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The purpose of this chapter is to examine everyday multilingual peer play interactions through their implications for the development of friendships among immigrant children.

Bringing together linguistic anthropology and conversation analysis as methodological approaches, this chapter explores friendship processes among Moroccan immigrant girls in Spain, specifically by analyzing the structure and composition of one such peer group, as well as their multilingual and multimodal interactions.

The main findings are that the multi-age, mixed-expertise composition of this peer group, as well as the semiotically flexible forms of participation and interaction that it encourages, are conducive to remarkably inclusive groups and strong friendships among a diverse group of Moroccan immigrant girls (including, younger and older girls, girls with disabilities and girls with very different immigration histories). Solid inclusive friendships are cemented in this peer interactional environment first because being able to interchangeably negotiate expert/novice participation roles in game interactions affirms feelings of social competence among all the girls, and second because achieving shared understandings in play entails successfully negotiating rules and expectations, which promotes trust and collaboration, while minimizing conflict. The inclusive nature of these girls’ peer-groups contrasts with the exclusion they encounter in other social settings and relationships.

In this sense, this chapter has important implications for understanding immigrant children’s abilities to respond to forms of social exclusion by forming diverse peer groups and strong friendships of their own. These friendships offer them a path to combat the marginalization they experience in other domains of social life.

This chapter aims at providing insight into how social mixing plays out in the Transvaal neighborhood in Amsterdam — a neighborhood which has gone through various rounds of urban renewal — in the context of nationwide polarization between native-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch.

This chapter is based on research with a neighborhood focus — daily interactions, urban renewal, and use of public space — which took place during 2007–2010. Methods used include participant observation, semistructured interviews, and focus groups.

The physical renewal implies renovating and pulling down social housing, and building new social or owner-occupier housing. This study provides insight into how residents of different ethnic and income backgrounds live together in the neighborhood, also taking into account the impact of social polarization at the national level.

By knowing how people with different ethnic and class backgrounds live together in Transvaal neighborhood, it contributes to the formulation of evidence-based policies for the improvement of social cohesion, livability, safety of the neighborhood, and social capital of local residents.

This study looks at social mix in the context of national-level social polarization between native-Dutch and Moroccan-Dutch. This creates a new viewpoint seen against how the general literature on renewal and social mixing tends to do two things: firstly it usually explicitly or implicitly is also a tenure mix strategy, and secondly the policy focus of the social mix is usually around class issues, that is, the mixing of poor social housing tenants with richer owners.

The use and appropriation of public spaces is one of the fundamental aspects to be taken into account in research on the daily lives of the men and women who live in cities. This experience is not the same for everybody since factors such as sex, age, social class and ethnic and cultural identity affect the way in which urban life is experienced and perceived. We define public spaces as places of interrelation, social encounter and exchange, where groups with different interests converge (Borja & Muxí, 2001). Where they are used by a great diversity of people and for a wide variety of activities, public spaces can contribute to the collective identity of the community (Valle, 1997; Franck & Paxson, 1989). They have the capacity to become “participatory landscapes”, core elements in urban life that reflect our culture, beliefs and values (Francis, 1989).

In this article the everyday relationships of children in the context of the contemporary multicultural city will be discussed. It is based on ethnographic research into social relationships of city dwellers in Antwerp, a Flemish city in Belgium, within the framework of the reflection on community life, conflict and public space. In this research several city dwellers were interviewed about their social relationships, a small number of individual city dwellers were followed in their everyday life and participant observation was done in shops and on public transport. The fieldwork on public transport was carried out over a period of eight months. Observations were done on one specific tramline and its stops; drivers were informally interviewed and the researcher took part in the ticket control with inspectors of the public transport company. The fieldwork in the shops consisted of participant observations (not anonymous) for six months in a small shoe shop, a baby shop and a department store with a refreshment bar in it. Next to this in a specific city neighbourhood 30 interviews were done with different city inhabitants about their relationships and contacts and three of them were each followed for two months in their daily activities in and around the city. An elderly woman, a working man and a child were involved. The research unit was not formed by a specific ethnic, socio-economic or age group but by the relationships between different city dwellers. Special attention is given to crosscutting ties, those ties between individuals that run through delineated social groups and geographical boundaries. This article offers only descriptions of everyday relationships of children from the ethnographical research projects described above.

Purpose – The purpose of this chapter is to show how Moroccan-Dutch young people discuss national belonging in a context fraught with experiences of exclusion.

Design and Methodology – Data were collected in three rounds of focus groups with the same Moroccan-Dutch participants, addressing a different aspect of their identity in each round. To analyse the data, a narrative approach was used that considers both the import of stories as well as the contextual opportunities and constraints for sharing stories.

Findings – The analyses show how participants used ‘subjunctive stories’, which highlight the possibility of alternative meanings, to address the controversial issue of national belonging without contradicting the dominant storyline of exclusion. While the Dutch national identity could not be explicitly adopted – at least not in the company of their peers – Moroccan-Dutch young people imagined what national belonging might look like in their stories.

Research Implications – An approach to narrative that considers its subjunctive properties may sensitize researchers to the ways in which people express hopes and desires in spite of macro- and microcontextual constraints.

Value/Originality – This study takes issue with the tendency in academic research on belonging to focus on exclusion; it shows how the actual narratives reveal a longing to belong, even in the face of exclusion.

Much research claims that immigrant women's entrepreneurship in Western capitalist societies is embedded in the structural and cultural attributes of receiving societies. Other studies maintain that the structural and cultural traits of immigrant groups explain women's entrance into this type of business activity. Together, this body of research underestimates those individual attributes embedded in human agency, in the personalities of immigrant women, that encourage them to engage in this type of business enterprise.

This chapter scrutinizes the role of ethnic categorizations in everyday-lived experiences in a diverse neighbourhood. It was found that ethnic categorizations do play an important part in use and perception in widely divergent ways. Users of public space categorize relevant others in terms of ethnicity in various situations and in relation to several activities. Ethnic categories provide meaningful frameworks both in the case of negative evaluations of behaviour and in understanding spatial segregation. Indigenous Dutch are ethnically categorized in terms of them avoiding public space. Established newcomers are aware of an ethnic hierarchy and feel abandoned by indigenous neighbours. On their part, these established newcomers consider more recently arrived new migrants as a sign of decay of the neighbourhood. Next to (perceived) ethnicity, language is taken in account as a separate important classifying principle.

This chapter offers a survey of education development in the Middle East and North Africa region (MENA), and how the different crises have changed the global dynamics in education. This chapter first gives an overview of the regional context and the history of education in the region, followed by a discussion of the education developments in the region as shaped by the economic growth of high-income countries and the political upheavals in low-income countries. MENA states have made huge investments in their educational systems through implementing major changes in the education policies and introducing initiatives to improve the quality of education in their countries. However, the educational system in the region has not reaped the benefits of these reforms as it has not met the desired goals. The quality of students’ learning is very low as reflected in the poor rating by international assessments such as PISA, TIMSS and PIRLS. Structural educational reforms to foster citizenship and civic responsibility are urgently needed. Good governance of the education systems of the MENA countries, a critical thinking skills-based curriculum and strong market-oriented skills and vocational training programs are necessary for MENA to become economically competitive and reliably democratic.

Marrakech is today the most important tourist destination in Morocco. Marrakech, however, is not only a key reference point for mass international tourism, but also the preferred choice for those hunting for an “authentic” experience in this North African country. The “Red City” is indeed often presented in literature and advertising alike as a place out of modern time where the real “soul” of Morocco can be found and unveiled (Minca, 2006). This chapter investigates how this “soul” was established—and is now, in Marrakech, constantly reenacted—through layers of colonial and postcolonial interactions between Europe and Morocco.

This research paper explores the role of women talk (schmoozing) and the gender gap in urban sociology. In the discussions concerning the changing face of the Dutch inner cities, there is an increasing tendency for attention to be paid to ethnicity, without a concomitant analysis of the impact of gender in these neighbourhoods. Many Dutch urban theorists focus on examining both the levels and effects of segregation in urban neighbourhoods and how this impacts integration and community building in the Netherlands. This study, in seeking to redress this imbalance, firmly places women at the centre of urban theoretical enquiry. Using the results of unstructured interviews and observation I am able to offer an assessment of the many ways in which ethnically embedded gender relations have impacted on the urban and social spaces known as Afrikaanderwijk. A key line of enquiry being: what role do women play and how are they visible in/at the local neighbourhood level, specifically in the form of everyday, informal social contacts?