‘Racism: From the Labour Movement to the Far-Right’

This report is a reflection on a recent conference, ‘Racism: From the Labour Movement to the Far-Right’, which was held at the University of Glasgow from Friday 5th to Saturday 6th September 2014. The authors discuss the main themes that the conference sought to address, consider the key highlights of the event including a summary of the opening address by Floya Anthias, and offer some suggestions as to how the initiative may be taken forward.     

Spectacles of migrant ‘illegality’: the scene of exclusion,the obscene of inclusion

Abstract

Border policing and immigration law enforcement produce a spectacle that enacts a scene of ‘exclusion’. Such spectacles render migrant ‘illegality’ visible. Thus, these material practices help to generate a constellation of images and discursive formations, which repetitively supply migrant ‘illegality’ with the semblance of an objective fact. Yet, the more these spectacles fuel anti-immigrant controversy, the more the veritable inclusion of the migrants targeted for exclusion proceeds apace. Their ‘inclusion’ is finally devoted to the subordination of their labour, which is best accomplished only insofar as their incorporation is persistently beleaguered with exclusionary campaigns that ensure that this inclusion is itself a form of subjugation. At stake, then, is a larger sociopolitical (and legal) process of inclusion through exclusion. This we may comprehend as the obscene of inclusion. The castigation of ‘illegals’ thereby supplies the rationale for essentializing citizenship inequalities as categorical differences that then may be racialized.     

Outsiders and insiders: changing boundaries of radicalism,racism and class

Virdee's book adds enormously to our understanding of two interconnected processes: the ways in which racism and nationalism in England/Britain became totally intertwined and embedded in working-class views of the world, and how at certain key moments those racially cast out from that depressing maelstrom may become the champions of an anti-racist internationalism. I am fractionally less negative than the author about the seemingly total hold of racism/nationalism on the whole working class, and less certain about racialized ‘outing’ as the key to the DNA of universalist anti-racists. Using the Garibaldi mobilizations of 1862–64, I suggest he may have underestimated the potential and reasons for ‘insider’ working-class resistance to racism/nationalism, and suggest greater caution in arguing an association between ‘racialized outsiders’ and internationalist views.     

Beyond ‘transnationalism’: Mexican hometown politics at an American labour union

The controversial notion of “transnationalism” has generated new insights into international migrants’ on-going ties with their communities of origin, but its problematic conceptualization and vague usage in empirical studies needlessly inhibit the transnational perspective’s utility. Understanding the political and economic incorporation of migrants in both their communities of origin and destination is facilitated by disaggregating the types of political borders, types of nationalism, and levels of identification that have been conflated in the framework of “transnationalism”. I demonstrate the analytic value of these distinctions by using them to interpret evidence from a six-month ethnographic case study of an immigrant labour union in Southern California. A theoretically coherent typology applicable to both the case study and other migration settings provides a framework for explaining how institutions assimilate migrants into U.S. and local politics while simultaneously promoting cross-border ties.     

Vulnerability and Place: Flat Land and Uneven Risk in New Orleans

Vulnerability to extreme events is shaped by both physical and social factors, and Hurricane Katrina brutally exposed that fact in New Orleans. Historically, low-income Irish and Italian populations suffered when floods washed over the Crescent City. Modifications in the structural defenses to floods and shifting demographics since 1950 altered the geography of vulnerability. In recent years, both blacks and whites have occupied below-sea-level sites, exposing both to flood risks, although the racial composition of the city has undergone a near reversal. Additionally, low-income residents, found disproportionately within the African American population, suffered dual vulnerability. Not only did many live in low-lying areas but evacuation plans relied on private automobiles that left many poor residents to endure the impact of the hurricane-induced flooding.     

Telling the forest from the trees: Local images of national change in a Danish town

How can ethnographers see the ‘big picture’, while they are busy with everyday minutiae? Awareness of the local impacts of history and globalisation has revived debates about the pragmatics of fieldwork. Arguing that most fieldwork remains, for most practitioners, ‘local’, this paper explores how it is possible to apprehend change ethnographically. Something of how local people understand and experience change, as it happens to them and around them and as they contribute to it, can be grasped in ‘significant local imagery’, in this case, ‘significant people’, ‘significant things’, and ‘significant events’. These images are recognised in local discourse as indicative or ‘telling’ of change, and can be used to summarise analytically, and shed light on, wider vistas of change. This paper presents three local images deriving from fieldwork in a small town in mid-Jutland and uses them to tell a bigger story, a narrative about the modernisation of Danish society.     

Textual Tactics of Identification

In this article we merge de Certeau's theory of strategies and tactics with more recent work on socially situated identities to investigate how youth in one eighth-grade reading class withstood and resisted identities of "being remedial." On the basis of observational and interview data collected during a year-long ethnographic study, we illustrate how students used various texts to participate in official school practices while subverting those practices.     

Rapid change in host use of the common cuckoo Cuculus canorus linked to climate change

Parasites require synchrony with their hosts so if host timing changes with climate change, some parasites may decline and eventually go extinct. Residents and short-distance migrant hosts of the brood parasitic common cuckoo, Cuculus canorus, have advanced their phenology in response to climate change more than long-distance migrants, including the cuckoo itself. Because different parts of Europe show different degrees of climate change, we predicted that use of residents or short-distance migrants as hosts should have declined in areas with greater increase in spring temperature. Comparing relative frequency of parasitism of the two host categories in 23 European countries before and after 1990, when spring temperatures in many areas had started to increase, we found that relative parasitism of residents and short-distance migrants decreased. This change in host use was positively related to increase in spring temperature, consistent with the prediction that relative change in phenology for different migrant classes drives host-use patterns. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that climate change affects the relative abundance of different host races of the common cuckoo.