Telling the collective story? Moroccan-Dutch young adults’ negotiation of a collective identity through storytelling

Researchers taking a social constructionist perspective on identity agree that identities are constructed and negotiated in interaction. However, empirical studies in this field are often based on interviewer–interviewee interaction or focus on interactions with members of a socially dominant out-group. How identities are negotiated in interaction with in-group members remains understudied. In this article we use a narrative approach to study identity negotiation among Moroccan-Dutch young adults, who constitute both an ethnic and a religious (Muslim) minority in the Netherlands. Our analysis focuses on the topics that appear in focus group participants’ stories and on participants’ responses to each other’s stories. We find that Moroccan-Dutch young adults collectively narrate their experiences in Dutch society in terms of discrimination and injustice. Firmly grounded in media discourse and popular wisdom, a collective narrative of a disadvantaged minority identity emerges. However, we also find that this identity is not uncontested. We use the concept of second stories to explain how participants negotiate their collective identity by alternating stories in which the collective experience of deprivation is reaffirmed with stories in which challenging or new evaluations of the collective experience are offered. In particular, participants narrate their personal experiences to challenge recurring evaluations of discrimination and injustice. A new collective narrative emerges from this work of joint storytelling

Diversity vs Pluralism? Notes from the American Experience

Europe is newly concerned with religious pluralism and questions of immigrant inclusion. Seen from the U.S., several issues stand out. First, our experience with diversity suggests that race is as much an issue as religion. Race is not just an American problem; race and religion are everywhere sources of identity and solidarity, just as they are sources of division. The Ellis Island model of immigration, in which churches helped immigrants adjust to American life, may have worked for Whites, but it did not work nearly as well for others. Don’t expect integration on that score. Second, American religious diversity is overstated. Figures show that the apostles of America’s new religious pluralism are talking about at most 9 % of our foreign-born immigrants and 4 % of our native population. The U.S. is still dominantly Christian, though that Christianity is internally diverse. Recently, sectarian Christian diversity has infected our politics, contributing to our current polarization. Racial, religious, and political conflicts are thus alive and well. Is ‘civil religion’ a solution? Not if the civil religion in question is of the priestly or the sectarian kind. At times, however, American civil religion has been prophetic, speaking to the country’s highest ideals. Only then has religion (of any form) been a resource for broad inclusion.https://inspire.redlands.edu/oh_chapters/1038/thumbnail.jp