8 research outputs found
narrating traditional iranian carpet merchants
Iranian carpet merchants developed a collective identitary narrative to enhance their capital creation in the social field of the German market, the field of Iranian foreign trade, and transnational bazari networks. This chapter goes beyond the practicalities of juggling resources across social fields: it explains the motivation behind this agency. Building on David Graeber's anthropology of value, as well as on studies about identity marketing and ethnic entrepreneurship, I show how the merchants' resources were evaluated between the 1950s and today to explain by which systems of value these social fields were shaped. From the confrontation between changing systems of value emerges Iranian carpet merchants' potential to increase the efficiency of their capital creation byâcollectivelyâtrying to redefine the meaning of their resources
âAssalam u Alaikum. Brother I have a Right to My Opinion on Thisâ: British Islamic Women Assert Their Positions in Virtual Space
âI want to speak like the other peopleâ : Second language learning as a virtuous spiral for migrant women?
This article contributes to scholarship on migrant womenâs second language (L2) education in North America and Europe. Questioning reductionist understandings of the relationship between female migrants, their receiving communities and L2 education, the authors consider existing literature as well as their own qualitative work to investigate the challenges, opportunities and agency of migrant women. Weaving together and thematically presenting previous scholarship and qualitative data from interviews, participant observations and classroom recordings from a mixed-gender L2 adult migrant classroom in Austria and an all-women L2 migrant classroom in the United States, they trouble conceptualisations which position women primarily as passive recipients of education and in need of emancipation, while simultaneously elevating communities as agentic providers of these. Specifically, the authors emphasise that (1) L2 proficiency is not a guarantee for migrant womenâs social inclusion or socioeconomic advancement; (2) migrant womenâs complex challenges and agency need to be recognised and addressed; and (3) all involved in L2 education of migrant women do well to become learners of their own experiences of oppression, including their complicity in it.peerReviewe