May 5, 2017 @12:30pm | The More We Can Try to Open Them Up, the Better It Will Be for Their Integration Challenging the Racializing Politics of Integration

Video Link

This talk presents findings from Jaffe-Walter’s recent book Coercive Concern: Liberalism, Nationalism and the Schooling of Muslim Youth which explores how stereotypes of Muslim immigrants in Western liberal societies flow through public schools into everyday interactions, informing how Muslim youth are perceived by teachers and peers. Beyond simply identifying the presence of racialized speech in schools, this book uncovers how coercive assimilation is cloaked in benevolent narratives of care and concern. Coercive Concern provides an ethnographic critique of the “concern” that animates integration policy in Danish schools. Specifically, Jaffe-Walter documents how teacher’s concern for the welfare of female Muslim students was expressed in desires to share with their female students the freedoms associated with Danish ideals of gender equity and democracy as an escape from what they believed to be a historical cycle of gender oppression in the Muslim community. In some cases, teachers encouraged students to adopt Danish norms of sexuality and marriage to encourage their integration. This talk seeks to expose the psychic and material costs immigrant youth endure when living in the shadow of social scrutiny and assimilative integration policies.