Parallel lives? : working-class Muslim and non-Muslim women at university

EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

The Paired Peers project report

Paired Peers is three-year qualitative longitudinal project following a cohort of students drawn from two universities in the same English city, the University of Bristol (UoB) and the University of the West of England (UWE), through three years of their undergraduate degree (2010-2013. The overall aims of the project were to discover:1. How the experiences of students were differentiated by class2. What kind of capitals students brought into university with them (economic, social and cultural) and what capitals they acquired during their university years3. In this way, to begin to explore in what ways university might promote, or not promote, social mobility

British Pakistani women's use of the ‘religion versus culture’ contrast: a critical analysis

This paper's aim is to highlight a series of problems related to data collection, analysis and ethics of research on British Pakistani women and their marriage choices. The authors will argue that much of the literature on this topic has stopped one step short of critically engaging with the ubiquitous and thus meaningful ‘religion versus culture’ paradigm. This leads both to a sort of acceptance of the existence, but especially of the effectiveness, of this paradigm, and to a missed opportunity in analysing the crucial part that this paradigm plays for women at a cognitive level. The authors' focus is on ‘religion versus culture’ as an important historically contextual social fact, but argue that further research needs to be carried out to properly evaluate the effectiveness of such paradigm on courses of action relating to marriage (and implicitly to education and other lifestyle choices). The authors recommend that interviewee recruitment should include women before and after marriage, and that the researchers should approach the ethics of their data interpretation differently if they want to go beyond the sanitised narratives that are, according to this paper, crucially influenced by the role Muslim women feel they play in giving Islam a positive public image, the postcolonial context and the generational tensions among British Pakistanis

The early history of migration and settlement of Yemenis in Cardiff, 1939-1970: religion and ethnicity as social capital

Utilizing Putnam's concept of bonding social capital, this article explores the under-researched topic of the history of migrant men's reproduction of social capital in Cardiff, Wales. Drawing upon a series of oral history interviews with a respected imam of more than fifty years, and informed by existing research on Muslim migrants, we explore both the advantages and disadvantages of community relationships between Yemeni men in relation to trust, reciprocity and interpersonal well-being. By examining these complex bonds, this article contributes to the literature on religious and ethnic social networks by challenging the assumption that migrants always benefit from social resources (Wilson 1978; Shah 2007), and offers an alternative account of religiously underpinned social capital to those of studies of majority ethnic Christians in North America (Smidt 2003). Uniquely, this article also points to the divergences between religious and ethnic capitals in the context of Yemeni migrants' social resources during 1939–1970

Twentysomethings and twentagers: subjectivities, spaces and young men at home

This article examines young men's (aged 18-25 years) meanings of home and practices of homemaking, comprising material and social relations. The discussion contributes to three areas of geographical interest: home, masculinities and youth. Both geographies of home and masculinities have begun to consider men's experiences and meanings of home, but young men's domestic practices remain largely unexamined. Geographical work on youth has examined housing transitions, but the gendered experiences of young men need further interrogation. To provide insight into young men's homemaking, this article presents qualitative case studies drawn from fieldwork that investigated relations between masculinities and domesticities in Sydney, Australia. Young men are arguably out-of-place at home in conventional discourses of gender and space, but homes are nevertheless crucial sites for shaping masculine subjectivities. Masculinities and homes are co-constituted through domestic practices, generating diverse intersectional subjectivities and spaces. In this article, three subjectivity-space, or masculine-domestic, relations are discussed, which also counter the centring of heterosexual couple family homes in domestic imaginaries: young men in parental homes, share-housing and 'alternative' family homes. I examine similarities and differences across and within these masculine domesticities. This multiplicity of 'youthful masculine domesticities' offers a set of qualitative examples for use in public rhetoric that seeks to redress uneven gender dynamics in contemporary domestic life