La racialisation comme constitution de la différence : une ethnographie documentaire de la santé publique aux États-Unis

On note de nos jours une intensification, aux États-Unis, de l’usage de la race en santé publique, une idée qui est parfois rejetée dans la mesure où elle est associée à des pratiques controversées. Les races sont vues, dans ce contexte, comme le produit du racisme, une technologie du pouvoir de l’État moderne qui a consisté à fragmenter l’humanité pour permettre les colonisations. C'est ainsi que la race a été prise en charge par le discours pour marquer la différence, discours qui est constitué d'un ensemble hétérogène de dispositifs, des institutions, des énoncés scientifiques, des normes et des règles. Le racisme s’est développé en parallèle avec l'affirmation d'un pouvoir sur la vie visant à assurer la gestion des corps et des populations, notamment par le biais des pratiques de santé publique. Cette thèse s'appuie sur une étude ethnographique réalisée sur un corpus de documents de la santé publique parus aux États-Unis et issus de bureaux fédéraux et d’une importante revue spécialisée dans le domaine sanitaire, et qui ont été publiés entre 2001 et 2009. Cette étude a analysé la manière dont la race est représentée, produite comme objet de connaissance, et régulée par les pratiques discursives dans ces documents. Les résultats confirment que le discours sur la race varie au cours du temps. Toutefois, les résultats indiquent la relative permanence en santé publique d'un régime racialisé de représentation qui consiste à identifier, à situer et à opposer les sujets et les groupes à partir de labels standardisés. Ce régime est composé d'un ensemble de pratiques représentationnelles qui, couplées aux techniques disciplinaires et à l’idée de culture, aboutissent à la caractérisation et à la formation d’objets racialisés et à des stéréotypes. De plus, cet ensemble d’opérations qui fabrique la racialisation, a tendance, avec la sanitarisation et la culturalisation, à naturaliser la différence, à reproduire l’ordre symbolique et à constituer les identités raciales. Par ailleurs, la racialisation apparaît tiraillée entre un pouvoir sur la vie et un pouvoir sur la mort. Enfin, cette étude propose une alternative postraciale qui envisage la constitution des groupes humains de manière fluide et déterritorialisée.

What’s the Problem? Precarious Youth: Marginalisation, Criminalisation and Racialisation.

Since the nineteenth century invention of adolescence, young people have been consistently identified as social problems in western societies. Their contemporary status as a focus of fear and anxiety is, in that sense, nothing new. In this paper, I try to combine this sense of historical recurrence about the youth problem with some questions about what is different about the present – asking what is distinctive about the shape of the youth problem now? This is a difficult balance to strike, and what I have to say will probably lean more towards an emphasis on the historical conditions and routes of the youth problem. That balance reflects my own orientations and knowledge (I am not expert on the contemporary conditions of being young). But it also arises from my belief that much contemporary social science is profoundly forgetful. An enthusiasm for stressing the newness, or novelty, of the present connects many varieties of contemporary scholarship. One result is the construction of what Janet Fink and I have referred to as ‘sociological time’ in which

New ethnicities online: reflexive racialisation and the internet

In this article we analyse the emergence of Internet activity addressing the experiences of young people in two British communities: South Asian and Chinese.We focus on two web sites: www.barficulture.com and www.britishbornchinese.org.uk, drawing on interviews with site editors, content analysis of the discussion forums, and E-mail exchanges with site users. Our analysis of these two web sites shows how collective identities still matter, being redefined rather than erased by online interaction. We understand the site content through the notion of reflexive racialisation. We use this term to modify the stress given to individualisation in accounts of reflexive modernisation. In addition we question the allocation of racialised meaning from above implied by the concept of racialisation. Internet discussion forums can act as witnesses to social inequalities and through sharing experiences of racism and marginalisation, an oppositional social perspective may develop. The online exchanges have had offline consequences: social gatherings, charitable donations and campaigns against adverse media representations. These web sites have begun to change the terms of engagement between these ethnic groups and the wider society,and they have considerable potential to develop new forms of social action.

A common ‘outlawness’ : criminalisation of Muslim minorities in the UK and Australia

Since mass immigration recruitments of the post-war period, ‘othered’ immigrants to both the UK and Australia have faced ‘mainstream’ cultural expectations to assimilate, and various forms of state management of their integration. Perceived failure or refusal to integrate has historically been constructed as deviant, though in certain policy phases this tendency has been mitigated by cultural pluralism and official multiculturalism. At critical times, hegemonic racialisation of immigrant minorities has entailed their criminalisation, especially that of their young men. In the UK following the ‘Rushdie Affair’ of 1989, and in both Britain and Australia following these states’ involvement in the 1990-91 Gulf War, the ‘Muslim Other’ was increasingly targeted in cycles of racialised moral panic. This has intensified dramatically since the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the ensuing ‘War on Terror’. The young men of Muslim immigrant communities in both these nations have, over the subsequent period, been the subject of heightened popular and state Islamophobia in relation to: perceived ‘ethnic gangs’; alleged deviant, predatory masculinity including so-called ‘ethnic gang rape’; and paranoia about Islamist ‘radicalisation’ and its supposed bolstering of terrorism. In this context, the earlier, more genuinely social-democratic and egalitarian, aspects of state approaches to ‘integration’ have been supplanted, briefly glossed by a rhetoric of ‘social inclusion’, by reversion to increasingly oppressive assimilationist and socially controlling forms of integrationism. This article presents some preliminary findings from fieldwork in Greater Manchester over 2012, showing how mainly British-born Muslims of immigrant background have experienced these processes.

International juvenile (in)justice : penal severity and rights compliance

This article focuses on the anomalies and contradictions surrounding the notion of ‘international juvenile justice’, whether in its pessimistic (neoliberal penality and penal severity) or optimistic (universal children’s rights and rights compliance) incarnations. It argues for an analysis which recognises firstly, the uneven, multi-facetted and heterogeneous nature of the processes of globalisation and secondly, how the global, the international, the national and the local are not mutually exclusive but continually interact to re-constitute, re-make and challenge each other.

On the Border of Indeterminacy: The Separation Wall in East Jerusalem

Drawing on a perspective which takes into account the convergences of sovereign and biopolitical ruling apparatuses, the aim of this article is to provide a comprehensive view of the Separation Wall constructed by Israel in East Jerusalem, and, through it, of Israeli control of Palestinian East Jerusalem. Neither a comprehensive border, nor a mere barrier, the Separation Wall which is being constructed in Jerusalem operates to reinstates sovereign power in arrays of governmentality for the purpose of drawing on the ability of sovereignty to appropriate legitimacy for the territorialisation of governmentality. This article claims that these territorialised arrays of governmentality give rise to processes of racialisation, by maintaining a grip on the communities of Palestinians in East Jerusalem and sustaining them in an intermediate position, standing in the way of their full integration into the Israeli population while severing their existing connections with the Palestinians in the West Bank. © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.

Hårda nypor för ett mjukt samhälle? : Om medialisering och rasifiering i utspelspolitikens Sverige

Toughness for a soft society? On medialisation, racialisation and the politics of spin in Sweden In recent years, issues concerning the future of “multicultural Sweden” have become a salient feature in Swedish politics. One important actor in recent years’ debates about the problems confronting “multicultural Sweden” is the Swedish Liberal Party. Since the general election of 2002, the party has gained both publicity and electoral support by focusing the question of “integration of immigrants” in terms of assimilation and intensified demands aimed at the “immigrant Others”. In this article, the party’s recent developments in the area of integration policy is analysed within the framework of two general processes in contemporary politics, the politics of racialisation and the medialisation of politics. The party’s successful interventions in the area of integration policy are built on an intimate as well as complex interplay between racialisation and medialisation. The agenda articulated by the party, further, has several similarities with the agenda of “authoritarian populist” movements throughout Europe.

'Nothing good ever came out of Japan': Race-mixing and the limits of diaspora

This paper argues that postcolonial notions of diaspora are premised on immigrant subjectivities and standpoints which do not fully apprehend the mixed-race / bi-racial experience and the local effect of cultural hybridity in Western settings. The paper was prompted by a recent conversation with Dee, the daughter of a Japanese warbride. As a child Dee recalled being told by her friend's mother that 'nothing good ever came out of Japan'. The significance of constant interpolations into 'Asianness' by statements such as these; by the 'where do you come from?' question and by more blatant discriminations are inadequately addressed by traditional and postcolonial notions of diaspora. 'Roots' and 'routes' imagery feature prominently in discussions of diaspora and hybridity which aim to decolonise culture and identity in deconstructive moves that highlight their flexible, multiple, contractedness. While it has been argued that even these conceptualisations are problematic because they privilege orders of explanation, theory and standpoint that are forced back into line with traditional notions of discrete 'races', cultures, ethnicities and identities, cultural studies and postcolonial theorists do not appear to find this contradiction overly troubling. Lodged in bodies that do not easily conflate to neat either/or cultures, politics and genetics, race-mixing also defies and yet return us to culture and biology. However, I argue that their refractions though the same tired old orders of racial, ethnic, cultural and national differentiation prevent us from disregarding the discursive effects of racism and racialisation.

A moral economy of whiteness:behaviours, belonging and Britishness

This article outlines the complex stories through which national belonging is made, and some ways in which class mediates the racialisation process. It is based on fieldwork on the ways in which white UK people in provincial cities construct identities based on positioning vis-a`-vis other groups, communities and the nation. I argue that this relational identity work revolves around fixing a moral-ethical location against which the behaviour and culture of Others is measured, and that this has a temporal and spatial specificity. First, attitudinal trends by social class emerge in our work as being to do with emphasis and life experience rather than constituting absolute distinctions in attitudes. Second, in an era supposedly marked by the hegemony of ‘new’ or ‘cultural’ racism, bloodlines and phenotypes are still frequently utilised in race-making discursive work. Third, in provincial urban England, there is a marked ambivalence towards Britishness (as compromised by Others) and an openness to Englishness as a more authentic source of identification.

Migrant domestic workers, vulnerability and the law: immigration and employment laws in Cyprus and Spain

The intersection of gender, welfare and immigration regimes has been one of the main focus of a rich scholarship on paid domestic work in Europe. This article brings into the discussion the nexus of employment and immigration law regimes to reflect on the role of legal regulation in structuring and reducing the vulnerability of domestic workers. I analyse this nexus by looking at the cases of Cyprus and Spain, two states falling under the cluster of Southern Mediterranean welfare regimes, that share certain characteristics in terms of immigration regimes, but have substantially different employment law regulation models. The first part sketches the debate on the employment law regulation of domestic work. The second part starts by giving an overview of the immigration regimes of Cyprus and Spain in relation to migrant domestic workers and then proceeds to analyse the two countries’ models and substance of employment law regulation in domestic work. The comparison of these two divergent approaches informs the debate on how the legal regulation of domestic work should be best structured. In Spain there have been recent dynamic legislative changes in the employment law regulation of domestic work. The final part of the article traces these changes and reflects on why such processes have not taken place in Cyprus.