This volume investigates the relationship between migration, identity, kinship and population. It uncovers the institutional practices of categorization as well as the conducts and the ethics adopted by social actors that create divisions between citizens and non-citizens, migrants and their descendants inside national borders. The essays provide multiple empirical analyses that capture the range of politics, debates, regulations, and documents through which the us/them distinction comes to be constructed and reconstructed. At the same time, the authors reveal how this distinction is experienced, reinterpreted, and reproduced by those directly affected by governmental actions. This perspective grants equal attention to both the logics of national governmentality and the myriad ways that individuals and collectivities entangle with categories of identity. Featuring case studies from countries as varied as the Netherlands; French Guiana; South-Tyrol; Eritrea and Ethiopia; New York City; Italy; and Liangshan, China, this book offers unique insights into the production of identity boundaries in the contested terrain of migration and minorities. It outlines how the process of producing national identity is enacted not only through impositions from above, but also when individuals themselves embody and deploy identities and kinship bonds. More so than lines of division, boundaries within are understood as an ongoing process of identity construction and social exclusion taking place among the various actors, levels, and spaces that make up the national fabric.

This book presents a series of analyses of educational policies – largely in the UK, but some also in Europe – researched by a team of social scientists who share a commitment to social justice and equity in education. We explore what social justice means, in educational policy and practice, and how it impacts on our understanding of both ‘educational science’ and ‘the public good’. Using a social constructivist approach, the book argues that social justice requires a particular and critical analysis of the meaning of meritocracy, and of the way this term turns educational policies towards treating learning as a competition, in which many young people are constructed as ‘losers’. We discuss how many terms in education are essentialised and have specific, and different, meanings for particular social groups, and how this may create issues in both quantitative survey methods and in determining what is ‘the public good’. We discuss social justice across a range of intersecting social characteristics, including social class, ethnicity and gender, as they are applied across the educational policy spectrum, from early years to postgraduate education. We examine the ways that young people construct their identities, and the implications of this for understanding the ‘public good’ in educational practice. We consider the responsibilities of educational researchers to acknowledge these issues, and offer examples of researching with such a commitment. We conclude by considering how educational policy might contribute to a socially just, equitable and inclusive public good.

This book examines how young people in Europe construct their political identities. Based on small discussion groups with 2000 young people across 29 European states, Alistair Ross explores how 13 to 20 year olds build identities in contemporary society, creating contingent narratives of local, national and European identities with families, friends and social media. As well as exploring what these kaleidoscopic identities look like and the sources they draw on, it also examines how these accounts are assembled and integrated with each other. The study uses deliberative discussions to allow young people to develop their own constructs and terms in conversation with each other. This analysis presents a complex polyphonic of political beliefs and values of rights, which young Europeans attach to political structures and institutions that often transcend traditional boundaries of state and nation. Finding Political Identities will be of interest to postgraduate students and academics across Education, Sociology, Politics and European Studies, especially those with a focus on Social Constructionism, Citizenship, Identity Studies, Social Policy, and Youth Studies.

The Oxford Handbook of Law and Anthropology is a ground-breaking collection of essays that provides an original and internationally framed conception of the historical, theoretical, and ethnographic interconnections of law and anthropology. Each of the chapters in the Handbook provides a survey of the current state of scholarly debate and an argument about the future direction of research in this dynamic and interdisciplinary field. The structure of the Handbook is animated by an overarching collective narrative about how law and anthropology have and should relate to each other as intersecting domains of inquiry that address such fundamental questions as dispute resolution, normative ordering, social organization, and legal, political, and social identity. The need for such a comprehensive project has become even more pressing as lawyers and anthropologists work together in an ever-increasing number of areas, including immigration and asylum processes, international justice forums, cultural heritage certification and monitoring, and the writing of new national constitutions, among many others. The Handbook takes critical stock of these various points of intersection in order to identify and conceptualize the most promising areas of innovation and sociolegal relevance, as well as to acknowledge the points of tension, open questions, and areas for future development.

This volume responds to the question: How do you know when you belong to a country? In other words, when is the nation-state a homeland? The boundaries and borders defining who belongs and who does not proliferate in the age of globalization, although they may not coincide with national jurisdictions. Contributors to this collection engage with how these boundaries are made and sustained, examining how belonging is mediated by material relations of power, capital, and circuits of communication technology on the one side and representations of identity, nation, and homeland on the other. The authors’ diverse methodologies, ranging from archival research, oral histories, literary criticism, and ethnography attend to these contradictions by studying how the practices of migration and identification, procured and produced through global exchanges of bodies and goods that cross borders, foreclose those borders to (re)produce, and (re)imagine the homeland and its boundaries.

Flüchtlinge sind in ihrem Leben mit Übergängen konfrontiert: auf individueller, sozialer und kultureller Ebene. Dieses Buch behandelt verschiedene Aspekte dieser Übergänge und ihre Überschneidungen mit Bildungserfahrungen. Studien aus unterschiedlichen Länderkontexten zeigen die komplexen Beziehungen zwischen Individuum, Kultur, Gesellschaft und Institutionen. Die Untersuchung dieser Beziehungen und Erfahrungen während der Übergangsprozesse soll zu einem tieferen Verständnis der verschiedenen Arten von Übergängen im Zusammenhang mit Bildung beitragen, was in der Zukunft zur Verbesserung von Unterstützungsstrukturen genutzt werden kann.

First published in 1999, this volume examines new forms of cultural diversity which result from migration and globalization. Historically, most liberal democracies have developed on the basis of national cultures – either a single one, or a dominant one, or a federation of several ones. However, political and economic developments have upset traditional patterns and have blurred established boundaries. Ongoing immigration from diverse origins has inserted new ethnic minorities into formerly homogenous populations. Democratic liberties and rights provided opportunities for old and new marginalized minorities to resist assimilation and to assert identities. The resulting pattern of multiculturalism is different from earlier ones. Often cultural boundaries are neither clearly defined nor do they simply dissolve by assimilation into a dominant group – they have become fuzzy and a constant source of real or imagined hostility and anxiety. A proliferation of mixed identities goes together with stronger claims for cultural rights and escalating hostilities between ethnic minorities and national majorities. In many countries multiculturalism is today perceived as a challenge rather than as an enrichment. The book focuses on the question how institution and policies of liberal democracies can cope with these trends. The book addresses two tasks: 1) To compare different national contexts and types of ethnic groups (immigrant and indigenous, linguistic and religious minorities) and to discuss how policies of multicultural integration have to be adapted in order to cope with such differences. 2) To evaluate the impact of common rends of globalization which link societies and encourage convergence between national models of multicultural integration.