“The More We Can Try to Open Them Up, the Better It Will Be for Their Integration”: Integration and the Coercive Assimilation of Muslim Youth

ABSTRACT

Capitalizing on national anxieties, right wing populist leaders promise to enforce national borders with new constellations of policies that regulate and exclude Muslim bodies. Using the theoretical tool of “technologies of concern” (Jaffe-Walter, 2016), this essay critiques how state security discourses operate through public schools. Drawing on ethnographic research with Muslim youth in a Danish public school and an analysis of European integration policies, the author analyzes how policies and practices that ostensibly support young people’s integration enact everyday violence and coercive assimilation. Highlighting the perspectives of the young people she worked with, the author argues that state efforts to transform Muslim students into acceptable subjects of the nation-state encouraged their alienation and marginalization.

Notes

¹ These processes of racialization collapse religion, culture, ethnicity, and national origin into a generalized category of “Other” that includes disparate groups. Here we draw on Balibar and Wallerstein’s (1991, p. 21) discussion of “differentialist racism” that identifies race as a “transnational phenomena” anchored in colonial histories. Such a framing describes contemporary global racial formations that create a homogenized Muslim Other, despite the huge diversity of actual Muslim people worldwide.

² A pseudonym for a Danish Folkeskole, a public school where 45% of students were first- and second-generation Muslim immigrants from countries such as Turkey, Iraq, Lebanon, Ethiopia, Syria, and Bulgaria. My ethnographic fieldwork included observations, interviews, and focus groups with Muslim youth, ethnic Danish students, and teachers, as well as an analysis of integration policies and media discourses.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Reva Jaffe-Walter

Reva Jaffe-Walter is an educational anthropologist and Assistant Professor of Educational Leadership at Montclair State University. Her research focuses on immigration and schooling, the anthropology of policy, and urban education reform and has appeared in journals such as the Harvard Educational Review, Teachers College Record and Anthropology and Education Quarterly. Her book Coercive Concern: Nationalism, Liberalism and the Schooling of Muslim Youth was published with Stanford Press.