1,721,014 research outputs found
‘Building a Platform for Our Voices to be Heard’: Migrant Women's Networks as Locations of Transformation in the Republic of Ireland
No full textSeveral migrant women's organisations have been set up in Ireland over the last decade. This article surveys three such groups: NOUR (Al Huda Women's Group), a Dublin independent Muslim women's group; WOMB (Women of Multi-Culture Balbriggan), a suburban multi-ethnic women's network; and AkiDwA, the African and Migrant Women's Network. In the second part of the article we focus in more depth on the evolution of the first two-NOUR and WOMB-both very different associations. Using the concept of network and focusing on the networking practices of these groups, we argue that migrant women's networks attest not only to women's agency and resourcefulness in transforming their lives but also to the nature of contemporary Irish society. We also suggest that, while the resilience and flexibility of networking embody a culture of global gendered resistance, networking also bespeaks the contradictions that migrant women face in Ireland, showing the everyday experiences of belonging and living in the margins and in-between social locations. © 2011 Taylor & Francis
Networking sisterhood, from the informal to the global: AkiDwA, the African and Migrant Women’s Network, Ireland
No full textIn this article we document the networking strategies of Ireland's leading migrant women's organization, AkiDwA – the African and Migrant Women's Network. We begin by positing networking as a process of agency and transformation and argue for the heuristic potential of ‘network’ in unpacking the gendered experiences of migration. Employing theoretical and ethnographic tools, we position AkiDwA as key to understanding how migrant women have been addressing discrimination, isolation, exclusion, violence and racism, through promoting gendered and culturally sensitive services and policies. We outline three phases in AkiDwA's development since the onset of immigration in the 1990s, from the informal to the global, situating it as the hub of overlapping national and global networks of migrant women, spanning Ireland, Europe and beyond. We conclude by suggesting that network analysis, rather than being a general grand theory, allows us to develop the micro-macro links that, as Robert Holton argues, bring together small worlds with larger structures
Beyond Black & White : Race, Ethnicity, and Gender in the U.S. South and Southwest
No full textEdited by Stephanie Cole & Alison M. Parker [College at Brockport faculty member] ; introduction by Nancy A. Hewitt [College at Brockport alum].
“The complex, changing and oppressive ‘multiracisms’—to use Ronit Lentin\u27s term—of the U.S. South and Southwest are brilliantly captured in this powerful collection of linked essays. So too are the ways in which differing but overlapping experiences of race, citizenship and terror created both common ground and grounds for division among racialized groups.”--David Roediger, University of Illinois, and author, Colored White: Transcending the Racial Pasthttps://digitalcommons.brockport.edu/bookshelf/1279/thumbnail.jp
Theorizing Migrant-Led Activism
No full textMuch attention has been paid to migrant associations in the scholarly literature, in the media and at policy level. This is not surprising, given their effectiveness in supporting and lobbying for migrants in contexts which often render them invisible and discriminate against them. The study of migrant associations and other forms of migrant activism is a prism through which we can understand the participation and integration of people who move and settle in new countries. It is through these associations that the state and other actors can address migrants as a collective, contributing directly and indirectly to the elaboration of migrants’ identities, in part by defining the grounds on which their associations are granted legitimacy (Kastoryano, 2003; Schrover and Vermeulen, 2005; Lucassen and Penninx, 2009). In turn, migrants’ collective claims lead states to negotiate their identities and redefine notions of citizenship, belonging and ‘national’ values (Koopmans et al., 2005). Migrant associations mediate the boundaries between states and migrant groups, and, because migrant groups are never homogeneous, they are often also the loci of intra-group negotiations and between migrants and their countries of origins and diaspora
‘Irishness’, the 1937 Constitution, and Citizenship: A Gender and Ethnicity View
No full textThis paper argues that ‘Irishness’ has not been sufficiently problematised in relation to gender and ethnicity in discussions of Irish national identity, nor has the term ‘Irish women’ been ethnically problematised. Sociological and feminist analyses of the access by women to citizenship of the Republic of Ireland have been similarly unproblematised. This paper interrogates some discourses of Irish national identity, including the 1937 Constitution, in which difference is constructed in religious, not ethnic terms, and in which women are constructed as ‘naturally’ domestic. Ireland's bourgeois nationalism privileged property owning and denigrated nomadism, thus excluding Irish Travellers from definitions of ‘Irishness’. The paper then seeks to problematise T.H. Marshall's definition of citizenship as ‘membership in a community’ from a gender and ethnicity viewpoint and argues that sociological and feminist studies of the gendered nature of citizenship in Ireland do not address access to citizenship by Traveller and other racialized women which this paper examines in brief. It does so in the context of the intersection between racism and nationalism, and argues that the racism implied in the narrow definition of ‘Irishness’ is a central factor in the limited access by minority Irish women to aspects of citizenship. It also argues that racism not only interfaces with other forms of exclusion such as class and gender, but also broadens our understanding of the very nature of Irish national identity.</jats:p
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