scholarly journals Young, unauthorised and Black: African unaccompanied minors and becoming an adult in Italy

2021 ◽  
pp. 144078332199391
Author(s):  
Sarah Walker ◽  
Yasmin Gunaratnam
Keyword(s):  
Transition To Adulthood ◽  
Black Child ◽  
The Political ◽  
Unaccompanied Minors ◽  
Ontological Security ◽  
Black African ◽  
Gender And Race ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Reception Centre

This article is based on ethnographic fieldwork in an Italian reception centre for male ‘unaccompanied minors’. Drawing on the concepts of ‘hostipitality’ (Derrida), the Black Mediterranean, and ‘intimate citizenship’ (Plummer), we examine the political ambivalence of hospitality for young African men as they transition to adulthood and how this is experienced through the intersections of age, gender and race. The biographical transition to adulthood thus offers a unique empirical opportunity to examine the extent of hospitality, as the (uninvited) Black child guest crosses the threshold into being an unwanted, potentially deportable, ‘invader’. Drawing from the young men’s images (art and photographs) and narratives, we discuss their experiences of differential anti-Blackness during their migration journeys and how hegemonic notions of masculinity circumscribe the quest for legal citizenship and the meaning of adulthood. While capitulation to gender normativity bolsters claims to citizenship, racism is a continuing and profound threat to ontological security.

scholarly journals "All against pedophilia": ethnographic notes about a contemporary moral crusade

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Lowenkron
Keyword(s):  
Child Pornography ◽  
Police Department ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Child Victims ◽  
Violence Against Children ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Sexual Perversion ◽  
Police Investigations ◽  
Victims Of Violence

Based on an ethnographic fieldwork carried out within the Brazilian Senate's inquiry committee on Pedophilia and in the Federal Police Department, the aim of this paper is to analyze the strategies and the effects of the conceptualization and the combat of the phenomenon of sexual violence against children as "pedophilia" and with focus on child pornography on the internet. The text consists of a historical approach to the emergence of the problem, an analysis of the political strategies of the Parliamentary Inquiry Committee on Pedophilia and an ethnographic description of the police investigations into child pornography on the internet. The hypothesis is that this "anti-pedophilia crusade" pivoting on the threats of a sexual perversion, is not as effective in the protection of the real child victims of violence as it is in the defense of an ideally innocent childhood.

scholarly journals Emancipation as social equality

Focaal ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 (76) ◽  
pp. 15-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indrajit Roy
Keyword(s):  
Political Party ◽  
Special Section ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Equality ◽  
Cultural Organization ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Indian State

The ethnographies presented in this article point to the ways in which members of oppressed communities imagine emancipation. Instead of analyzing emancipation as stemming from statist precepts of citizenship, I want to direct attention—along with other articles in this special section—to the “arcadian” spaces in which exploited, marginalized, and discriminated populations forge membership in the political community in contentious engagement with both state and society. I draw on ethnographic fieldwork with Musahar landless laborers in the Indian state of Bihar during the winter and spring of 2009–2010, with follow-up visits in September 2013 and July 2014. I focus on their engagement with two organizations, one a leftist political party and the other a cultural organization, to advance my claims. The ethnography reveals that, for the Musahar laborers, ideas of emancipation are anchored in reclamations of social equality rather than a telos of state-centered citizenship.

Pensée 2: The “African” in Africana/Black/African and African American Studies

2009 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 193-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolyn Somerville
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
North Africa ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
The Political ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Black African ◽  
Academic Fields ◽  
Sub Saharan ◽  
Middle East Studies ◽  
Research And Policy

In Pensée 1, “Africa on My Mind,” Mervat Hatem questions the perceived wisdom of creating the African Studies Association (focused on sub-Saharan Africa) and the Middle East Studies Association a decade later, which “institutionalized the political bifurcation of the African continent into two academic fields.” The cleaving of Africa into separate and distinct parts—a North Africa/Middle East and a sub-Saharan Africa—rendered a great disservice to all Africans: it has fractured dialogue, research, and policy while preventing students and scholars of Africa from articulating a coherent understanding of the continent.

scholarly journals The Life of a Gunshot: Space, Sound and The Political Contours of Acoustic Gunshot Detection

2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 42-55 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew Merrill
Keyword(s):  
Surveillance System ◽  
Black Child ◽  
The Political ◽  
Surveillance Systems ◽  
Incident Report ◽  
Structural Racism ◽  
Surveillance Studies ◽  
Detection Systems ◽  
Nonhuman Agency

This article examines the implications of acoustic gunshot detection systems for the role of sound and nonhuman agencies in Surveillance Studies and their relationship to broader modes of power. This is done by examining the role of a ShotSpotter Flex Incident Report in the case of DeOnté Rawlings, a 14-year old black child shot and killed by an off-duty police officer in Washington, D.C. Through this case, this article traces the diagrams of power that imbricate this surveillance system within structural racism. In focusing on the material particularities of acoustical surveillance systems, like ShotSpotter Flex, this work also reconsiders the role of the visual in surveillance systems and Surveillance Studies. This article argues that these new configurations of sound and nonhuman agency offer a particular value to understanding the contemporary entanglement of surveillant mediums and broader regimes of power.

Liminality and Missing Persons

2016 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 201-218 ◽  
Author(s):  
Laura Huttunen
Keyword(s):  
Armed Conflicts ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Missing Persons ◽  
Post Conflict ◽  
The Future ◽  
Intimate Relations ◽  
Political Communities ◽  
Conflict Reconciliation ◽  
Political Groups

In many armed conflicts, forced disappearances and hiding the bodies of victims of mass atrocities are used strategically. This article argues that disappearances are powerful weapons, as their consequences reach from the most intimate relations to the formation of political communities. Consequently, political projects of forced disappearances leave difficult legacies for post-conflict reconciliation, and they give rise to a need to address individuals’ and families’ needs as well as relations between national and political groups implicated in the conflict. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, this articles explores the question of missing persons in post-1992 Bosnia. The processes of identification and practices of remembering and commemorating the missing are analyzed through the concept of liminality. The article argues that the future-oriented temporality of liminality gives rise to numerous practices of encountering the enigma of the missing, while the political atmosphere of postwar Bosnia restricts possibilities of communitas-type relationality across ethnonational differences.

scholarly journals Motherhood after the age of 35 in Poland

2014 ◽  
pp. 7-28
Author(s):  
Anna Rybińska
Keyword(s):  
Transition To Adulthood ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Transformation ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Life Trajectories ◽  
Level Data ◽  
Widespread Phenomenon ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Educational Professional

Postponing motherhood is a widespread phenomenon across developed countries, however only few studies look into very late motherhood in post-socialist countries using individual level data. In this study, I look at the context of the first childbirth in Poland in the midst of the political transformation of 1989. Employing sequence analysis I reconstructed life trajectories of women who experienced the transition to adulthood during the late 1980’s and the early 1990’s and have just completed their fertility histories. Individual data from the 2011 GGS-PL and the 2011 FAMWELL Survey were used. Comparing paths of mothers’ lives, I searched for differences in educational, professional and conjugal careers between women who gave birth before the age of 30 and after the age of 35. The results show how various life careers crisscross over the life course leading women to late motherhood.

Dreams from Beyond as Politics from Below

2018 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 61-78
Author(s):  
Ida Hartmann
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Social Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
The Social ◽  
Dream Stories

Building on ethnographic fieldwork in Istanbul in 2015, this article traces how certain people within the Hizmet community drew on dream stories to understand and manoeuvre within the escalating falling-out with the AKP government. It suggests that, in this context, dream stories were circulated within the community to reframe the conflict against the horizon of the afterlife but prevented from spilling into the wider public sphere out of fear that Hizmet critics would use dream stories to denounce the community as a threat to Turkish republican tradition. The article thus proposes to see the social life of dream stories as a ‘politics from below’ through which relations between the religious and the political refracted and notions of national and religious belonging were negotiated and contested.

Media Regulation and Freedom of Expression in Black Africa

2019 ◽  
pp. 228-249
Author(s):  
Floribert Patrick C. Endong
Keyword(s):  
Liberal Democracy ◽  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
Press Freedom ◽  
The Political ◽  
African Countries ◽  
Political Pluralism ◽  
Black African ◽  
Media Regulation ◽  
Black Africa ◽  
The Press

Since the 1990s, Black African states have been subjected to endogenous and exogenous political pressures which have compelled them to variously adopt a number of pro-democracy reforms. Though lauded in a number of quarters, these sweeping political reforms have merely been on paper. This is so as, cardinal democracy indexes such as freedom of expression, press freedom, freedom of thought and political pluralism among others, have remained more a myth than a reality in these countries. Using a comparative analysis of the political situation in Cameroon and Nigeria, this chapter argues that press freedom and liberal democracy are still mere ideals, not yet backed by evidential political will in both countries. The same multifaceted abuses of the press still prevail in the two states. This chapter however, underscores the vibrancy and political maturity of the Nigerian press which differentiate it from its counterparts in other African countries, notably in Cameroon.

Prison Religion and Prison Justice

2020 ◽  
pp. 153-192
Author(s):  
Joshua Dubler ◽  
Vincent W. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Mass Incarceration ◽  
Religious Practices ◽  
The Political ◽  
Malcolm X ◽  
Court Decisions ◽  
Ethnographic Fieldwork ◽  
Conversion To Islam ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Martin Luther King ◽  
The Church

Using trial records, court decisions, and ethnographic fieldwork, this chapter tracks how the disruptive religious practices of the prisoners’ rights era, including prison strikes, became the accommodating religious practices of America’s prisons today. In other words, it tells the story of the rise and fall of the collectivist prisoners’ religion of the 1960s and the subsequent ascendency of the depoliticized, accommodationist religious forms better suited to the controlled conditions of mass incarceration. Touching on a range of incarcerated people’s writings and rituals, including Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X and his conversion to Islam, the Church of the New Song, and the black naturalist sect MOVE, the chapter explores how highlighting the politicizing force of prison and reclaiming the political-theological voices of prisoners might allow us to see new possibilities for justice beyond the prison. With an eye toward what has been repressed, the chapter concludes with the abolitionist promise of the new surge in prisoners’ political organizing.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document