1,720,973 research outputs found
The New Muslims
Get PDFOur aim in this collection is to challenge the ways in which ‘Muslims’ as a social category are imagined in popular, policy and even some academic circles. The title ‘New Muslims’ indexes both this conceptual shift and the changing contours of ‘the Muslim community’ in 21st-century Britain. It argues for renewed assessments of Muslims in Britain today – beyond the discourses of securitization, segregation or sharia law – to recognize the multidimensionality of Muslim lives and their place within a broader struggle for equality, citizenship and social justice. This collection emerged from a workshop on ‘The New Muslims’ and a panel on ‘The Muslim Question’ held at University of Manchester in 2013. The event was funded as part of the ESRC project ‘Revisiting the Asian Gang: Continuity, Change and Transformation’ (Award No. ES/1032274/1). We are grateful to the ESRC and the Department of Sociology at Manchester for supporting both the event and this publication
Conceiving collectivity: The Urdu-speaking Bihari minority and the absence of home
Get PDFWhat makes a Diaspora Diasporic? Is it a shared sense of culture, of experience, of home? Ongoing research in Bangladesh into the ‘Urdu-speaking Bihari’ minority explores the role of space and settlement in the formation of Diasporic identity. Research finds a community that conceive of themselves as a unit of collective membership, but one with very little to unite around. A community divided along cultural, political, linguistic, generational and socio-economic lines. Of the estimated 1.3 million Urdu-speaking Muslims that migrated to Pakistan following the country’s creation in 1947 more than one million migrated to the region of East Bengal in present day Bangladesh.1 Only 300,000 are thought to remain, 160,000 of whom have been living in temporary ‘camps’ set up by the ICRC since the War of Liberation in 1971. The remaining 140,000 live outside the camps, integrated, to varying degrees, within majority Bengali society. As a linguistic community they do not speak a common language. As a cultural community they practice ‘culture’ in different ways. As a social community the divisions of class, money, opportunity and status are deeply felt. As a political community they are without a common political identity or equal access to political participation. As a Diaspora they do not share a sense of home. Through the experience of space, settlement and segregation this paper analyses the role of culture, politics, language, generation and class in dividing and uniting Diasporic groups, and questions the significance of a sense of ‘home’ in understandings of the term
Statelessness and citizenship: Camps and the creation of political space
Get PDFIn depth field research with a stateless population in Bangladesh has revealed that, despite liberal theory's reductive vision, the limits of political community are not set in stone. The Urdu-speaking population in Bangladesh exemplify some of the key problems facing uprooted populations and their experience provides insights into the long term unintended consequences of major historical events. Set in a site of camp and non-camp based displacement it illustrates the nuances of political identity and lived spaces of statelessness that Western political theory has too long hidden from view. Using Bangladesh as a case study, Statelessness and Citizenship: Camps and the Creation of Political Space argues that the crude binary oppositions of statelessness and citizenship are no longer relevant; access to and understandings of citizenship are not just jurally but socially, spatially and temporally produced. Unpicking Agamben's distinction between 'political beings' and 'bare life', the book considers experiences of citizenship through the camp as a social form. The camps of Bangladesh do not function as bounded physical or conceptual spaces in which denationalized groups are altogether divorced from the polity. Instead, citizenship is claimed at the level of everyday life, as the moments in which formal status is transgressed. Moreover, once in possession of 'formal status' internal borders within the nation-state render 'rights-bearing citizens' effectively 'stateless', and the experience of 'citizens' is very often equally uneven. While 'statelessness' may function as a cold instrument of exclusion, certainly, it is neither fixed nor static; just as citizenship is neither as stable nor benign as the dichotomy would suggest. Using these insights, the book develops the concept of 'political space' - an analysis of the way history and space inform the identities and political subjectivity available to people. In doing so, it provides an analytic approach of relevance to wider problems of displacement, citizenship and ethnic relations
Subjectivity and citizenship: Intersections of space, place and identity among the Urdu-speaking minority in Bangladesh
Get PDFThe paper examines understandings of citizenship and ethnic identification among the ‘Urdu-speaking linguistic minority’ in Bangladesh, addressing three key areas of debate. Firstly, it explores the relationship between the material institution of citizenship and conditions of (physical) integration/segregation. Secondly, it attempts to unpick the intimate connection between that material institution and the ethnic and national identities of individuals. Finally, it investigates a dissonance discovered between the bureaucratic state recognition of citizenship and imaginations of that status among interviewees, the ‘identities of citizenship’ occupied at the local level. The paper demonstrates the significance of subject positionality, economies of power and the ‘dialogic’ nature of ethnic identity formation, and discusses the complex emotional ordering of belonging they collectively construct
Rethinking ‘the Muslim Community’: Intra-minority relations and transnational political space
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Illimitable liminality or the return to structure: Locating displacement in Bangladesh
Get PDFOf the estimated 1.3 million Urdu-speaking Muslims who migrated to Pakistan immediately following the country’s creation in 1947 more than one million migrated to the region of East Bengal in present day Bangladesh.2 Sixty years later, a little over 300,000 are thought to remain, 160,000 of whom are still living in the ‘temporary’ camps set up by the International Committee for the Red Cross following the War of Liberation in 1971. The camps themselves represent a liminal space, ‘between and betwixt’ recognised points of cultural classification.3 Originally constructed as transitory shelters en route to an imagined home (‘Pakistan’), forty years on they represent something quite different. Through the experience of space, settlement and segregation, this paper questions the significance of a sense of ‘home’ in understandings of ‘diasporic identity’ and reveals that instead of a transition between homes, these spaces can be understood as liminal homelands in themselves. The camp has become both a collective identity, and the spatial and symbolic site for a re-constructed belonging. Does the resolution of liminality therefore, as assumed by anthropological theory,4 remain elusive
Abjects or agents? Camps, contests and the creation of ‘political space’
Get PDFThe 'Urdu-speaking population' in Bangladesh, displaced by Partition in 1947, and made 'stateless' by the Liberation War of 1971, exemplify some of the key problems facing uprooted populations. Exploring differences of 'camp' and 'non-camp' based displacement, this paper represents a critical evaluation of the way 'political space' is contested at the local level and what this reveals about the nature and boundaries of citizenship. Semi-structured and narrative interviews conducted among 'camp' and 'non-camp' based 'Urdu-speakers' found that citizenship status has been profoundly affected by the spatial dynamics of settlement. However it also revealed the ways in which 'formal' status is subverted - the moments of negotiation in which claims to political being are made. In asking how and when a 'stateless' population is able to „access‟ citizenship, through which processes and by which means it reveals the tension, ambiguity and conceptual limitations of 'statelessness' and citizenship, unearthing a reality of partial, shifting and deceptively permeable terrain. In doing so, it also reveals the dissonance and discord (constitutive of an 'us' and 'them' divide) upon which the creation of 'political space' may at time rely. Citizenship functions to exclude and, therefore, it is very often born of contestation
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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