Conditional hospitality and coercive concern: countertopographies of Islamophobia in American and Danish schools

ABSTRACT

In this article, we explore how locally situated educational practices and policies aimed at inclusion and integration may contribute to racialised exclusion for students. Our analysis brings together two ethnographic studies of how minoritised Muslim youth navigate secondary schooling in Denmark and the US. Our cases illustrate how assumptions held by school staff toward the youth in our studies were rooted in both Islamophobic tropes and deeply held nationalist beliefs about the benevolence of the US and Denmark. Cindi Katz's notion of ‘countertopography’ is critical to our argument that Islamophobia is productive of similar practices of surveillance and exclusion across disparate educational settings. As an analytical framework, countertopography opens important possibilities for critical and comparative qualitative inquiry, with specific promise for highlighting how seemingly dissimilarly educational spaces may be imbued with similar social meanings, and how these meanings are constituted by recurring unequal social relations between individuals and groups therein.

摘要

在本文中，我们探讨旨在包容与融合的本地教育实践和政策如何会促成对学生的种族排斥。我们的分析结合了两项民族志研究，关注作为少数民族的穆斯林青年如何在丹麦和美国经历中学教育。这两个案例说明了，学校教职员工对研究中青年的认知是如何既植根于伊斯兰恐惧症的阴影，又对各自国家的仁慈抱有根深蒂固的民族主义信念。辛蒂·凯兹的“反向地形学”概念对我们的论点十分关键，即伊斯兰恐惧症在不同的教育情境中产生了类似的监视与排斥的做法。作为一个分析框架，反向地形学为批判性和比较性的定性研究提供了重要的可能性，尤其是有助于彰显看似不同的教育空间如何被赋予相似的社会意义，以及这些意义又如何由个人与群体之间反复显现的不平等的社会关系所构成。

KEYWORDS:

• Countertopography
• ethnography
• islamophobia/anti-muslim racism
• secondary schooling
• migration
• liberalism
• nationalism
• sociopolitical inclusion

关键词:

• 反向地形学
• 民族志
• 伊斯兰恐惧症/反穆斯林的种族主义
• 中学
• 移民
• 自由主义
• 民族主义
• 社会政治包容

Disclosure statement

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

Notes on the contributors

Roozbeh Shirazi is an Associate Professor in the Department of Organizational Leadership, Policy,and Development at the University of Minnesota.

Reva Jaffe-Walter is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Montclair State University.

Notes

1 One example of this common discourse can be seen in this story from National Public Radio in the United States: https://www.npr.org/2019/01/16/685819397/how-the-1965-immigration-act-made-america-a-nation-of-immigrants

2 See UNESCO for a definition of exploitative migration. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/international-migration/glossary/exploitative-migration/