jacomijne Prins is an Independent Researcher affiliated with the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her research focusses on the stories young adults with migrant backgrounds in the Netherlands construct to sustain changes in their identities. As children of migrants, second- and third-generation young adults’ identities have long been defined by stories about ‘otherness’. Now, these young adults are trying to find their own stories. New stories are constructed and negotiated in conversation but also increasingly imagined and represented in literature, film and theater. This research follows on her PhD thesis, Looking for New Stories: Moroccan-Dutch Young Adults’ Constructions of Identity and Belonging. Her work is published in Qualitative Sociology and Political Psychology, on public forums on societal and diversity issues (www.kis.nl; www.socialevraagstukken.nl) and in government reports about the impact of theater on (de)polarization.

Peer Smets is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Netherlands. His PhD focussed on housing finance and the urban poor in India. His current research deals with neighbourhoods and focusses on livability, use of public space, housing, everyday encounters, belonging, home-making practices, community development, participation, self-help practices and cooperation between stakeholders. He has co-edited many special journal issues and books. Recent books include Mobilities and Neighbourhood Belonging in Cities and Suburbs (co-edited with P. Watt; PalgraveMacmillan, 2014), Affordable Housing in the Urban Global South: Seeking Sustainable Solutions (co-edited with J. Bredenoord and P. van Lindert; Earthscan by Routledge, 2014) and Social Housing and Urban Renewal: A Cross-National Perspective (co-edited with Paul Watt; Emerald, 2017).

Petra Verdonk is a Psychologist and has a PhD in gender mainstreaming in medical education (gender studies in medicine, University Medical Center at Radboud, Nijmegen, the Netherlands). At VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, she coordinates the learning pathway, Interculturalization and Diversity in Medical Education, which is part of the professional development training in medical education. She teaches on medical ethics and diversity issues in medical education and on medical sociology in health sciences education. In her research at the Department of Medical Humanities and the Amsterdam Public Health research institute, she focusses on gender and diversity in medical education and public health. She is also a member of a global international network on gender medicine and medical education.

Marloes Vlind is a Sociologist and PhD candidate at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Besides working as a lecturer, she researches democracy and inclusion. Together with Peer Smets, she published several articles about democratic initiatives and cooperated on a book about experiences with citizens’ summits in the Netherlands on behalf of the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations. She also reported on the national citizens’ conference for the same ministry and has co-written a guidance for local governments who want to organize a citizens’ summit. Currently, she is researching on how citizens’ summits serve as places of belonging and recovery of the so-called commons.

Karin Willemse is Assistant Professor at the Erasmus School of History, Culture, and Communication, Erasmus University Rotterdam, and at the Department of African Languages and Cultures and International Studies at Leiden University. Her work focusses on gender, religion, violence, youth and migration in the context of globalization. She conducted several research projects in Africa, cooperating with scholars from South Africa, Senegal and Sudan. Some recent works are: ‘Landscapes of Memories: Visual and Spatial Dimensions of Hajja’s Narrative of Self’, in Narrative Works: Issues, Investigations and Interventions (2012); ‘Embodied Engagements: Feminist Ethnography at the Crossing of Knowledge Production and Representation’, an introduction with Tine Davids for a co-edited special issue of Women Studies International Forum (2014) and ‘Muslim Communities and the Struggle Over the Public Sphere’, an introduction with Sylvia Bergh for a co-edited special issue of Contemporary Islam (2016). Currently she is engaged in research on heritage and belonging in Nubia, North Sudan, on an Urgent Anthropology Fellowship from the Royal Anthropological Institute and the British Museum.