Familial geopolitics and ontological security : intergenerational relations, migration and minority youth (in)securities in Scotland

This paper discusses the family as a site of geopolitics. Bridging scholarship in feminist geopolitics, political psychology and sociology, we explore the psycho-social dynamics of family life and theorise the family as a multi-scalar, relational site of security. Original data collected with ethnic and religious minority youth in Scotland are presented alongside an analysis of how family relations, at interconnected scales, mitigate against and/or re-inscribe broad geopolitical narratives of security. We employ the concept of ontological security (OS) to analyse the role of the family, and the relationships within it, on shaping youth securities. We discuss (1) how family histories and intergenerational experience shape young people’s sense of security; (2) how young people negotiate and resist family norms and values that reproduce securitizing geopolitical narratives; and (3) how young people find security when family is absent or indeterminate. In each case, we analyse how geopolitics operates through family life. The paper makes two key contributions: first, we use original empirical data to theorise ethnic and religious minority youth securities; second, we show the value of OS as a conceptual tool for understanding psycho-social dimensions of familial geopolitics.PostprintPeer reviewe

Transnationalism, social capital and gender – young Pakistani Muslim women in Bradford, UK

This work was funded by the Leverhulme Trust.This article considers the relationship between transnationalism and social capital amongst young Pakistani Muslim women in Bradford, West Yorkshire. The central aim of the article is to explore how second generation Pakistani Muslim women accrue faith based social capital to negotiate and resist transnational gendered expectations, norms and practices. In particular, they use faith-based social capital that is transnationally informed: to challenge the patriarchal expectations and norms of their families; to gain access to higher/further education and thereby improve their life opportunities; and to resist growing anti-Muslim sentiment. This paper draws on qualitative research (in-depth interviews) conducted in BradfordPostprintPeer reviewe

Exploring symbolic violence in the everyday : misrecognition, condescension, consent and complicity

The empirical material for the article was collected during a project funded by FAS (now FORTE), the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare.In this paper, we draw on Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of 'misrecognition', 'condescension' and 'consent and complicity' to demonstrate how domination and violence are reproduced in everyday interactions, social practices, institutional processes and dispositions. Importantly, this constitutes symbolic violence, which removes the victim's agency and voice. Indeed, we argue that as symbolic violence is impervious, insidious and invisible, it also simultaneously legitimises and sustains other forms of violence as well. Understanding symbolic violence together with traditional discourses of violence is important because it provides a richer insight into the 'workings' of violence, and provides new ways of conceptualising violence across a number of social fields and new strategies for intervention. Symbolic violence is a valuable tool for understanding contentious debates on the disclosure of violence, women leaving or staying in abusive relationships or returning to their abusers. While we focus only on violence against women, we recognise that the gendered nature of violence produces its own sets of vulnerabilities against men and marginalised groups, such as LGBT. The paper draws on empirical research conducted in Sweden in 2003. Sweden is an interesting case study because despite its progressive gender equality policies, there has been no marked decrease in violence towards women by men.PostprintPeer reviewe

Encountering Misrecognition: Being Mistaken for Being Muslim

Exploring both debates about misrecognition and explorations of encounters, this paper focuses upon the experiences of ethnic and religious minority young people who are mistaken for being Muslim in Scotland. We explore experiences of encountering misrecognition, including young people's understandings of, and responses to, such encounters. Recognising how racism and religious discrimination operate to marginalise people – and how people manage and respond to this – is crucial in the struggle for social justice. Our focus is upon young people from a diversity of ethnic and religious minority groups who are growing up in urban, suburban and rural Scotland, 382 of whom participated in 45 focus groups and 224 interviews. We found that young Sikhs, Hindus and other South Asian young people as well as Black and Caribbean young people were regularly mistaken for being Muslim. These encounters tended to take place at school, in taxis, at the airport and in public spaces. Our analysis points to a dynamic set of interconnected issues shaping young people's experiences of misrecognition across a range of mediatised, geopoliticised and educational spaces. Geopolitical events and their representation in the media, the homogenisation of the South 'Asian' community and the lack of visibility offered to non-Muslim ethnic and religious minority groups all worked to construct our participants as 'Muslims'. Young people demonstrated agency and creativity in handling and responding to these encounters including: using humour; clarifying their religious affiliation; social withdrawal and ignoring the situation. Redressing misrecognition requires institutional change in order to ensure parity of participation in society

Young people’s everyday securities: pre-emptive and pro-active strategies toward ontological security in Scotland

This paper uses a framework of ‘ontological security’ to discuss the psycho-social strategies of self-securitization employed by ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland. We argue that broad discourses of securitization are present in the everyday risks and threats that young people encounter. In response and as resistance young people employ pre-emptive and pro-active strategies to preserve ontological security. Yet, these strategies are fraught with ambivalence and contradiction as young people withdraw from social worlds or revert to essentialist positions when negotiating complex fears and anxieties. Drawing on feminist geographies of security the paper presents a multi-scalar empirical analysis of young people’s everyday securities, connecting debates on youth and intimacy-geopolitics with the social and cultural geographies of young people, specifically work that focuses upon young people’s negotiations of racialized, gendered and religious landscapes

‘Living Rights’, rights claims, performative citizenship and young people – the right to vote in the Scottish independence referendum

This paper examines the rights claims-making that young people engaged in during the 2014 Scottish independence referendum when the right to vote was extended to 16- and 17-year-olds for the first time in the UK. Understanding citizenship and rights claims-making as performative, we draw on the novel idea of ‘living rights’ to explore how young people ‘shape what these rights are – and become – in the social world’. They are coexistent and situated within the everyday lives of young people, and transcend the traditional idea that rights are merely those that are enshrined in domestic and/or international law. We explore the complex and contested nature of rights claims that were made by young people as ‘active citizens’ in the lead up to the referendum to illustrate how the rights claims-making by young people is bound up with the performativity of citizenship that entails identity construction, political subjectivity (that challenges adultcentric approaches) and social justice

Minority ethnic young people: Confident negotiators

No abstract available

Securing Disunion: young people’s nationalism, identities and (in)securities in the campaign for an independent Scotland

This paper explores ethnic and religious minority youth perspectives of security and nationalism in Scotland during the independence campaign in 2014. We discuss how young people co-construct narratives of Scottish nationalism alongside minority ethnic and faith identities in order to feel secure. By critically combining literatures from feminist geopolitics, international relations (IR) and children’s emotional geographies, we employ the concept of ‘ontological security’. The paper departs from state-centric approaches to security to explore the relational entanglements between geopolitical discourses and the ontological security of young people living through a moment of political change. We examine how everyday encounters with difference can reflect broader geopolitical narratives of security and insecurity, which subsequently trouble notions of ‘multicultural nationalism’ in Scotland and demonstrate ways that youth ‘securitize the self’ (Kinnvall, 2004). The paper responds to calls for empirical analyses of youth perspectives on nationalism and security (Benwell, 2016) and on the nexus between security and emotional subjectivity in critical geopolitics (Pain, 2009; Shaw et al., 2014). Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), this paper draws on focus group and interview data from 382 ethnic and religious minority young people in Scotland collected over the 12-month period of the campaign