Culture as politics in contemporary migration contexts: the in/visibilization of power relations

ABSTRACT

In the 1990s, an essentialist, bounded understanding of culture delimiting (ethno-national) groups based on allegedly discrete sets of natural characteristics came to structure politics in North Atlantic migration contexts, justifying migrant exclusion or celebrating inclusion. Yet, how this idea of “culture-as-defining-attribute” works among people situated in everyday life remains understudied. We develop an analytical framework centred on discursive repertoires, sources of relational meaning-production, anchored in historical contexts, and embedded in power. Analyzing 125 essays written by Toronto and Neuchâtel undergraduate students, we demonstrate that using culture-as-defining-attribute results in an in/visibilization of power relations. Toronto students hypervisibilize a positively inflected conviviality across multicultural diversity, while invisibilizing racism and settler colonialism. Neuchâtel students visibilize the production of migranticized others, invisibilizing nativism and non-migrant/white structural privileges. We end with a plea for context-specific analysis of culture-as-defining-attribute and a deeper understanding of in/visibilization as a significant “missing link” in current analyses of culture and ex/inclusion.

KEYWORDS:

• Uses of culture
• migranticization
• racialization
• nativism
• discursive repertoires
• invisibilization

Acknowledgments

We want to warmly thank our students, at UTM and Neuchâtel who played the “game” and consented to be part of this research. We are more than grateful for the critical feedback we received on a first draft of this paper from Christin Achermann, Ellen Hertz, Tahseen Shams, and Fidan Elcioglu. Many thanks go also to the members of the LAPS/Unine who challenged us during the institute colloquia with many insightful comments. Further heartfelt thanks go to Jon Fox for giving us the opportunity us to present and discuss an almost finished version of this paper at an invited talk at SPAIS (School of Sociology, Politics and International Studies, Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship), University of Bristol, UK on June 14, 2022. We are also grateful to Christian Joppke who invited Janine Dahinden to give a talk on the paper at the Institute of Sociology, Bern, on 1st of June, 2022. Finally, our thanks go to the three external reviewers, whose comments were highly constructive. Yet, of course, we retain full responsibility for the content of this paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Ethics statement

We received ethics approval for using these essays: University of Toronto Research Ethics Board, protocol number 38699 and NCCR on the move/Swiss National Science Foundation for the University of Neuchâtel data.

Notes

1 This typification will not do justice to many works in this field. This section provides a general overview of major trends.

2 We received ethics approval for using these essays: University of Toronto Research Ethics Board, protocol number 38699 and NCCR on the move/Swiss National Science Foundation for the University of Neuchâtel data.

3 The quotes have been translated from French to English by the authors.

4 See for Canada https://www.mipex.eu/Canada, for Switzerland https://www.mipex.eu/Switzerland (accessed on February 1, 2022).

5 All data from Statistics Canada: https://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2016/dp-pd/prof/details/page.cfm?Lang=E&Geo1=CMACA&Code1=535&Geo2=PR&Code2=35&Data=Count&SearchText=Caledon%20East&SearchType=Begins&SearchPR=01&B1=All (accessed on August 2, 2022).

6 For the data see: https://www.ne.ch/autorites/DFS/STAT/domaines/Pages/01.aspx (accessed on August 2, 2022).

7 Quotes by UTM students receive a T, Neuchâtel students an N.

8 For this reason, we make a plea to analytically distinguish between migranticization and racialization: While both terms refer to processes of marking differences between people on the basis of assumptions about physical or cultural “traits” and while both produce exclusion and inequalities, they do so in different ways. Racialization is understood here as being linked to the intellectual and political histories of colonialism and racism and its legacies in terms of representations. Migranticization in turn is seen as linked to “foreignization” and anchored in the nation-state logic. Of course, for some people both processes come together.

9 Marcacci, Marco. 2012. “Schweizerische Eidgenossenschaft”. In: Historisches Lexikon der Schweiz (HLS), Version vom 6. September 2012, übersetzt aus dem Französischen. Online: https://hls-dhs-dss.ch/de/articles/009826/2012-09-06/ (accessed on December 15, 2021).

10 For anti-black racism in Switzerland see the last UN report: https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=28062&LangID=E (accessed on January 31, 2022).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the National Center for Competence in Research - The Migration-Mobility Nexus, Swiss National Science Foundation [grant number 51NF40_182897] and by the Department of Sociology, University of Toronto Mississauga.