Pragmatic Belonging: Migrant Young People Making Claims on the Nation

ABSTRACT

Multicultural Youth Australia is a national ‘census’ of migrant youth in Australia aimed at tracking their social, cultural and economic status. The findings from this study highlight strong feelings of national belonging among migrant young people, despite significant experiences of racism. This article unpacks this paradox. It asks what migrant youth mean when they say they belong in the face of persistent racialised exclusion. In Hage's account of liberal multiculturalism, these feelings of belonging despite national rejection are explained as an acquiescence to the structures of white nationhood. This article develops an alternative analysis by drawing on place-based, reflexive accounts of youth belonging and scholarship on everyday multiculturalism. It extends these approaches by proposing a pragmatic analytics of belonging, foregrounding the practical and political contexts in which migrant young people's statements of belonging are put to work. It understands these belonging claims as practices of provisional citizenship, and aligns these claims with Arendt's notion of ‘action’ to highlight their potential as open-ended, critical engagements with the nation.

KEYWORDS:

• Migrant youth
• pragmatic belonging
• nation
• racism
• provisional citizenship
• multiculturalism

Disclosure Statement

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

Notes

1 The project's full title is Defining the Status of Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Young People (ARCLP150100219: 2016-2018). Ethics approval for the project was provided by the University of Melbourne's Human Research Ethics Committee (ethics ID 1545979.2).

2 The MYA project's partner organisations were Centre for Multicultural Youth, Multicultural Youth Advocacy Network, Youth Advisory Council of Western Australia, Youth Coalition of the ACT, Migrant Resource Centre Southern Tasmania, Access, Multicultural Youth Affairs Network New South Wales, Multicultural Youth South Australia and the Department of Premier and Cabinet, Victoria State Government.

3 Half of the young migrants surveyed in the MYA study were underemployed, compared with 31% of young people in a comparable study of the general Australian population (ABS 2017).

4 In a useful pragmatic analysis of ‘diaspora,’ Fischer and Dahinden (2019) draw on James’ work to ask what individuals and groups do with the concept of diaspora, and the objectives and consequences of labelling oneself and others with the term.

5 Here I am broadening Arendt's concern with formal citizenship and the dangers of statelessness to think about other kinds of membership to a polity. Benhabib (2004) examines how Arendt's writing on political membership is marked by a tension between inclusion, national sovereignty and cosmopolitan rights.

6 Pragmatism is derived from the Greek word, pragma, meaning ‘action’ (James 1906).

7 For a pragmatic analysis of the ‘politics of diversity’ see Schiller (2015).

8 Research on young people's belonging itself forms part of the wider apparatus of government in which migrant youth are obliged to participate. Scholars have commented on the gap between institutional expectations of youth civic participation and young people's everyday practices of identity and community-making (Harris et al 2007). However, researchers might understand their own work as part of this normative call on migrant youth to ‘participate’ in the nation. Questions about belonging contribute to the institutional settings that govern migrant youth by producing knowledge about them.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Australian Research Council [grant number LP150100219].

Notes on contributors

Rimi Khan

Rimi Khan is a Lecturer in the School of Communication and Design, at RMIT University Vietnam. Her research is broadly concerned with diverse citizenship and creative economies. Her most recent work examines global youth cultures and ethical fashion networks. Her book, Art in Community: The Provisional Citizen (2015, Palgrave), examines the institutional, aesthetic, and economic agendas that produce notions of community.