Negotiating the diversity of 'everyday' multiculturalism: teachers' enactments in an inner city secondary school

This paper explores the presence of multiculturalism in teachers’ professional practice in a British inner city co-educational secondary school, which featured in two predominant ways: first, as a form of ‘diversity management’ through interventions including a formalised staffing structure to ‘respond’ to the school’s ethnically mixed student body, representation of difference, and same ‘race’ role models; and second, through its sedimentation into everyday practices, whereby teachers enacted multicultural approaches in varied ways. The multiple meanings teachers attached to multiculturalism and its subsequent translations into ‘everyday’ professional practice suggest that the term ‘everyday multiculturalism’ should be used beyond its ‘convivial’ meaning of living in/with ethnic diversity to also reflect the diverse professional enactments of multiculturalism through everyday practice in institutional settings. Further, an analytical focus on professionals in ‘everyday’ multiculturalism elucidates how teachers’ diverse enactments of multiculturalism perpetuate micro-processes of racialisation in schools

Empowering Muslim girls? Postfeminism, multiculturalism and the production of the 'model' Muslim female student in British schools

This article draws on an analysis of the narratives of teachers, policy-makers and young Muslim working-class women to explore how schools worked towards producing the model neoliberal middle-class female student. In two urban case-study schools, teaching staff encouraged the girls to actively challenge their culture through discourses grounded in western post-feminist ideals of female ‘empowerment’. The production of the compliant ‘model Muslim female student’ appeared to be a response to the heroic western need to ‘save’ the young women from backward cultural and religious practices. While this approach had many positive and liberating effects for the young women, it ironically produced forms of post-feminist ‘gender friendly’ self-regulation. The article concludes with a black feminist intersectional analysis of race, religion, gender, sexuality and class in the context of British multiculturalism and rising Islamophobia, exploring the contradictions of gendered social justice discourses that do not fully embrace ‘difference’ in educational spaces

Precarious Care and (Dis)Connections

Adult stakeholders who work with separated child migrants (SCMs) face a substantial challenge to their capacity or remit to care amid increasingly hostile immigration environments. This paper explores a diverse range of adult stakeholders' understandings of the care of SCMs, filling an important gap in understanding how care is conceptualized by those working in often complex and contradictory positions. Drawing on the care literature, this study focuses on 15 qualitative semistructured interviews with state and nonstate adult stakeholders in England (e.g., social work, law, police, and NGO workers). We argue that stringent immigration practices, policies, and bureaucratic and structural challenges undoubtedly present personal tensions and professional constraints for those whose role is meant to foreground “care.” Importantly, when taking into account a range of different perspectives, roles, and responsibilities across professions and sectors, our respondents were constrained in varying ways or had varying room to maneuver within their institutional contexts. Our analysis suggests that amid a hostile immigration environment, care connections with and between SCMs are treated with mistrust and are unstable over space and time. We argue that how care is conceptualized and experienced is mutually constituted by hostile policies and procedures, adult stakeholders' roles within or out-with those systems, and their personal values and perspectives. It is within this space where constraints, enablers, and resistances play out. Care is subjectively experienced, and care relationships are open to potential (dis)connection across space and time

The identities of South Asian girls in a multicultural school context: constructions, negotiations and constraints

This thesis explores the identities of South Asian girls in relation to the multicultural backdrop of one mixed sex inner-city state secondary school. It interrogates how the girls constructed, negotiated and contested their social identities within the school’s approach to managing diversity through discourses of ‘everyday’ multiculturalism. The research constituted a three-year case study consisting of in-depth interviews to explore the perspectives of nine teachers who were involved with the Ethnic Minority Achievement and Inclusion departments, and nine ‘South Asian’ 15-16 year old girls, mainly first generation migrants from the Indian sub-continent and Sri Lanka, Mauritius and Afghanistan. An intersectional approach was employed to investigate the ways in which the girls, as racialized and gendered subjects are socially positioned by teachers and position themselves in the school’s multicultural context. The findings illuminate the ways in which multiculturalism was a contested ‘top down’ policy response to diversity, but also an ‘everyday’ reality, evident in teachers’ varied enactments of ‘everyday’ multiculturalism and the girls’ daily negotiations of diversity. An analytic focus on ‘everyday’ multiculturalism was crucial in providing an understanding of how teachers positioned the girls and the girls positioned themselves. Findings specifically highlight how racialized and gendered identities in ‘everyday’ multiculturalism were shifting and transformative. Yet, since essentialised versions of culture were reproduced in ‘everyday’ multiculturalism, the girls negotiated and navigated identities that were also constraining and hierarchical, particularly in dominant discourses of ‘Asian’ girls, forced marriage and ‘between two cultures’. These findings have implications for policy and practice in teacher education in terms of the need to institutionalize a more complex multicultural approach in which issues of cultural racism can be openly addressed

Stories too big for a case file: Unaccompanied young people confront the hostile environment in pandemic times

It is never easy nor comfortable to turn rich and textured research conversations about people’s lives into a brief article or a short film. In putting together our contribution for this special issue, we asked ourselves: What imagery best evokes the violence unaccompanied children and young people feel when asked, or made, to tell their story over and over – to the Home Office, solicitors, social workers, and more, as well as the violence of not being asked nor being heard? How can we show both strength and struggle in difficult times (a global pandemic) and often uncaring places (the UK’s hostile migration regime)? In what follows we discuss our ethical, political, and intellectual responses to these questions in relation to the film this text accompanies: Stories too big for a case file

Beyond ‘between two cultures’: micro processes of racialised and gendered positioning of South Asian and Muslim girls in an ‘everyday’ British multicultural school context

This article reports on a case study exploring the social positioning and identities of South Asian and Muslim girls in one British inner city secondary school. The analysis is situated within the context of ‘everyday multiculturalism’, a framework which provides a lens on racialized and gendered encounters in the school context. Whilst their experiences were marked by exclusions, bullying and racialized, gendered and religious hierarchies, and typical processes of Othering, this appeared against the contradictory backdrop of the ’warmth’ of multiculturalism and the silence of racism. Their experiences were therefore complex and signals the need to move beyond the discourse of the melodrama of South Asian girlhood, commonly depicted in dominant wider discourses in the form of ‘between two cultures’, towards a more nuanced understanding of the issues encountered in the everyday multicultural contexts of British schools marked by micro processes of racialized and gendered positionin