The Belonging and Ethnicity Research Group, BERG, at Bangor University, UK, organized and hosted in June 2012 an international two-day conference on the dual theme of ‘intersectionality’ – a widely discussed concept in the social and human sciences – and ‘spaces of belonging’, a thematic field that primarily would denote issues of nationality and ethnicity but also denotes a wide variety of (actual or metaphorical) spaces and forms of belonging.1 The constellation of keynote speakers indicated the interdisciplinary framework of the conference: Nira Yuval-Davis, director of the Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging, University of East London, UK, and Gurminder K. Bhambra, Director of the Social Theory Research Centre, University of Warwick, UK, are two leading British-based sociologists well known for their feminist and postcolonial work respectively, while Jie-Hyun Lim, the director of the Institute of Comparative History and Culture, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea, is a historian highly regarded for his work on ‘transnational history’. The conference aimed to provide a dialogue between scholars who directly address and reflect on the concepts referenced in the title of the conference, and others who seem to be doing work along similar routes without necessarily using the actual concepts themselves.

The first keynote speaker, NIRA YUVAL-DAVIS (London) spoke on ‘The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Constellations’. She argued that intersectionality studies originated in the gender inequality discourse, but that its application and relevance have become significant for studies on social exclusion in general. Intersectionality should now be treated as a form of ‘stratification theory’. The character of identity intersections indicates that concepts such as gender, class and ethnicity are not only additive, but mutually constitutive; their overlapping character modifies social divisions within society. Furthermore, the entangled identity categories are irreducible, in an ontological sense, and cannot be understood by focusing only on one type of social division. For these reasons intersectionality research is highly dependent on the context discussed. However, the complexity of identity intersections throws up the question, how many ‘social divisions’ one can take into consideration at any one time without losing one’s chosen focus. Yuval-Davis framed her discussion of belonging in terms of political agency, focussing on the ‘politics of belonging’. The plenary discussion raised the question how the issue of empirical evidence should be addressed and resolved where some identity categories are more prominent than others. Another issue of contention was how the on-going privatization of the public sphere changes the character of spaces of belonging.

A large number of papers discussed issues related to migration, two of which the intersectional experience of migrant mothers. PAULA PUSTULKA (Bangor) discussed migration and motherhood in Germany and the UK, making gender the focal point. She argued that it is in the labour market where the Polish and motherhood aspects of identity come to the fore but also within decisions about parenting. Some of the structures from back in Poland are brought to the UK when they migrate which means that where they are from within Poland affects how Polish people in the UK will relate to each other. UMUT EREL’s (Milton Keynes) paper argued that mothers are crucial conduits for transmitting a cultural habitus to children and they play an especially crucial role in doing this in migrant settings because of the desire to retain one’s culture and language. NILUFAR AHMED (Swansea) focussed on the emotional attachment to place. Her paper was based on longitudinal research from 2001 to 2011 where Bengali women in Tower Hamlets, a borough of London, were interviewed. These women came to join their husbands who had been first to come to Britain. As their children grew up, they began thinking about themselves. They have more time for themselves and their role changes through enrolling in English language classes for example. They end up being integrated more into society. Satellite channels help the women form an imagined diasporic community. The local areas have changed and are more welcoming to them than they were in the beginning. They find all the services they need in their local communities but they also feel somehow trapped here because of their children when they might rather be living back in Bangladesh. They may therefore long to return to Bangladesh but remain in London for the sake of being near their children. As time passes they do have a sense of Britishness and develop more attachment to their locality. Belonging can be seen as fluid, ebbing and flowing, not necessarily consistent throughout life. One important observation is that belonging is related to the first initial experiences, the local area, children, education and health care: if a person has a positive early experience of migrating to a new place they are more likely to have a positive long-term experience.

The peculiar in-between intersectionality of young people of migration backgrounds was discussed by ADELA SOURALOVA (Brno) who talked about the young generation of Vietnamese-Czech migrants. Problematizing citizenship, she showed how her interview-partners struggled in their efforts to feel at home in the Czech Republic – where they grew up with a local Czech nanny but have difficulty obtaining a nationality and passport. Furthermore, their connections with Vietnam have been often severed (due to the lack of having relationships with family there), leaving a void of no sense of (legitimatized) belonging. In a similar vein, INDRA ANGELI DEWAN (London) reported on ethnographic research that she had conducted in a London school. She examined how the discourse of cosmopolitanism plays out in mixed race lives and observed that middle class girls were more likely to have certain types of cosmopolitan identities: ‘mixedness’ in a boy is considered as more negative than it is in a girl for whom it can be seen as an advantage. The British citizenship test was discussed by ELISABETH BADENHOOP (Glasgow) who focused on the process of racialization, arguing that the tests serve as a platform for the narrow definition of ‘what the British people do’; NICOLA SAMSON (London) explored fourteen women immigrants’ thoughts and feelings about the acquisition of British citizenship, and how much it actually mattered to their sense of belonging. Virtual diasporic spaces were the subject matter of ANINDYA RAYCHAUDHURI’s (London) presentation: migrants often use the internet as a medium to stay connected to their communities. For example, there are social networking sites specifically for Indians living in the UK. One interesting way in which diasporas have a presence online is through food websites that discuss recipes and ingredients. Through these websites and through talking about food from ‘back home’ they manage to reconnect to home, but also hybridity emerges in these online forums and networks because of global influences which means that new combinations are produced. Nostalgia is a key term to consider when looking at these online communities because often they want to explore their identity through reminiscing and having a fond memory of place and home.

Intersectionality offered itself of course also as a prism through which to look at the belonging of refugees. ZIBIAH ALFRED (London) drew on her involvement in a Refugee Communities History Project (RCHP) and the exhibition ‘Belonging: Voices of London’s Refugees’ that was created using material collected from refugee life narratives. With the aim to challenge press representations of refugees and also to highlight their own experiences and contributions to community, the exhibition team tended to capture confident collective narratives about the possibility of people from refugee backgrounds fitting comfortably into new circles of social ‘belonging’. However, Alfred found that refugees themselves often express ‘non-belonging’ reflecting on their past and present instead of associating themselves to certain conventional identity categories. It was interesting to learn that people from refugee backgrounds often choose for themselves not to conform to a pre-constructed group or position while reflecting on their experiences of painful rejection, outcasting, racism and so on. Alfred concluded that the design of the exhibition may have softened the jagged, splintered edges of such narratives in order to make them more pleasing to the ear whilst their stories, in fact, constituted an exhibition about human ‘unbelonging’. In the discussion it was asked whether expressions of ‘non-belonging’ in fact could be read as stemming from a more acute sense of belonging shared by people who survived agony.

Another related cluster of papers addressed issues of racism and multiculturalism. KATRIN REIMER (Berlin) showed that discourses following Thilo Sarrazin`s book Deutschland schafft sich ab have intensified anti-Muslim racism in Germany, functioning within interrelations of race, gender and class. In considering how to challenge racism in Germany more effectively, she postulated three drawbacks of contemporary intersectional approaches: there is little understanding of domination on several levels of analyses (individual, collective, institutional and societal), inequalities are rarely seen as modes of reproduction and the dimension of class is underestimated. Reimer argued such drawbacks might be overcome with the help of the German discourse on Critical Psychology (Holzkamp) and the theory of ideology (W. F. Haug) as these are able to address individual and collective agency under contradictory conditions in transnational high-tech-capitalism. The proposed methodology asks how subjects are positioned within modes of reproduction and how they position themselves in everyday life and in political struggles with respect to the goal of general emancipation. Intersections of domination can inhibit or facilitate solidary agency. JOOWON YUK (Warwick) turned to South Korea and argued that in a country known for its strong ethnic homogeneity, the concepts of race, ethnicity and nation have often been entangled and conflated. The majority of Koreans tend to perceive ‘race’ to be a foreign concept and accordingly assume that Korea is free from racism. However, various forms of racism have existed throughout Korea’s history of nation-building and modernisation. The silence on race is still pervasive even in contemporary Korea where the increase in migrants over the past decade has begun to create an empirical reality of ‘multiculture’. Contrary to the tendency of Korean mainstream media and academia to ignore ‘anti-multiculturalists’ as pathological individuals, Joowon Yuk argued that their logic is fed by multiculturalism itself: in-depth interviews with ‘anti-multiculturalists’ reveal how nationalism works reciprocally with racism without using the language of race. Coming from an entirely different geographical and disciplinary angle, EVA DORN (Bordeaux) talked about contemporary African literature which she suggested addressed the common misconception that human migration was a movement from ‘developing’ countries or conflict and disaster zones to places of exile in ‘developed’ countries. Contemporary African authors attempt to correct this one-dimensional view. Texts resulting from the African diaspora are writings affiliated to heterogeneous backgrounds and complicated hybrid identities, exploring and ascribing new meanings to concepts of 'non-place', 'heterotopia' and 'dystopia'. The interrelationship between ‘bureaucracy and torture’ – i.e. the experience of torturous bureaucracy – was addressed by SMADAR LAVIE (Berkeley) who focused on the lives of disenfranchised Mizrahi (‘Oriental’ Jews in Israel) single mothers. Entirely different again was the disciplinary background of a paper by HEBA EL-SAYAD (Manchester) on the lived experiences of academic and non-academic Muslims in relation to praying in British universities. She argued that Management Studies has not really looked at religion so far, and certainly not in an intersectional perspective. She pointed out that prayers are regulated by specific times vis-à-vis organizational practices which interact with specific spatial structures, creating problems thereby. Religion was the focus also in a paper by LEON MOOSAVI (Liverpool) on converts to Islam in Britain. Their intersectional positioning resulted in being asked, on the one hand, by fellow-Brits, ‘You do not want to be British anymore?’, and by fellow-Muslims, ‘Are you really Muslim, you do it because of your boyfriend or it is a fashion?’.

Although the category of gender was present in the majority of papers, presentations with a clear focus on gender and sexuality were less numerous. ANNA CARASTATHIS’s (Los Angeles) paper looked at how the feminist organization Somos Hermanas dealt with intersectionality and the concept of coalition. She argued that identity should be looked at through the lens of coalitions. The paper focused on the experiences of Carmen Vazquez, a key organizer of the organization who also was a leader of the LGBT movement; she stated that coalitions helped her in consolidating the different aspects of her identity. Somos Hermanas, composed of different racial, sexual components was in itself a coalition. CHRISTIAN KLESSE (Manchester) mapped in his paper the narratives of gay/bi-sexual South Asian men in Britain. These narratives, he argued, lead to the formation of discursive space allowing for contesting narratives to form a counter-public. Klesse showed how gay spaces are perceived to be exclusively for white gays and reflected on the (in-)commensurability of religion and homosexuality. HELENE MONK (Liverpool) based her presentation on interviews with service providers who deal with violence against women. She explored how identity categories operate in this area of the social world and raised questions how service providers acquired the identity information and how they respond to it. The data reveal that identity was implicitly practiced in service provision to violence-affected women. Identity, it seems, was filtered through needs. JEONG-MI PARK (Seoul) examined the case of Korean military prostitutes in U.S. military camp-towns in South Korea in the period 1953-1966. By examining the Korean government’s control of military prostitutes (particularly through mandatory STD examinations) and their legal status during the height of the Cold War, Park delves into the workings of gendered nationalism unravelling the relationship between the rule of law, violence and gender. Park’s paper explored how camp-town prostitutes were constructed both as threats to the health and purity of the nation and as crucial resources for national security, as the alliance between US imperial power and Korean patriarchal nationalism was forged through the subordination of these women’s bodies. In addition to that, she pointed out that the Korean government’s control operated through a ‘two-tiered reversal’ of legal hierarchy – reversed hierarchies between the constitution, legislation and administrative orders – which she elucidated using Agamben’s notion of the ‘state of exception’: military prostitutes were examples of Homo Sacer who exist at the threshold of law and violence. A very different setting was examined by SUPURNA BANERJEE (Edinburgh) who talked about group-formation among women workers on tea plantations in India. The tea plantation is a place where poor people come to in order to find work. The women who work on the plantations have multilayered identities but they only bring forth some of their identities depending on who they are surrounded by and the context they are working in. These identities intersect and change over time. The women form informal groups and co-operate to support each other. There are also times when some of the women are excluded or negative feelings are held towards some of the women. For example, some women are seen as feigning injury or weakness in order to be allocated easier jobs.

A third main theme of the conference was nationalism. A particular angle on this subject area was provided by the second keynote lecture, given by JIE-HYUN LIM (Seoul), ‘A transnational history of victimhood nationalism: national mourning and global accountability’. Due to illness, Jie-Hyun Lim was unable to attend in person, so that lecture, comments and discussion were conducted via a skype connection.

Drawing on Korean, Japanese, Polish and German history, Lim discussed the complexities of forms of nationalism that are based on a sense, or an experience, of being victims, typically, of other nationalisms. In victimhood nationalisms, the sense of being victimised often is elevated into a feeling of having been sacrificed, which carries a religious connotation. The binary simplification of the world into victimizers and victims, good and bad, is not adequate to properly appreciate the complexities involved. Rather there is an entangled convolution of how the very complicated historical factors play on historical memory. Victimhood nationalism arises from a similar understanding. Lim referred to the debate regarding the Poles’ engagement with the Holocaust in whose course it was brought forth how Poles had themselves complied in the killing of Jews. This shift has challenged existing understandings of nationalism. Concerning the Korean case, Lim argued that the post-war generations in Korea could hardly be considered victims as they had been born after the war, but still continued to perceive themselves as victims. This can be called ‘hereditary victimhood’. The concept of ‘hereditary victimhood’ is a tool to critique nationalist historiography. In January 2007 a number of major Korean newspapers criticized the autobiographical novel So far from the Bamboo Groves by Yoko Kawashima Watkins, a Japanese post-WW2 expellee from Northern Korea describing her childhood memories. In a wave of criticisms that had originated among Korean-Americans, the fear was expressed that the book portrayed to the American audience a story of Japanese victimhood that negated the years of imperialism, torture etc. that Korea had been subjected to under Japan. Lim then addressed the issue of globalization of memory, as in the case of Holocaust memory. He argued that the Holocaust was instrumental to the formation of the EU. In the 1950s, German expellees from East Germany held themselves to be victims of the Holocaust. In the first decade of the 21st century, Holocaust discourse has been used in different ways both to re-territorialize and de-territorialize national memories. Lim emphasises the importance of trans-nationalism: in order to understand Polish victimhood, for example, German history also has to be known. Hence trans-nationalism is a necessary methodological tool through which to understand victimhood nationalism.

East Asian nation-state formation also was central to HAE-YOUNG SONG’s (London) discussion of how universal capitalist contradictions manifest themselves in nationally specific forms in the context of rapid catch-up industrialisation. The author focused on social class and gender hierarchies in the East Asian countries and on the way these hierarchies are reproduced in the name of national culture. A class perspective on nationalism was offered by ROBIN MANN (Bangor) who explored Nairn’s notion that English nationalism lacks ‘a semblance of classlessness’ and ‘imagined social equality’. He backed up this claim by his research on how English people feel about English identity. He found that intersections of Englishness and class took two forms: one tendency considers Englishness upper class, the other tendency underclass; both class associations make white middle class people feel uncomfortable about being English. He pointed out that other countries such as the USA which are no less socially stratified seem better able to create a sense of the nation as a community filled with ‘imagined social equality’. MARTA EICHSTELLER (Bangor) discussed the usefulness of narrative methods for plural actor theory in her research on transnational personal relationships as well as issues of status associated with the notion of cosmopolitanism. Relatedly, the paper by YALIZ AKBABA (Mainz) addressed the question of how teaching can account for ethnic differences among students and accommodate them. She explored how in a classroom setting the practice of ‘doing ethnicity’ is carried out through interactive processes that construct meanings. Akbaba used an exercise in a primary school class, ‘let’s talk more about my family’ to highlight her points. Difference is actually not only produced but also made use of to the extent that labelling reveals a degree of compliance. Differences are usually established within this setting without a definite hierarchy, though. The students pick up tags of difference and reproduce them but they are also capable of using them independently. Yet another access route to the problem of the nation was provided by STEFAN BAUMGARTEN (Bangor) who discussed the issue of power relations in translation studies. A historical case from the context of nineteenth-century nation-building was discussed by SCOTT HANCOCK (Gettysburg) who looked at African-American slave-runaways in the pre-Civil War USA. He demonstrated how the newly freed slaves experienced frictions within their identities when they were faced with institutional and state demands. Another emblematic historical case of ‘strong’ nationalism overdetermined by race was discussed by JANA HUSMANN (Berlin) who examined intersecting categories of religious and secular knowledge in religious antisemitism of German Christian fundamentalists in the 1930s. Husmann critically analysed in what ways the Old Testament was re-interpreted as an antisemitic document. Relatedly, but again from a different disciplinary background, SAHRA DORNICK (Berlin) explored Gila Lustiger’s novel So sind wir (That’s how we are) in terms of understanding the impact of traumatisation (in relation to Shoah-experiences of the author’s father) within a family. Dornick found that the processes of trauma transition and identity construction of family members occur through silences rather than through literal explanation or expression of trauma. In so doing, Dornick claimed that the novel opened up a possibility to recognise trauma as ‘a condition sine qua non of our social constitution’ rather than pathological illness or abnormal status. Furthermore, by understanding silence as an active reaction to trauma and emphasising Gila’s persistent longing to create a ‘space of belonging’ in silence, Dornick highlighted how a family finds ways to survive trauma engaging intimate spaces of belonging.

With mental health, a rather rare context of discussions of intersectionality was highlighted in FIONA ZINOVIEFF’s (Bangor) presentation of a research project that tackles issues of exclusion practices related to dual-diagnosis of mental health patients with substance abuse problems. Having discussed the precarious nature of both service provision (i.e. limited funding) and its recipients (experiencing stigma), she argued that the intersectional framework was capable of resolving policy and service restructuring pitfalls. Similarly, DOMINIK BALDIN (Dortmund) spoke to the subject of categorizations of disabled people with migratory background in Dortmund (Germany). He pointed to insufficient research on connections and relatedness between disability studies and ethnicity.

The conference was concluded by the third keynote lecture, GURMINDER K. BHAMBRA’s (Warwick) paper ‘Race, Class and the Sociological Endeavour: A Critique of the Limits of Community’. Bhambra revisited the classic sociological study Middletown: A Study of Modern American Culture of 1929. The study that had been commissioned by Rockefeller and became a best-seller, was done by Robert and Helen Lynd. ‘Middletown’ was a pseudonym for the US city of Muncie in Indiana. Rockefeller was concerned about the escalation of labour. The study projected an image of the town as quintessentially American. It presented a homogenous white population with a small ‘Negro’ community that it alleged could be ignored. In erasing the existence of the African Americans, essentially an all-white community was created, a myth perpetuated by subsequent studies. Bhambra framed her examination of Middletown in a discussion of the fact that dominant histories of sociology tend to write the colonial moment out of history. This also affects recent discussions of multiculturalism in the UK and Europe. In these contexts, the colonial past is erased and so the post-colonial present and post-colonial subjects are disavowed.

The third keynote was a fitting conclusion to the conference on intersectionality and belonging, raising further questions about the importance for researchers themselves to reflect on their own positionality and consider how ‘race’ and ‘class’ etc. are not only ‘out there’ to be studied but also ‘within’, influencing the perspective of researchers and affecting the very nature of how research itself may be conducted and the type of studies that may be undertaken within different subject disciplines. The conference underlined powerfully the importance and fruitfulness of framing research both in the social sciences and humanities in the categories of ‘intersectionality’ and ‘belonging’. The breadth of these categories – although theoretically containing the risk of vagueness and lack of focus – allow experiences, empirical materials and approaches to come together and be combined that otherwise would hardly meet: indeed only broad, and admittedly ipso facto somewhat vague categories like ‘intersectionality’ and ‘belonging’ can achieve this. A particular joy in attending was the inter-, not to say non-disciplinarity of the conference: interdisciplinary conferences I have attended previously typically involved the usual suspects from the social and historical sciences plus a small helping of literature, as this one did, but hardly ever management studies and health policy research which seem extremely worthwhile additions to the expanding palette of studies on intersectionality and belonging.

The conference was co-organized and sponsored by the Wales Institute of Social & Economic Research, Data & Methods (WISERD), the British Sociological Association Theory Study Group and the Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging, University of East London, UK. Organisers included Howard Davis, Marcel Stoetzler, Robin Mann and Sally Baker.

Video recordings of the keynote presentations, as well as the programme and abstracts of all contributions, can be found at this address: http://berg.bangor.ac.uk/keynotes.php.en?menu=3&catid=10218&subid=0;subid=0

Conference Overview

First Day: Keynote 1: ‘The Politics of Belonging: Intersectional Constellations’

Nira Yuval-Davis: Director of the Centre on Migration, Refugees and Belonging, University of East London, UK
Welcome: Ian Rees Jones
Chair: Howard Davis
Respondent: Gurminder K. Bhambra

Session 1a Chair: Jana Husmann
Introducing Intersectionality from afar: Theorizing lives of Polish female migrants on the crossroads of class, ethnicity and gender (Paula Pustulka)
Migrant Mothers negotiating the Politics of Belonging (Umut Erel)
Thwarted cosmopolitanism? The experiences of mixed race youth in London (Indra Angeli Dewan)

Session 1b Chair: Gail Hickey
Intersectionality and Coalitional Identities: Somos Hermanas, 1984-1990 (Anna Carastathis)
Queering Diaspora Space – Creolising Europe. Narratives of British South Asian Gay and Bisexual men on sexuality, intimacy and marriage (Christian Klesse)
From Theory to Practice: Violence Against Women Service Providers, an Intersectional Vision (Helen Monk)

Session 1c Chair: Marcel Stoetzler
Challenging racism in Germany (Katrin Reimer)
Paradoxes of Multicultural Korea (Joowon Yuk)
Urban aesthetics in contemporary African literature (1980-2010) (Eva Dorn)

Session 2a Chair: Christian Klesse
Wrapped in the Flag of Israel: Mizrahi Single Mothers and the Gender Race of Bureaucratic Torture (Smadar Lavie)
‘Intersectionality, Simmel and the dialectical critique of society’ (Marcel Stoetzler)
A Cultural Critique of Confucian Capitalism from a Transnational and Intersectional perspective: The Dialectic of Universality and Specificity of ‘National’ Culture (Hae Young Song)

Session 2b Chair: Howard Davis
What does it mean to be a practicing ‘Academic’ ‘Muslim’ Working in a ‘Secular’ ‘Western’ ‘University’? (Heba El-Sayed, Anita Greenhill, Chris Westrup)
Multicultural Peer-Groups in Germany from an Intersectionality Perspective: An Empirical Study on the Establishment of Social Belonging in Schools (Oktay Aktan, Cornelia Hippmann)
(Un-)Doing Ethnicity in Class- Students’ Reactions between Tagging and Deconstructing Differences in Class Interaction with Ethnic Minority Teachers (Yaliz Akbaba)

Session 2c Chair: Robin Mann
The crossroads of mental health and substance misuse service provision –Intersectional influences on the individual (Fiona Zinovieff, Anne Krayer, Catherine Robinson, Rob Poole)
Influences on the European identities of Muslims living in England, Germany and Spain (Saffron Karlsen)
Exploring the inclusion and exclusion of persons with disabilities and migrant backgrounds (Dominik Baldin)

Session 3a Chair: Smadar Lavie
‘People were kind of shocked’: Gender, religion, and work in U.S. South Asian Women’s narratives (Gail Hickey)
‘Intersectional Capital’: A resource used by Congolese women in the UK and in Belgium in their ‘diasporic engagement’ (Marie Godin)
Religion and Race for Muslim Converts in Britain (Leon Moosavi)

Session 3b Chair: Marta Eichsteller
Belonging, Non-Belonging and spaces between and beyond: voices of refugees in London (Zibiah Alfred)
Positionality, Power and participation (Adefemi Adekunle)
The significance of class for English national sentiments (Robin Mann)

Keynote 2: ‘A Transnational History of Victimhood Nationalism: National Mourning and Global Accountability’
Jie-Hyun Lim: Director of the Institute of Comparative History and Culture, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea
Chair: Marcel Stoetzler
Respondents: Nira Yuval-Davis and Gurminder K. Bhambra

Session 4a Chair: Hae-Yung Song
Vietnamese First Generation Nationals in the Czech Republic: Czechs with Vietnamese passport? (Adéla Souralová)
How Muslim migrants from the former Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia in Luxemburg negotiate salient social identity references (Lucie Waltzer)
Runaway Slaves, Citizenship and Belonging in the Antebellum United States (Scott Hancock)

Session 4b Chair: Umut Erel
Women’s narratives of belonging: Situated stories of ethnicity and citizenship (Nicola Samson)
Belonging in Bangla Town: A longitudinal qualitative study on the evolving sense of belonging for first generation Bangladeshi women over the life-course in Tower Hamlets (Nilufar Ahmed)

Session 4c Chair: Stefan Baumgarten
Spaces of Silence –The Intersection of Trauma and Longing in Gila Lustiger’s novel: So sind wir (Sahra Dornick)
Anti-Semitism and Spaces of Belonging: Intersections of Religion, Race and Gender within German Christian Fundamentalism during the ‘Third Reich’ (Jana Husmann)
The Cold War’s Homo Sacer: Military Prostitutes and the South Korean Government’s Control of Sex Work in U.S. Camp-Towns, 1953 – 1966 (Jeong-Mi Park)

Session 5a Chair: Sahra Dornick
Identity and Belonging: The perception of group-formation among the women workers of Tea plantations in Dooars, India (Surpurna Banerjee)
“Place to connect”: Nostalgia and Radical Identity Constructions in Virtual Diasporic Spaces (Anindya Raychaudhuri)
Ethnonational identity and citizenship in Hungarian communities: the challenges of dual belonging (Valér Veres)

Session 5b Chair: Scott Hancock
Citizenship as contested “space of belonging” : inclusions and exclusions of migrants in the British Citizenship test and ceremonies (Elisabeth Badenhoop)
Cross Routes Identities – Transnational experiences and the sense of belonging (Marta Eichsteller)
Intersectionality and Translation: Towards a Multidimensional Analysis of Power Relations (Stefan Baumgarten)

Keynote 3: ‘Race, Class and the Sociological Endeavour: A Critique of the Limits of Community’
Gurminder K. Bhambra: Director of the Social Theory Research Centre, University of Warwick, UK
Chair: Robin Mann
Respondent: Nira Yuval-Davis

Note:
1 I am grateful for having been able to use reports on individual sessions by Marta Eichsteller, Leon Moosavi, Surpurna Banerjee, Zibiah Alfred, Adéla Souralová, Paula Pustulka and Joowon Yuk.