Female first-generation Caribbean students are an understudied population; not only are they members of three societal groups which have historically been marginalized, but they are also often mistaken for African Americans. Through direct engagement with Triple Consciousness Theory (TCT), this article discusses how this specific student body constructs intersectional gendered, ethnic, and racialized identities at predominantly white institutions (PWIs) which positively impact their self-efficacy, engagement, and academic achievement. The aim of this research is not only to add to existing scholarship on TCT in higher education but also to inform the very educational policy which currently neglects Black diaspora students' needs.
This study analyses how Polish school history textbooks published between 1991 and 2022 construct Jerzy Popie & lstrok;uszko, a Catholic priest associated with the Solidarity movement, as a national hero. Drawing on Critical Discourse Analysis, it examines the values, ideologies and narrative strategies embedded in textbook accounts of his biography. The findings show that martyrdom remains the dominant strategy: Popie & lstrok;uszko is most often presented as a victim whose death symbolizes national suffering under communism. Since around 2012, however, textbooks have increasingly portrayed him as a social and political actor, emphasizing his pastoral work, civic engagement and defence of human rights. This shift moves the narrative beyond moralized martyrdom towards a more agency-oriented model of national heroism. The article argues that such changes may shape students' understandings of democratic role models, civic responsibility and national identity.
This article analyzes Alevi recognition in Europe through a comparative study of French, German, and Austrian secularism. It explores how secularism, as a legal and discursive system, reshapes religious spheres, practices, and identities by defining what qualifies as 'religion'. The article shows that contemporary recognition regimes encourage Alevis to seek religious recognition and increasingly present themselves as a religion, even though many do not define Alevism as such, effectively (re)religionizing a community aligned with secular values. It further demonstrates that although all three paradigms are grounded in the separation principle, national frameworks push Alevis to adopt different forms of self-representation, self-imagination and institutionalization, either within Islam or as a distinct faith: Austria recognizes Alevis within Islam, Germany, as a separate belief community, and France does not grant religious recognition. The article highlights both the importance of local arrangements and the shared logic of secular governance that Alevis must navigate across contexts.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, border closures separated thousands of people who were in cross-national, unmarried relationships. Sweethearts across the world protested using the refrain and hashtag, #LoveIsNotTourism. In response, twelve European countries introduced sweetheart visas to reunite couples excluded from family-based migration policies. This study compares sweetheart visas to traditional family/marriage visas to assess their significance and inclusivity. Using qualitative data from online forums and policy documents, it finds that while sweetheart visas often mirrored existing visa structures, the ambiguous definition allowed for broader recognition of intimate relationships - including non-marital, non-heteronormative, and polyamorous partnerships. The analysis also shows that countries with higher gender equality and less adherence to heteronormative norms were more likely to adopt sweetheart visas. This examination of how states temporarily expanded intimate citizenship beyond conventional family forms contributes to debates on migration governance, care regimes, and the politics of belonging.
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.
