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Blog post by Heather Sauyaq Jean Gordon, USA
As an Indigenous scholar of race and ethnicity, I have struggled to find a place for who I am within the field. I studied race and ethnic studies as an undergraduate, but the curriculum focused on Black/African Americans, Asian Americans, White Americans and Latinos/Hispanics/Chicanos. I chose term paper topics and presentations that centered on Alaska Native (Indigneous) people to bring us into the conversation. My honors thesis on Arab American racism post-9/11 was another effort to highlight underrepresented populations.
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Blog post by Marcus Nicolson, Institute for Minority Rights, Italy
Scotland has been described as having a progressive politics towards immigration and migrant integration, which is closely tied to the civic brand of nationalism that has been promoted by the Scottish government in the 21st century. But what effects do these narratives have on young adult migrants who have made Scotland their home, and how do they relate to these narratives when negotiating their own identities? These are the key questions which are explored in my Identities article, ‘Transnational identities and agency: navigating everyday life as a young adult migrant in Glasgow, UK'. 
Blog post by Sudip Sen, University of Portsmouth, UK
In my Identities article, ‘Belligerent shyness and puzzlement: a discursive analysis of ‘not racism’ and the post-racial on UK phone-in radio’, I investigate ‘the talk about the talk’ about racism – including when that talk is about how we shouldn’t talk about it. In particular, I analyze commercial phone-in radio calls in the UK, where speakers seek to minimize or deny the relevance of racism, and find that there is a persistence of performed shyness and puzzlement. Shy people are usually not belligerent, and people genuinely puzzled by something are not usually quite so adamant about their answer. So, what is going on here? The speakers’ ‘shy’ and indirect utterances emphasize their view that they cannot speak anymore, and their puzzlement and shock frames racism as exceptional. In other words, these small public performances, rehearsed and repeated, are (re)generative of a post-racial discourse. 
Blog post by Jamella Gow, Bowdoin College, USA
What makes a migrant ‘Black’? Frequently, negative rhetoric surrounding migrants in the United States and Europe have used race and culture as a means through which to contrast the inherent ‘belonging’ of citizens with the seeming ‘non-belonging’ of migrants. Migrants’ presence and cultures are, at worst, feared due to assumptions derived from 16th-19th century rhetoric which drove the colonization of people broadly conceived as Others. This is particularly the case for Black migrants. We can draw a line between the transformations of nations in the Caribbean under colonization to the migratory waves of the 20th and 21st century. Historically, the colonization of the British Caribbean anticipated the arrival of the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants (1948) who sought to build new lives in the centre of Empire. The imperial forays of the United States in Central America and the Caribbean also generated pathways to migration for Haitians who have been coming to the US since Haiti’s founding in 1804. The arrival and reception of Black migrants to the US and Europe, therefore, cannot be understood without these deeper historical links that draw the Caribbean and the West together. These linkages are explored in my Identities article, ‘From colonial subjects to Black nations: racializing the Caribbean within global Blackness’, where I trace the history of Blackness in the Caribbean to better understand how mobility became a feature of Blackness both under slavery and more modern iterations of Black migration today. 
Blog post by Chiara Martini, University of Milan, Italy
For anyone who has spent time in Athens in recent years – especially those involved in migration research or work – Victoria Square is a place they have undoubtedly passed through and become familiar with. Victoria Square, located in central Athens, offers a unique lens through which to understand the complexities of migration and social stratification in contemporary Europe. In my Identities article, ‘Victoria Square, Athens: migratory movements and social stratifications in the centre of the Greek capital’, I explore how this seemingly ordinary space reflects larger migration dynamics, showcasing the intersection of diverse communities, solidarity efforts and social tensions in urban environments 
Blog post by Aaron Winter, Lancaster University, UK; Co-Editor, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power
In the past, I’ve warned against seeing Trump and fascism as the ultimate threat(s) because they can serve as extreme, exceptional and, in the case of the former, individualised distractions from problems in the wider system, mainstream politics and liberal democracy in ways that can position these as a bulwark despite their role in mainstreaming the far right and upholding the same inequalities and injustices. Then there was Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration and questions about what it meant. In many ways, Musk may serve the same purpose for Trump as the latter has for American society and politics by making him look less illiberal, extreme and scary. That does not mean we should not be concerned about Trump or more importantly fascism but also be attuned to the inequalities and injustices in the system, mainstream and democracy that may not only be distracted from but also justified, exploited and exacerbated by it. We see this most acutely in how the liberal mainstream has embraced the war on ‘woke’ and migrants in order to prevent something worse. Something that, despite or possibly because of this, has been emboldened and is already occurring. Of course, few expected much from Trump’s second inauguration on 20 January 2025. As much as many feared the new administration would oversee the rise of fascism and collapse of American Democracy, there also seemed to be an atmosphere of resignation. At the very least, many probably thought that he could not possibly do worse than in his appearance on 6 January 2021 just prior to the last inauguration. If anything, it was the events of that day that led many to assume it would not happen again, either because Trump would not get re-elected or his victory would at least satisfy the extremists. Everything seemed to be going as expected with the typical combination of procedure and ritual, albeit with extra nationalism, glitz and guests. The latter included far right celebrities such as former head of Breitbart and Trump Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and X CEO Elon Musk, as well as other tech bros. One notable guest, Brexit and UKIP funder Arron Banks could not attend his own Stars and Stripes and Union Jack Party because he was denied entry to the US. This led to outrage from those more often heard demanding tougher border controls. 
Blog post by Alyssa Marie Kvalvaag, Nord University, Norway
When questions around migration appear in a European context, the concept ‘integration’ often follows. Despite being a well-established concept within migration policies and studies, many scholars have highlighted that integration is characterized by ambiguities and multiple, often unclear, meanings (e.g., Grillo 2011; Kutor, Arku, and Bandauko 2023; Vertovec 2020). In my Identities article, ‘Contesting integration discourses: migrant organizations and epistemic resistance in northern Norway’, I explore how leaders of migrant organizations use and contest integration discourses by drawing on their experiential ways of knowing and doing. Migrant organizations are understood as organizations created by migrants and run (primarily) for migrants. I argue that leaders of migrant organizations use integration discourses to ‘do’ multiple things, at times subverting common ways of knowing about integration and carving out new spaces of possibilities in thinking about what integration is and may be. 
Blog post by Monika Mokre, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
Identity politics were something like a buzz word in the 2024 US election campaign. On the one hand, media speculated why Kamala Harris did not play the ‘identity card’ of her multiethnic origin in a similar way as Barack Obama did. On the other hand, Republicans accused Harris precisely of using her minority identity as a campaign token and reject, at the same time, any kind of anti-racist or gender politics as identity politics of an elite neglecting the problems of the majority population. Identities and their political usage, thus, might influence the outcome of elections and, in this way, play a role for the most important participatory practice of representative democracy. Their impact, however, goes far beyond ballot box agendas. When democracy is government of the people, for the people, and by the people, identity politics pose the paramount question if there is, in fact, a ‘people’ or if the citizenry consists of fundamentally irreconcilable subgroups 
Blog post by Sara Amadasi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy
In our Identities article, ‘Keeping two cultures together’: the binary construction of belonging in narratives of professionals on children’s cultural identity’, we investigated how the sense of belonging and cultural identity of children with a migration background[1] are socially constructed by Italian professionals who work at schools and in social services with young people. We also investigated whether narratives told by interviewees are affected by the gender of the children they are referring to. Our article is based on interviews conducted in the context of the Horizon 2020 project, ‘Child-Up: Children Hybrid Integration: Learning Dialogue as a Way of Upgrading Policies of Participation’. This project investigated the opportunities of children with a migration background to actively exercise their agency to change their social and cultural conditions. While the project involved several groups of people, our Identities article analyzed interviews conducted with teachers, educators, social workers and mediators in three cities in northern Italy. 
Blog post by Diditi Mitra, Brookdale Community College, USA
As I explore in my Identities article, ‘The socioeconomics of Sikh American identity’, semi structured interviews conducted with immigrant Sikh taxi drivers in New York City and with immigrant Sikh families show that socioeconomic differences are impactful in shaping the experiences and identities of non-white immigrants of the Sikh religious faith. The respondents of these interviews converged and diverged on their lived experiences and subsequently in terms of making meaning of themselves. While all the respondents converged on their encounter with racism, the specific form of those racist encounters was shaped by socioeconomic status. The spaces occupied by the professional informants were typically suffused with colourblind racial ideology, making it challenging to identify it as such and as a matter of fact casting doubt on the professional respondents’ assessment of those encounters as racist. The taxi drivers, in contrast, reported routine and blatant experiences of racism from passengers, law enforcement and the taxi court judges. In my view, it was possible to remove the mask of liberalism, that usually conceals overt expressions of racism in professional workplaces, in dealings with non-white immigrant cab drivers whose work and social status ranked low in the social order. 
Blog post by Karim Murji, University of West London, UK
My Identities article, ‘The BBC, public intellectuals, and the making of Five Views of Multiracial Britain’, centres on a series of five television programmes made by the BBC in 1978 and subsequently published as a slim booklet by the Commission for Racial Equality. This is a piece of media and socio-political history though re-viewing it in light of recent events reveals some notable contrasts about public intellectuals and the media/the BBC then and now. In August 2024 widespread rioting took place in towns and cities, largely in England though there were also some in Northern Ireland and in Wales. Some of the locations were Aldershot, Birmingham, Blackburn, Blackpool, Bolton, Bristol, Darlington, Hartlepool, High Wycombe, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Nottingham, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Preston, Rotherham, Southport, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland, Tamworth and Weymouth. 
Blog post by Stephen Cho Suh, San Diego State University, USA
In April 2024, David Chang, head of the Momofuku food empire, came under fire when lawyers for his brand sent cease-and-desist letters to dozens of companies across the US. At issue was the apparent unauthorized use of ‘chili crunch’, a name that Momofuku was in the process of trademarking for one of its own chili oil products. Though Momofuku eventually pulled these requests, with Chang himself issuing a public apology, it was clear that a metaphorical line had been crossed. Chang, a long-time advocate if not key representative of the Asian American food scene, was roundly criticized by Asian American foodies and food entrepreneurs for doing the very things he frequently railed against – seemingly creating artificial barriers to entry for fledgling entrepreneurs while also policing the culinary boundaries of a dish or cuisine. To many, Chang had become the culinary bully that he had built his career claiming to despise. It is easy to dismiss this short-lived Asian American food drama as a business decision gone temporarily awry or as the grumblings of a small but loud minority. But doing so would miss the broader cultural significance of this micro-event. We contend that what was at conflict here was not simply the overly complicated nature of trademark law, nor was it just about who gets to claim ownership of an ingredient or dish. No, the predicament here had to do with something that was far more fundamental – the questions of ‘What is Asian American food?’ and ‘Who does Asian American food belong to?’. 
Blog post by Gabrielle Lindstrom, Mount Royal University, Canada
In general terms, diversity and cultural awareness training are approaches that fall under the auspices of equity, diversity and inclusion (EDI) initiatives. While there are different legal and political imperatives surrounding EDI discourses, diversity and cultural awareness education modalities are commonly used by many corporate, government and NGO (non-government organizations) to address gaps in knowledge with regard cultural realities other than mainstream Western perspectives. My Identities article, ‘Rethinking critical thinking, diversity and Indigenous awareness from a Blackfoot perspective’, is concerned with the Canadian settler context and is situated within conceptual terrain of EDI educational development. I offer a critique of the cadre of diversity initiatives that emerge out of EDI initiatives with emphasis on the Indigenous/cultural awareness training, unconscious bias training and culturally inclusive workplace approaches. These EDI methods distinct to Indigenous lived-experiences with Western colonialism are used to address information that was not taught in mainstream schools about Indigenous peoples historical and contemporary cultural realities. 
Blog post by Debra L. DeLaet, Drake University, USA
On February 6 each year, the United Nations observes the International Day of Zero Tolerance for Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). This observance aligns with anti-FGM initiatives within numerous UN agencies. Eradicating FGM by 2030 is a critical target of Sustainable Development Goal 5 focused on promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls. In 2024, the theme of the International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM was #HerVoiceMatters, described as an effort to elevate the voices of survivors in mobilizing support for global efforts to eliminate FGM. Despite the implied universality in campaigns such as #HerVoiceMatters, legal inconsistencies and cultural biases in global anti-FGM initiatives beg questions about whose voices – and whose bodies – matter in practice. According to the official website for the International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM, FGM ‘comprises all procedures that involve altering or injuring the female genitalia for non-medical reasons…’ The simplicity of this definition, alongside the stated goal of zero tolerance, asserts a universal standard that seemingly should apply to women and girls across cultures. 
Blog post by Emaeyak Sylvanus, University of Nigeria, Nigeria
Historically, music has remained a critical unifying feature of the citizens in Nigeria's political processes, particularly during campaigns. Music has achieved this by transcending the many linguistic and ethnic barriers in modern Nigeria. The country’s February 2023 presidential election was no different with campaign songs as a medium through which political ideologies and identities were broadcast and reinforced. These memorable songs laden with cultural references served as a vehicle for political messaging that was both accessible and emotionally compelling. Our Identities article, ‘Music and political identity salience in Nigeria’s 2023 presidential election’, delves into this phenomenon by exploring how Nigerians used music to signal and express both their political affiliations and national identity. In the analysis, we posit that music has the power to amplify political identity salience, especially when it reflects deeper cultural and socio-political values. This was evident in the 2023 presidential elections, where the campaign songs not only supported political candidates but also conveyed messages of hope, unity, and, at times, dissent. 
Blog post by Neal A. Lester and Elizabeth McNeil
In the technicolorized version of the film Imitation of Life (1959) about racial passing and white supremacy, Annie Johnson, a Black housekeeper, asks a rhetorical and existential question of Miss Lora Meredith, Annie’s white employer and mother of a white daughter. Referring to her Black daughter Sarah Jane, who passes for white, Ms. Johnson says, ‘How do you tell a child that she was born to be hurt?’ While this film is melodrama at its best, Annie's sentiment captures Black parenting and Black guardianship and its inability to protect Black children and families from systemic racism. It further underscores the fact that adult racial politics deny Black children their humanity and the luxuries and privileges granted white children and white childhood. Whether through the adultification of Black children or the erasure of Black children’s experiences altogether, representational and physical violence against Black children in cartoons, commercial ads, games and picture books mirrors manifestations of racial violence against Black adults. Such racialized physical and representational violence denies humanity to Black people more broadly, adults and children alike. Within the contexts of US history, children's literature and popular culture, the invisibilization of Black children is yet another social injustice under the colonial white gaze. This invisibility includes the exploitation of Black children in poverty porn as well as Black children’s experiences with ‘curriculum violence’ in problematic classroom pedagogies across the USA. 
Blog post by Rebecca Callahan, University of Vermont, USA; Julieta Rico, University of California at Los Angeles, USA; Kathryn M. Obenchain, Purdue University, USA; Claudia Ochoa, University of Texas-Austin, USA; and Angeles De Santos-Quezada, University of Texas-Austin, USA
Polarizing and hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric dominates political news in the US, a nation uniquely defined by both its immigrant origins and its racist, white settler colonial history. In the politically charged months leading up to the 2020 election, we interviewed dozens of Latiné young adult US citizens about their sense of belonging and responsibility to their community. As we explore in our Identities article, ‘Civic identity: media, belonging, and Latiné youth in the 2020 US presidential election’, these data revealed surprising findings; (1) our participants used social media to identify a community of belonging beyond their geographic locale; (2) as informed citizens, they curated, vetted and disseminated information to protect and improve the community; and (3) they perceived media misinformation as a serious threat to democracy. Not only did participants report using social media to identify a community of belonging defined by shared experiences, beliefs or ethnicity, but they did so at a time when the COVID-19 pandemic limited traditional ways that people gathered and engaged in civic life. Social media allowed participants to connect not only with family and friends, but also with a large coethnic community that expanded beyond their physical location to include people they already knew as well as those they admired (e.g., celebrities and political figures). 
Blog post by Meghan Tinsley, University of Manchester, UK; Sadia Habib, University of Manchester, UK; Chloe Peacock, University of Sheffield, UK; Ruth Ramsden-Karelse, Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Germany; and Gary Younge, University of Manchester, UK
Toppling a monumental, public statue may be powerful, cathartic, or even jarring for those who witness it. As sites of memory and public art, statues are imposing, apparently permanent figures that claim a prominent place in both urban space and collective memory. Toppling these statues overthrows the appearance of stability and authority. It is at least partly because this act was so visually striking that images of cultural activists toppling statues were among the most iconic symbols of the Black Lives Matter protests that erupted across the globe in the summer of 2020. Far less public attention, however, has focused on what has happened to public space since the statues were toppled. Certainly, dethroning slavers and colonisers is an important first step of decolonising history, but it also introduces the question of who, or what, should replace their stories and voices. Similarly, toppling statues of slavers and colonisers in 2020 signalled the beginning of an equally fraught – and ongoing – debate over what to do with newly emptied pedestals and public squares. 
Blog post by Samira Azabar, University of Antwerp, Belgium and Radboud University, Netherlands
In public debates, Muslims in the West are often presented and perceived as the dangerous Other opposing democracy and Western values, situating them as outsiders to the nation. Consequently, Muslim minorities frequently find themselves grappling with multifaceted forms of marginalization and exclusion. This marginalization has been exacerbated by the success of radical right parties in the European countries, which often promote anti-Muslim rhetoric and policies, further entrenching prejudice and exclusion. This blog post delves into the political endeavours of Muslims in Belgium, exploring how they navigate and resist their marginalization through everyday hidden resistance tactics aiming for recognition as co-members of the polity. Understanding Muslims’ resistance While research on Muslims’ political engagement often focuses on recognized forms of political participation such as voting and protests, my Identities article, ‘Good Muslims, good citizens? An intersectional approach to Muslims’ everyday (hidden) resistance tactics in Belgium’, pays special attention to more subtle forms of resistance enacted by Muslims in a society characterized by Islamophobia. To understand these forms of resistance, Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness is helpful in conceptualizing the duality experienced by marginalized groups, including where they view themselves through the eyes of the dominant group that discriminates against them. 
Blog post by Lambros Fatsis, City, University of London, UK. Cross-posted from The BSC Blog.
“Riots Engulf Britain”, “Under Siege”, “Summer of Discontent”, “You Will Regret This, Starmer Warns Rioters”, “Rioting Thugs Must Not Be Allowed to Win”. This is how the violence that recently broke out in multiple cities across England became headline news. What kind of violence was this though? Is any of it new? Is more policing the answer? These are some of the questions that have circulated widely in the aftermath of those events, especially in the Twittersphere. A closer look at them, therefore, seems appropriate—as an attempt to go beyond sensationalist reporting and irresponsible punditry that traffics in info-wars, but does not really aid our understanding of the historical, ideological, political and socio-cultural dimensions of such ‘rioting’. 
Blog post by Andrea Calabretta, University of Padua, Italy; Francesco Della Puppa, Ca’ Foscari University of Venice, Italy; and Giulia Storato, University of Padua, Italy
‘It is this fact of locomotion, as I have said, that defines the very nature of society’: this is what sociologist Robert Park[1] said exactly a century ago, seeing mobility as the characteristic and founding feature of humanity. It is no coincidence that the book in which he makes these considerations is titled ‘the City’ and brings together a set of essays on urban life. If people move naturally, at some point they also need to come to the – provisional – end of their journeys. To stop, at least for a moment, and to take root. How then do migrants settle in cities and territories that are already inhabited? How do they develop relationships with the previous inhabitants? And with the future migrants, who will arrive after them? These questions have permeated the sociology of migration and urban sociology for over a hundred years. Our Identities article, ‘The migratory crossroads of Alte Ceccato: an emblematic case of migratory stratification’, attempts to analyze these questions from a new perspective. While migration studies have kept the ‘camera’ fixed on migrants and their complex movements, we focus on a specific place – the hamlet of Alte Ceccato in Italy – in order to observe the stratification and interaction between different ages of migration. 
Blog post by Juliette Galonnier, Sciences Po Center for International Studies, France
In July 2023, the alarming rise of public burnings of the Qur’an that occurred in several European countries, notably Sweden and Denmark, led the Human Rights Council of the United Nations to adopt a resolution on ‘countering religious hatred’. In hundreds of incidents, far-right or anti-Islam activists and politicians, sometimes under heavy police protection, had burned copies of the Holy Book in front of mosques or embassies of Muslim-majority countries. These events garnered considerable international attention and received a number of responses (the Danish parliament subsequently adopted, in December 2023, a law that prohibits the ‘inappropriate treatment of writings with significant religious importance for a recognized religious community’). At the Human Rights Council, while incidents of Qur’an burning were unanimously condemned as despicable and wrong, there was no consensus as to how to characterize these events. 
Blog post by Rozemarijn Weyers, KU Leuven and University of Antwerp, Belgium
On the 22nd of November 2023, the party of far-right politician Geert Wilders was elected the largest in the Netherlands. His statement that 'the Netherlands will be returned to the Dutch' alludes to the question of who is considered Dutch and who is not, and what the role of whiteness is in the construction of Dutch identity? In my research, I look at such questions in the context of urban neighbourhood spaces. More specifically, I research how a distinction between 'us' and 'them', and more specifically, white Dutch identity and racialized otherness, are created through daily interactions in such spaces? The case of Geert Wilders is only one example of how the relationship between whiteness and national identity is marked out. In the context of Europe, several studies show other ways of how national identities are entangled with, and shaped by, notions of race (see for instance Beaman 2019; Muller 2011; Clarke 2023; Garner 2012; Cretton 2018). What those studies have in common is that they argue that those national identities often exist in contexts that claim to be colour-blind and perceive whiteness as the norm. 
Blog post by Shereen Fernandez, London School of Economics, UK
Right now in the UK, the topic of ‘extremism’ is once again gripping public consciousness. On 14th March 2024, Michael Gove MP, the communities secretary, unveiled a new government definition of extremism, which is: ‘the promotion or advancement of an ideology based on violence, hatred or intolerance, that aims to:
The unveiling of this new definition of extremism aims to target groups and individuals who, if defined as an extremist, will be blocked from engaging in government, working in public bodies, and receiving council grants. Extremists are not considered as lawless per se, meaning that they cannot be prosecuted but instead, are considered to be ‘unacceptable’ by government. Of course, any designation of extremism will have a direct impact on how such groups and individuals can operate in other spaces of significance, such as in religious institutions, where claims of hosting ‘extremists’ will set them back significantly. As shown in my Identities article on Prevent in schools, ‘When counter-extremism ‘sticks’: the circulation of the Prevent Duty in the school space’, the label of ‘extremism’, for Muslims especially, is part of a long trajectory dating back to 9/11 which saw their significant securitization globally as a result of labels like this. 
Blog post by Leoni Connah, Flinders University, Australia
Kashmiri solidarity with Palestine and the ongoing situation in Gaza is currently being silenced by Narendra Modi’s BJP. For decades, the ongoing resistance between Kashmiri civilians and Indian security forces in the Kashmir Valley (particularly Srinagar) has drawn inspiration from the Palestinian struggle (particularly in Gaza) and the two situations have often been compared and contrasted. However, since October 2023, the solidarity that Kashmiris have towards Palestine and the ways in which it is expressed has changed because of the clamping down of Modi’s BJP and his security forces. This short piece provides insight into two aspects of Kashmiri solidarity with Palestine. Firstly, it looks at why Kashmiris are willing to risk their own safety to stand in solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza. Secondly, it explores exactly what this solidarity looks like and examines how Kashmiris are finding alternative ways to resist such silencing that may not be through street demonstrations, but instead using the mediums of art and poetry. The piece considers the following questions: why do Kashmiris stand in solidarity with Palestine? What are the consequences that Kashmiris face through this solidarity? Why does Modi silence Kashmiris when it comes to Palestine? |
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The views and opinions expressed on The Identities Blog are solely those of the original blog post authors, and not of the journal, Taylor & Francis Group or the University of Glasgow.