Chinese immigrant youth identities and belonging in Prato, Italy: exploring the intersections between migration and youth studies

This article explores the experiences of young people of Chinese background in Prato (Italy). Despite significant social exclusion, young Chinese develop a sense of belonging to Prato by creating local, translocal and transnational affiliations and interconnections. These relationships contribute to making an often overtly hostile local reality, liveable and meaningful. A central aim of this article is to examine the intersection between migration studies and youth studies. The former tend to focus on the processes of identity formation featuring ethnic background, hence the label ‘second generation’. In contrast, the latter tend to foreground age- and generation-specific practices of belonging that may extend beyond ethnic identification, hence the focus on ‘youth’. We argue that bringing migration and youth studies together by complicating notions of home and host, migrant and local identity and belonging helps us to better understand how young people are managing multiplicity and mobility (and situatedness and stasis/fixity).

Sport in the lives of young people with intellectual disabilities: negotiating disability, identity and belonging

Whilst there is now a growing body of sociological research on the role of sport in the social, gender and identity rehabilitation of people with physical impairments, research on the role of sport in the lives of people with intellectual disabilities primarily focuses on improving fitness, health and social interactions. Yet sport is not only a form of physical exercise, competition or leisure—it is also a powerful social institution within which social structures and power relations are reproduced and, less frequently, challenged. This paper provides insights into the role of sport and physical activity in the lives of four young Australians with intellectual disabilities or cognitive limitations from their own perspectives. Data from life history interviews elicits rich and in-depth insights, revealing that the meanings these young people give to their sporting experiences include—but also go beyond—concerns with fitness, health and social interactions. Though by no means representative of the role of sport for all young people with intellectual disabilities, it is evident that these four young people use sport to negotiate complex emotional worlds around disability, identity, and belonging—much like their physically impaired counterparts.

Exploring cultures of belonging in Darwin, Australia

This paper argues that the use of visual methods such as participatory video is crucial to co-producing sensory and embodied knowledges of belonging in Australian cities. These knowledges of belonging that focus on affectivity and passion have the potential to expand the worlds that racialised bodies of colour inhabit, but contemporary urban research shows an overwhelming focus on ‘talk’. This paper therefore takes the risk by engaging in a research process that is experimental, flexible and adaptive to explore diverse sensory cultures of belonging through a focus on Darwin, a small north Australian city. This is a city with a polyethnic history where Indigenous-migrant-settler race relations are recognised as more complex in comparison to large south Australian cities. The paper draws on participatory videos of two eventsin suburban Darwin - a Vigil on the side of the road opposite Airport
Lodge, an asylum seeker detention centre, and an afternoon walk along Casuarina beach where Aboriginals who live ‘rough’ camp. Using short video clips, long-term residents, migrant newcomers and asylum seekers (on bridging visas) compose an expressive narrative of the road and beach in Darwin, as places where refrains of welcome expand worlds that racialised bodies of colour inhabit. Using digital technologies the flow and juxtaposition of video clips of these events provides the possibility to craft sensory and embodied knowledges of belonging in a north
Australian city with a history of assimilationist and racially discriminatory policies.

The new Anti-Semitism in Europe: the Islamic dimension of, and Jewish belonging in, the EU

This article examines the sense of Jewish vulnerability and exclusion in Europe that has resulted from manifestations, and Jewish perceptions, of the “new anti-Semitism,” and the role of Islamic communities in Europe in propagating this form of hatred of Jews. First emerging in 2000 with the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada, and tied in with the Middle East conflict, anger at Israel is directed at Diaspora Jewish communities. This “new anti-Semitism” targets the Jewish collective with the characteristics of anti-Semitism previously aimed at individual Jews. The article focuses on the wave of anti-Semitism that erupted as a result of the 2014 Israeli–Hamas War. Based on an analysis of European Jewish communities, it considers the active part played by European Muslim communities in perpetrating the new anti-Semitism. Using an analysis of survey data, emigration statistics and newspaper opinion articles by leading European Jewish intellectuals, the article considers how the new anti-Semitism is adversely affecting Jewish–Muslim relations and the concomitant sense of “belonging” of European Jewry. The article considers what is required to overcome the new anti-Semitism propagated by Muslim communities to restore a greater sense of Jewish belonging to, and identification with, Europe.

Identity, belonging and cultural diversity in Australian museums

 Karen studied the ways that objects have mediated relationships between people from culturally diverse backgrounds in Australian history and society. She focused on the ways museums, through their collection and display of particular objects, have played a role in supporting processes of inclusion and exclusion in Australian society over time.

Belonging as a force of agency : an exploration of immigrant children’s everyday life in early childhood settings

The notion of agency is being used with increasing frequency in early childhood policies, replacing traditional assumptions about young children’s immaturity and their role as mere recipients of adults’ arrangements. Agency is thus both an educational aspiration as well as a signifier of a strong rights-based political commitment to countering views of children as immature and incompetent. This article develops the argument that agency is inherently a sociocultural product that is driven by children’s clear attempts to bond with others and to develop a sense of belonging. Using examples of the everyday experiences of two Chinese immigrant children in an early childhood centre, the article considers ways in which agency was exercised by the children in an unfamiliar sociocultural setting because they wanted to belong. Some crucial issues are highlighted for practice and policy development in the area of immigrant children’s education, arguing that the shaping of early childhood education requires an attention to children’s ‘invisible’ capabilities, needs to belong and ‘small’ everyday life realities.

Book review : belonging in Oceania : movement, place-making and multiple identifications

Book review of Belonging in Oceania: Movement, Place-Making and Multiple Identifications by Elfriede Hermann, Wolfgang Kempf and Toon van Meijl.

Identity, belonging and cultural diversity in Australian museums.

Karen studied the ways that objects have mediated relationships between people from culturally diverse backgrounds in Australian history and society. She focused on the ways museums, through their collection and display of particular objects, have played a role in supporting processes of inclusion and exclusion in Australian society over time.