This study explores the multifaceted experiences of immigrant women living in T & uuml;rkiye, with a particular focus on discrimination and social exclusion. Drawing on qualitative data collected through in-depth interviews with immigrant women from diverse cultural and national backgrounds, the research investigates how gender, migration status, and socio-economic factors intersect to shape their daily lives. The findings reveal that immigrant women often face systemic barriers in accessing employment, education, healthcare, and public services. Additionally, participants reported experiences of cultural stereotyping, social isolation, and limited participation in local social and community life. By shedding light on the lived realities of immigrant women, this research aims to contribute to the development of more inclusive and gender-sensitive integration approaches.
This article examines how pedagogies of the home shape the educational experiences and identity formation of Central and Eastern European (CEE) migrant youth in the UK. Situated within the racialized politics of Brexit, it moves beyond deficit-oriented accounts of CEE migration to foreground the everyday knowledge practices, affective labour and relational resources cultivated within families and communities. Drawing on Delgado Bernal's pedagogies of the home and Yosso's community cultural wealth framework and based on 20 case studies in England and Scotland, the study shows how young people mobilize language, peer networks, religion, and family values to develop resilience, cultural competence, and strategies of resistance to marginalization.
Religification research focuses on Muslims' self-reported experiences. Based on interviews of 46 Black and White Canadians on how they perceive South Asian Muslims as romantic partners, I identify three narratives of religification: gender, sexuality and geopolitics. Each reveals a different facet of how Muslimness is externally constructed as intolerant of minorities, conformist, and unassimilable. While findings support the largely siloed literatures on religification and racialization, I argue these processes are co-constitutive. Muslimness is racialized just as brownness is religified when associated with Islam. However, these interactions vary based on the racially stratified positionalities of Blacks and Whites in Canada.
This article examines how citizenship is made and unmade in neoliberal Chile through the ethnographic case of Linda, a mother living in La Pintana, Santiago, whose nine-month-old son, Baltazar, was killed by a stray bullet while sleeping at home. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, press and institutional materials, we show how spectacular loss triggers 'flash' state care: a surge of visibility, political attention and assistance that temporarily widens access to benefits while keeping belonging precarious. Baltazar's narratively stabilized innocence enabled cross-partisan mobilization through security and victim-policy frames, yet Linda's recognizability as a grieving mother remained morally monitored and vulnerable to suspicion. We trace how assistance is experienced as conditional and withdrawable, shaping when and how families dare to claim justice, and how the quiet closure of legal proceedings reasserts state discontinuity. We argue that stray-bullet deaths illuminate unequal geographies of protection and moral mediation of entitlement in stigmatized territories.
The literature on Islam and prison often approaches Islam, and religion more broadly, as changing during incarceration. The literature focuses upon three main aspects emphasizing change: rehabilitation, adaptation (to the prison environment), and radicalization. In this article, I use the case study of Chechen Muslim prisoners in Russia to contrast these aspects. I argue that Islam can also provide support for not changing in prison. Indeed, in the Chechen prisoners' experiences, the Islamic religion helps them withdraw from the prison environment and maintain their humanness by not adopting a prison identity. For them, change is damaging, since they perceive the Russian prison system as dehumanizing.
This paper examines the digital self-representations of racialized migrant women in post-socialist Estonia and their role in reshaping public understandings of gender, migration, and belonging. Using feminist critical discourse analysis (FCDA) of Instagram narratives, it explores how migrant women articulate situated voices that challenge exclusionary and Eurocentric discourses while fostering transnational solidarities. Drawing on intersectionality and networked feminism, the study situates these self-representations within broader struggles for recognition and inclusion. The analysis shows how migrant women use digital platforms to craft counter-discourses, constructing a diasporic feminist counterpublic that redefines activism, identity, and feminist visibility in post-socialist Europe.
The article examines the negotiation of hybrid identities among young adults from mixed Serb - Hungarian families in Vojvodina, northern province of Serbia, one of Europe's most ethnically diverse regions. Drawing on Social Identity Theory and Acculturation Theory, the study explores how bilingualism, family dynamics, and societal pressures shape experiences of belonging in a multiethnic, post-conflict context. Based on focus group discussions with young adults, the findings reveal that bilingualism functions as both a bridge and a boundary, reflecting broader social expectations about language, nationalism, and cultural conformity. Participants also display agency through subtle acts of adaptation, resistance, and compromise. Hybridity thus emerges as a form of bounded agency, shaped by coercive social structures but sustained through everyday negotiation and selective cultural practices. By centring the perspectives of mixed-heritage youth, the paper contributes to broader debates on intermarriage, multiculturalism, and the micropolitics of belonging in post-conflict and other multiethnic contexts.
This article examines how kinning practices shape relationships between migrant domestic workers and employers in live-in care arrangements in Turkiye, and how these practices differ across eldercare and childcare. Drawing on interviews with 78 workers and 14 employers, it analyzes how intimacy, professional boundaries, and power are negotiated within private households. The findings show that kinning is not an inevitable outcome of paid care work but a negotiated process shaped by care type, cohabitation, employers' moral evaluations, and workers' migration and employment statuses. By developing a typology that distinguishes eldercare and childcare as relationally distinct domains, the article demonstrates that kinning is more likely to emerge in eldercare, where continuity and sustained interaction foster quasi-familial bonds, while in childcare it remains more variable, fragile, and employer-mediated. Across both domains, kin-like inclusion may provide support and a sense of belonging, yet also produces precarious belonging dependent on employer goodwill.
The article examines how regional identities in Bosnia and Herzegovina persist despite administrative and ethnoreligious divisions. It is based on long-term ethnographic fieldwork (2017-2023) conducted across multiple regions, drawing on semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and thematic analysis of narrative accounts. We show that cultural heritage is neither an immutable source of division nor a simplistic tool for reconciliation, but a dynamic space of identity negotiation. Using a multidisciplinary framework, we offer an empirically grounded perspective on identity politics and post-conflict reconciliation. We argue that regional identities, rather than being remnants of the past, can serve as bridges for dialogue and coexistence, with broader relevance for post-conflict societies worldwide.
Migration complicates racial and ethnic identity discourses, especially for populations from non-sovereign states. Using 58 in-depth interviews with stateside Puerto Ricans, I argue that Puerto Ricans engage in a racialization process that both challenges and sustains colonial legacies. Findings reveal that cultural nationalism, expressed as pride in Puerto Rico's history and people, allows stateside Puerto Ricans to collectively resist their racialization as colonial/racial subjects. At the same time, intra-group politics around what counts as an 'authentic' Puerto Rican identity emerged in ways that simultaneously reified their racialization, resulting in contention within diasporic communities.
Guided by the concept of belonging and drawing on interviews with 13 young Afghan refugees who arrived in Sweden as unaccompanied minors, this study explores their constructions of Swedishness versus Afghanness, and how they negotiate and position themselves in relation to these concepts. The analysis demonstrates their narrative strategies for interpreting and resisting official media and political portrayals, advancing what they perceived as respectable elements of Afghan culture as counternarratives. Official representations of unaccompanied (particularly Afghan male) migrants framed how they positioned themselves, their future prospects, and their sense of belonging within the new Swedish social context.
In an era marked by violent border regimes, mounting xenophobia against migrants and refugees, and the reassertion of blood-and-soil nationalisms across Europe and beyond, liberal multicultural frameworks have proven inadequate for contesting essentialist logics of belonging - as they often remain contained within the framework of the nation-state itself. Merely critiquing ethno-nationalism is insufficient; we require theoretical frameworks capable of imagining sociality beyond the nation-state. This paper develops a diasporic sociology through the exegesis and synthesis of 19th-20th century Jewish critical thought and Black critical thought, two intellectual traditions born precisely from the experience of being strangers, that is insider-outsiders, of European societies. Both traditions developed in and through the societal margins, theorizing from diasporic positions of (forced) displacement and offering vocabularies for understanding how societies are remade through movement and the claims of those deemed outsiders.
This study examines the (re)production of whiteness in the city of Bordeaux (France). Fifteen locals who identified as white women were interviewed in Spring 2023. Critical discourse analysis and literature on whiteness and white space were used to identify the discursive strategies and resources used by the participants to make sense of space through whiteness and vice-versa. The findings reveal the range of discourses the participants drew on to make sense of (their) whiteness in Bordeaux and ways in which they positioned themselves in conflicting and varying ways within whiteness.
Una Marson, the first Black woman who was a full-time producer at the B.B.C. registered significant broadcasting accomplishments despite enduring unique challenges. She was a colonial subject and Pan-Africanist who pushed against entrenched cultural prejudices to develop a legendary broadcasting presence. Despite her remarkable accomplishments, her dismissal by the B.B.C. left her sidelined and forgotten. Our research used textual analysis with grounded theory to examine data that traced Marson's professional experiences. We reviewed articles, books, audiovisual materials, and internal B.B.C. memos to establish a contextual narrative of Marson's tenure at the B.B.C.. Our analysis suggested scholars pursuing a comprehensive understanding of the contributions of Black pioneers should interrogate the nuances of their private struggles and the implications of their personal losses. This approach is important because narratives of Black exceptionalism rooted in values that embrace colonialism, racism, and imperialism have typically ignored or undervalued Black lives, and have missed critical insights.
The postmigrant perspective provides novel analysis of questions on migration, racism, and anti-racism. Rural and small-town areas in particular have hardly been researched with a postmigrant gaze. A closer look reveals that here, too, we must speak of a historical normality of migration and increasing efforts by rural communities to recognize their own diversity. However, this self-perception exists alongside continuities of racism that are far less exposed than those in urban, postmigrant centres. This article addresses this tension and examines the Austrian region of Tyrol. We focus on experiences of racism and want to show that an inclusive stance that does not centre those experiences has a non-performative function.
Despite their ubiquity and integration into everyday life, social media platforms remain under-theorized as central spaces for the curation and negotiation of diasporic identity. Contributing to the knowledge in diaspora studies, using digital ethnography and case studies from two Bangladeshi American influencers' Instagram accounts, this paper shows that from within the postfeminist neoliberal space of social media these women curate a transnational brown/desi girl identity through their drive towards inclusive beauty, challenging patriarchy, racism and global injustices. I argue this enables them to symbolically rupture classifications like racial hierarchies of beauty, normative discourses around ethnic and migrant women and their position within global politics, creating a 'brown girl' space built on sharing of common experiences or assemblies whereby the followers of these influencers relate and add to their experiences via like, comment and share - multiplying the reach of the diasporic community.
This study examines how Chinese international postgraduate students in the United Kingdom negotiate and (re)construct their national identity. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 19 Chinese postgraduate students, the findings reveal that students navigate this process through four context-sensitive strategies: rediscovering China through comparison, reaffirming national attachment, acting as cultural ambassadors, and negotiating conflicting perspectives. These strategies are not fixed roles; rather, students move between them depending on the situation, the type of encounter, and the social or political stakes involved. The study demonstrates that national identity is a lived, dynamic, and reflexive practice, shaped through everyday interactions, responses to misrecognition, and engagement with unequal power dynamics. The article contributes to the emerging higher education paradigm of student self-formation, illustrating how Chinese students enact intentional, context-sensitive practices to negotiate their national identity.
This article examines the way Bangladeshi identity is constructed relationally amongst British Bangladeshi Muslims by studying their diasporic self-organization on the basis of 'Sylheti' and 'non-Sylheti' identity. By centring A) region, B) language and C) religion that emerge from in-depth interviews as key constituents of British Bangladeshi identity, this paper follows from works on class distinction and 'appropriate' identity to demonstrate aspirations and competitions for respectability amongst British Bangladeshi Muslims, such as through disparate access of Sylhetis and non-Sylhetis to cultural capital via education. By conceiving this identity negotiation as invisible labour, rather than assuming antagonism, this article demonstrates how British Bangladeshi communities negotiate their own and others' regional, linguistic and religious identities and practices to put forth an identity perceived relationally as authentically and appropriately 'Bangladeshi'. Through this, the article illustrates the dual labour and agency of British Bangladeshi Muslims.
This article explores the enactment of everyday solidarity among Black African immigrant men in Barcelona through subtle nonverbal gestures, with a particular focus on the nod. Drawing on qualitative street ethnography conducted between 2021 and 2023, the article analyzes how these brief, but important exchanges operate as affective practices of belonging within racialized European urban contexts. The article engages with Hall's theory of cultural identity, Gilroy's concept of the Black Atlantic and Ahmed's framework of affective economies to conceptualize these nods and related silent gestures as diasporic micro-performances that affirm shared struggle, mutual recognition, and resistance to racial invisibility on the streets of Barcelona, Spain. Through its results, the analysis discusses three interrelated themes: 'We are all Undocumented Immigrants', 'Brotherly Africanness and Joy', and 'Homesickness: Memories of Home'. These themes highlight how gestures, memory, and everyday affect produce counter-narratives within an Eurocentric space.
This article explores the historical and migratory relationship between the Bengali community and Britain. Although this relationship spans from the early 17th century to the present, the article focuses on post-WWII migration trends. I will examine the migration waves of the 1950s to 1970s, particularly in East London, and highlight the community's struggle against racial discrimination and its growing anti-racist activism. I discuss the political and social challenges faced by Bengalis during this period, including the myth of 'return' and the formation of coalitions with other racially marginalized groups. The 1980s and 1990s marked a shift towards political mainstreaming, while the early 2000s saw the rise of religious identity, particularly among British Bangladeshi Muslims in the aftermath of 7/7. The focus on the Muslim identity of this group, mainly through the lens of security and stereotyping, has often overshadowed the community's diverse experiences.
