Book Chapters by Sara de Jong
Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning , 2018
Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning is a resource for teachers and learn... more Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning is a resource for teachers and learners seeking to participate in the creation of radical and liberating spaces in the academy and beyond. This edited volume is inspired by, and applies, decolonial and feminist thought – two fields with powerful traditions of critical pedagogy, which have shared productive exchange.
The structure of this collection reflects the synergies between decolonial and feminist thought in its four parts, which offer reflections on the politics of knowledge; the challenging pathways of finding your voice; the constraints and possibilities of institutional contexts; and the relation between decolonial and feminist thought and established academic disciplines. To root this book in the political struggles that inspire it, and to maintain the close connection between political action and reflection in praxis, chapters are interspersed with manifestos formulated by activists from across the world, as further resources for learning and teaching.
These essays definitively argue that the decolonization of universities, through the re-examination of how knowledge is produced and taught, is only strengthened when connected to feminist and critical queer and gender perspectives. Concurrently, they make the compelling case that gender and feminist teaching can be enhanced and developed when open to its own decolonization.
This chapter employs Iris Marion Young’s framework of two types of politics of difference – the s... more This chapter employs Iris Marion Young’s framework of two types of politics of difference – the structural inequality model and the societal cultural model – to unpack and analyse the ‘difference’ that is articulated in diversity politics. Application of Young’s framework uncovers the tendency to a static understanding of culture, with limited reference to the structural processes underlying social group formation and inadequate attention to intersections with other categories. In order to account for the shift of diversity politics to difference as a ‘resource’, Young’s work needs to be placed in relation to ‘difference-conscious neo-liberalism’ rather than a difference-blind liberalism’. Insights from studies on colonial cultural brokers can help demonstrate continuities in ‘domesticating’ difference for political and commercial ends, and show the continued relevance of Young’s account of normalising processes.
Articles by Sara de Jong
Identities: GLOBAL STUDIES IN CULTURE AND POWER, 2019
This article presents an analysis of employment trajectories of refugee staff in migrant support ... more This article presents an analysis of employment trajectories of refugee staff in migrant support and advocacy organisations in the UK, Austria and the Netherlands. In contrast to existing scholarship, it takes refugees’ success in finding employment as a starting point. Moreover, it makes an important contribution to extant literature by identifying the unique features of a niche employment sector for refugees: migrant support organisations. I demonstrate that the mainstream explanatory concepts of ‘labour market segmentation’ and ‘ethnic niche’ fail to capture refugees’ pathway from client to service provider and neglect the sector’s status as a mid- to high-skilled but feminised employment sector. I propose instead to understand ‘refugeeness’ as a form of capital and argue that this capital provides access to employment in migrant support and advocacy organisations, while simultaneously trapping refugees in front-line work with high degrees of hidden, devalued labour and inadequate career mobility.
Social Inclusion, 2017
This article analyses four emerging refugee support organisations in Austria, founded before the ... more This article analyses four emerging refugee support organisations in Austria, founded before the so-called refugee crisis in 2015. It argues that these organisations have managed to occupy a middle space between mainstream NGOs and social movements with structures of inclusive governance, a high degree of autonomy, personalised relationships with refugees, and radical critique combined with service delivery. Based on interviews with the founders of each organisation, we show that their previous NGO and social movement experience formed a springboard for the new initiatives. It not only allowed them to identify significant gaps in existing service provision, but also provided the space of confrontation with the asylum system inspiring a strong sense of outrage, which in turn developed into political critique. We argue that this critique combined with identifying the needs of asylum seekers and refugees has produced a new type of organisation, which both delivers services and articulates radical demands. Each organisation offers a space of encounter, which undoes the 'organ-ised disintegration' of the asylum system.
Austrian Journal of Development Studies, 2017
This article offers an analysis of the aim, audience, form and
content of the “i am a migrant” ca... more This article offers an analysis of the aim, audience, form and
content of the “i am a migrant” campaign of the International Organisation of Migration (IOM). We suggest that the campaign directs public opinion in Western ‘host countries’. We furthermore propose that the campaign’s website as a platform for migrants’ voices is not antithetical to the mission of the IOM to manage migration according to a logic of productivity and rationality, but rather a logical extension of it. We show that the migrant narratives presented not only confirm, but also disrupt the assumed naturalness of migrants’ strong ties with their countries of origin, frequently underpinning established policy on the migration-development nexus.
The contributions in this special issue share theorisations, auto-ethnographic reflections, and p... more The contributions in this special issue share theorisations, auto-ethnographic reflections, and pedagogical experiments of decolonisation, politics of knowledge, and activism informed by Feminist, Gender, and Queer studies but also by non-Eurocentred epistemic geo-genealogies grounded in embodied experiences of racialisation, discrimination, and resistance in the academia. Inserting what are inevitably profoundly political contributions, which question the foundations and limitations of hegemonic knowledge creation, into the mould of an academic peer-reviewed special issue is a complex and, at times, seemingly impossible exercise. As the guest editors and editorial board negotiated the process of this issue’s production, we ourselves were challenged to engage with tensions around what constitutes a ‘proper’ scientific contribution, by which and whose standards. As a reader of this special issue, and perhaps a student, teacher, researcher, activist, or a combination thereof, it is likely that you also find yourself addressed and challenged by some of the critiques and proposals articulated in the articles and essays that follow.
This article takes as its point of departure the media attention for a Vienna-based project, whic... more This article takes as its point of departure the media attention for a Vienna-based project, which recruits migrant women to act as mediators between migrant communities and ‘Austrian’ society. Drawing on historical literature on gendered and racialised cultural brokers, it understands the appeal of this project as arising from its correspondence with dominant intersectional gender and ethnic stereotypes. In this article, I offer a critical analysis of the media sources and argue that the contemporary media narratives present a reconfigured version of the historic colonial tropes of “panoptical time” and “anachronistic space” (McClintock, 1995); two tropes that express hierarchical narratives of progress, placing gendered, racial, and classed ‘others’ outside modernity. I suggest that the gendered and ethnicised intersectional positions of the female migrant mediators are mapped onto a modernising narrative, which is articulated through spatio-temporal images. By contrasting the three main figures of the project – the project founders, the target group, and the female migrant mediators – I illustrate how gender and ethnicity get imbued with distinct hierarchical and relational meanings at different intersectional junctions. Particular spatial and temporal locations come to stand in for specific intersectional positions, and communicate a hierarchy between gendered Austrianness and gendered othered migrant-status. This article makes a contribution beyond the particular case of the Austrian project analysed here, by demonstrating that intersectional analysis can gain from attending to continuities with colonial discourse and to spatial-temporal metaphors.
This article intervenes in the emerging field of global citizenship studies by following in the f... more This article intervenes in the emerging field of global citizenship studies by following in the footsteps of critical studies of national citizenship, which have shown that the seemingly neutral features of citizenship are gendered and racialized. The notion of “global citizenship” has gained currency in recent years and while there is not yet a canonized account of global citizenship, it is possible to identify the main shared features of different global citizenship accounts. While the “global” of global citizenship could denote the universality of the concept in contrast to national citizenship, this promise of inclusivity is not fulfilled. This article provides an intersectional reading of global citizenship theories and examples. Dominant global citizenship accounts, I argue, contain exclusionary and marginalizing tendencies and are biased toward a certain type of global subject whose responsibility is based on benevolence. A more inclusive and radical account of global citizenship can be built by drawing on Iris Marion Young's social connection model to rethink responsibility and by more firmly grounding it in an understanding of globalization as linked to historical and present structural inequalities.
This article provides a theoretical framework for analysing discrimination against second-generat... more This article provides a theoretical framework for analysing discrimination against second-generation immigrant girls in education and the labour market by proposing an intersectional approach. Drawing upon selected elements of the findings of our Neskak Gora Project - a qualitative
research conducted between 2009 and 2011 in Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK and funded by the EC Daphne III Programme - we show that the intersection of class, gender and ‘race’/ethnicity, which is at play at the structural, institutional and discursive levels of systems of intersectional discrimination, works in variable ways.
While gendered educational structures seem partly to benefit female immigrant youth at school, gendered disadvantages are experienced particularly in the transition to the labour market. This highlights the necessary acknowledgement of the ‘discontinuity’ of axes of inequality that are manifested in different ways, according to specific contexts, institutional settings and moments of the individual’s life cycle.
Feminists have faced and are still facing a similar critique as NGOs and development organisation... more Feminists have faced and are still facing a similar critique as NGOs and development organisations, namely, that they draw on predominantly Western, middle-class values
and constructs in their work. The notions of reflexivity as used in feminist theory and the notion of constructive complicity as introduced in postcolonial theory are both responses to the need to find ways to operate productively and responsibly within unequal power structures. This paper will explore the parallels between this reflexivity and acknowledgement of complicity. It will consider whether and if so, how reflexivity and constructive complicity can be translated into NGO practices using material collected from interviews with women located in the global North who work for organisations that seek to support women in and from the global South.
Politics, Groups and Identities, 2013
This Dialogues section brings together research from two hitherto separate interdisciplinary stra... more This Dialogues section brings together research from two hitherto separate interdisciplinary strands of European scholarship on politics: Gender Studies, and Migration and Ethnic Studies. Combining theories, concepts, methods, and findings, the papers demonstrate what each field can learn from the other. By exploring various forms of citizenship and representation of ethnic minorities in Western Europe, this section addresses the key contributions of Gender Studies and Migration and Ethnic Studies: intersectionality and the critique of methodological nationalism, respectively. Intersectionality challenges scholars to cross gender with other categories such as ethnicity. Methodological nationalism refers to the naturalization of national categories; critics dispute the assumption that the nation/state/society is the natural social and political form of contemporary politics. Both approaches are far from mainstream in political science, and despite their potential they are rarely combined. This essay argues that central future challenges for political science are (1) to mainstream intersectional analysis; (2) to be critical of the construction of taken-for-granted categories and the way such “fixed” categories result from our focus on nation-states; and (3) to develop new mix-method toolkits to make this exercise feasible.
Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies 17(2) (2014) , 2014
In this special issue of Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies we examine the gendered implications of ‘... more In this special issue of Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies we examine the gendered implications of ‘Fortress Europe’, a metaphor for the closing of Europe’s borders in the context of European unification. The consequences of ‘Fortress Europe’ are not limited to those outside its borders who wish to enter Europe. Rather, the EU’s migration regime encompasses multiple forms of differential treatment, which produces and affects particular racialised and gendered subjects inside Europe´s boundaries.
Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies 17(3) (2014) , 2014
CSSGJ Working Paper Series, WP10, 2009
Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies 15(2) (2012) , 2012
In this article Stef Scagliola is interviewed
about her experiences with the large scale
Dutch ... more In this article Stef Scagliola is interviewed
about her experiences with the large scale
Dutch Veteran Oral History project, which
she coordinated from 2006-2011. While this
oral history project did not have an explicit
gender or feminist focus, there is still ample
of material relevant for gender studies, such
as the question of how gender was expressed
in the self-narrations of the veterans and
how gender relations played a role in
the interaction between interviewer and
interviewee. The interview also explores the
way in which themes such as empowerment
and the hidden stories of marginalised
people, that have been central to feminist oral
history literature, played out in this specific
project with veterans. As Stef Scagliola shares
her considerations, insights, and reflections,
she provides a glimpse of the way oral
history works in practice and the dilemmas
that have to be negotiated, in line with the
feminist tradition to place one’s own research
methodologies under critically scrutiny.
Tijdschrift voor Genderstudies 15(2) (2012) , 2012
Oral history, of mondelinge overlevering, is
een methode van dataverzameling die zowel
door soc... more Oral history, of mondelinge overlevering, is
een methode van dataverzameling die zowel
door sociale wetenschappers als door historici
wordt gebruikt. Oral history kan verborgen
verhalen boven water brengen en sluit daarbij
aan bij Genderstudies. Het betreft zowel het
verzamelen van de verhalen van mensen die
aan de zijlijn van de ‘grote verhalen’ van de geschiedenis
staan, zoals vrouwen, als ook verhalen
over gemarginaliseerde onderwerpen,
zoals seksualiteit. Daarnaast kan oral history
verborgen dimensies van de ‘grote verhalen’
naar boven brengen, de manieren waarop
mensen bepaalde gebeurtenissen beleefden.
Books by Sara de Jong
Teaching Gender with Libraries and Archives was conceived of as a pedagogical tool, aimed at stim... more Teaching Gender with Libraries and Archives was conceived of as a pedagogical tool, aimed at stimulating gender studies teachers to critically reflect, together with their students, on libraries and archives as profoundly gendered knowledge spaces. Whilst feminist standpoint theory with its recognition that knowledge always emanates from and is produced within a specific situationality is now commonplace in gender studies, libraries and archives have so far largely escaped critical feminist reflection on their status as both locations and as actors of knowledge production.
Consequently, we have set out to provide an array of diverse, complementary perspectives both from within and aimed towards libraries and archives. Scholars, teachers, activists and information specialists reflect on questions such as: How can we ‘open the black box of the library’? How can we make visible the political entanglements of knowledge spaces with their social, historical, cultural and technological contexts? Are there analogies between gender studies research practices and the practices of collecting, preserving, ordering and disseminating feminist knowledge? What are the challenges involved in preserving and disseminating knowledge about gender issues? How can we produce situated feminist knowledge from within and about the social, institutional, symbolic and technological dynamics of libraries and archives?
Contributions from Iceland, Cyprus, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Italy, the UK, Italy and Germany showcase archives and libraries as lively, fast changing and thoroughly political spaces, where students can engage both critically and creatively with a multitude of feminist practices, as well as reflecting on how the relationship between power and knowledge is enacted and materialized in particular libraries and archives. Each chapter offers suggestions for activities and discussions that can be used in or adapted to teaching settings.
Book Reviews by Sara de Jong
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Book Chapters by Sara de Jong
The structure of this collection reflects the synergies between decolonial and feminist thought in its four parts, which offer reflections on the politics of knowledge; the challenging pathways of finding your voice; the constraints and possibilities of institutional contexts; and the relation between decolonial and feminist thought and established academic disciplines. To root this book in the political struggles that inspire it, and to maintain the close connection between political action and reflection in praxis, chapters are interspersed with manifestos formulated by activists from across the world, as further resources for learning and teaching.
These essays definitively argue that the decolonization of universities, through the re-examination of how knowledge is produced and taught, is only strengthened when connected to feminist and critical queer and gender perspectives. Concurrently, they make the compelling case that gender and feminist teaching can be enhanced and developed when open to its own decolonization.
Articles by Sara de Jong
content of the “i am a migrant” campaign of the International Organisation of Migration (IOM). We suggest that the campaign directs public opinion in Western ‘host countries’. We furthermore propose that the campaign’s website as a platform for migrants’ voices is not antithetical to the mission of the IOM to manage migration according to a logic of productivity and rationality, but rather a logical extension of it. We show that the migrant narratives presented not only confirm, but also disrupt the assumed naturalness of migrants’ strong ties with their countries of origin, frequently underpinning established policy on the migration-development nexus.
research conducted between 2009 and 2011 in Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK and funded by the EC Daphne III Programme - we show that the intersection of class, gender and ‘race’/ethnicity, which is at play at the structural, institutional and discursive levels of systems of intersectional discrimination, works in variable ways.
While gendered educational structures seem partly to benefit female immigrant youth at school, gendered disadvantages are experienced particularly in the transition to the labour market. This highlights the necessary acknowledgement of the ‘discontinuity’ of axes of inequality that are manifested in different ways, according to specific contexts, institutional settings and moments of the individual’s life cycle.
and constructs in their work. The notions of reflexivity as used in feminist theory and the notion of constructive complicity as introduced in postcolonial theory are both responses to the need to find ways to operate productively and responsibly within unequal power structures. This paper will explore the parallels between this reflexivity and acknowledgement of complicity. It will consider whether and if so, how reflexivity and constructive complicity can be translated into NGO practices using material collected from interviews with women located in the global North who work for organisations that seek to support women in and from the global South.
about her experiences with the large scale
Dutch Veteran Oral History project, which
she coordinated from 2006-2011. While this
oral history project did not have an explicit
gender or feminist focus, there is still ample
of material relevant for gender studies, such
as the question of how gender was expressed
in the self-narrations of the veterans and
how gender relations played a role in
the interaction between interviewer and
interviewee. The interview also explores the
way in which themes such as empowerment
and the hidden stories of marginalised
people, that have been central to feminist oral
history literature, played out in this specific
project with veterans. As Stef Scagliola shares
her considerations, insights, and reflections,
she provides a glimpse of the way oral
history works in practice and the dilemmas
that have to be negotiated, in line with the
feminist tradition to place one’s own research
methodologies under critically scrutiny.
een methode van dataverzameling die zowel
door sociale wetenschappers als door historici
wordt gebruikt. Oral history kan verborgen
verhalen boven water brengen en sluit daarbij
aan bij Genderstudies. Het betreft zowel het
verzamelen van de verhalen van mensen die
aan de zijlijn van de ‘grote verhalen’ van de geschiedenis
staan, zoals vrouwen, als ook verhalen
over gemarginaliseerde onderwerpen,
zoals seksualiteit. Daarnaast kan oral history
verborgen dimensies van de ‘grote verhalen’
naar boven brengen, de manieren waarop
mensen bepaalde gebeurtenissen beleefden.
Books by Sara de Jong
Consequently, we have set out to provide an array of diverse, complementary perspectives both from within and aimed towards libraries and archives. Scholars, teachers, activists and information specialists reflect on questions such as: How can we ‘open the black box of the library’? How can we make visible the political entanglements of knowledge spaces with their social, historical, cultural and technological contexts? Are there analogies between gender studies research practices and the practices of collecting, preserving, ordering and disseminating feminist knowledge? What are the challenges involved in preserving and disseminating knowledge about gender issues? How can we produce situated feminist knowledge from within and about the social, institutional, symbolic and technological dynamics of libraries and archives?
Contributions from Iceland, Cyprus, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Italy, the UK, Italy and Germany showcase archives and libraries as lively, fast changing and thoroughly political spaces, where students can engage both critically and creatively with a multitude of feminist practices, as well as reflecting on how the relationship between power and knowledge is enacted and materialized in particular libraries and archives. Each chapter offers suggestions for activities and discussions that can be used in or adapted to teaching settings.
Book Reviews by Sara de Jong
The structure of this collection reflects the synergies between decolonial and feminist thought in its four parts, which offer reflections on the politics of knowledge; the challenging pathways of finding your voice; the constraints and possibilities of institutional contexts; and the relation between decolonial and feminist thought and established academic disciplines. To root this book in the political struggles that inspire it, and to maintain the close connection between political action and reflection in praxis, chapters are interspersed with manifestos formulated by activists from across the world, as further resources for learning and teaching.
These essays definitively argue that the decolonization of universities, through the re-examination of how knowledge is produced and taught, is only strengthened when connected to feminist and critical queer and gender perspectives. Concurrently, they make the compelling case that gender and feminist teaching can be enhanced and developed when open to its own decolonization.
content of the “i am a migrant” campaign of the International Organisation of Migration (IOM). We suggest that the campaign directs public opinion in Western ‘host countries’. We furthermore propose that the campaign’s website as a platform for migrants’ voices is not antithetical to the mission of the IOM to manage migration according to a logic of productivity and rationality, but rather a logical extension of it. We show that the migrant narratives presented not only confirm, but also disrupt the assumed naturalness of migrants’ strong ties with their countries of origin, frequently underpinning established policy on the migration-development nexus.
research conducted between 2009 and 2011 in Denmark, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK and funded by the EC Daphne III Programme - we show that the intersection of class, gender and ‘race’/ethnicity, which is at play at the structural, institutional and discursive levels of systems of intersectional discrimination, works in variable ways.
While gendered educational structures seem partly to benefit female immigrant youth at school, gendered disadvantages are experienced particularly in the transition to the labour market. This highlights the necessary acknowledgement of the ‘discontinuity’ of axes of inequality that are manifested in different ways, according to specific contexts, institutional settings and moments of the individual’s life cycle.
and constructs in their work. The notions of reflexivity as used in feminist theory and the notion of constructive complicity as introduced in postcolonial theory are both responses to the need to find ways to operate productively and responsibly within unequal power structures. This paper will explore the parallels between this reflexivity and acknowledgement of complicity. It will consider whether and if so, how reflexivity and constructive complicity can be translated into NGO practices using material collected from interviews with women located in the global North who work for organisations that seek to support women in and from the global South.
about her experiences with the large scale
Dutch Veteran Oral History project, which
she coordinated from 2006-2011. While this
oral history project did not have an explicit
gender or feminist focus, there is still ample
of material relevant for gender studies, such
as the question of how gender was expressed
in the self-narrations of the veterans and
how gender relations played a role in
the interaction between interviewer and
interviewee. The interview also explores the
way in which themes such as empowerment
and the hidden stories of marginalised
people, that have been central to feminist oral
history literature, played out in this specific
project with veterans. As Stef Scagliola shares
her considerations, insights, and reflections,
she provides a glimpse of the way oral
history works in practice and the dilemmas
that have to be negotiated, in line with the
feminist tradition to place one’s own research
methodologies under critically scrutiny.
een methode van dataverzameling die zowel
door sociale wetenschappers als door historici
wordt gebruikt. Oral history kan verborgen
verhalen boven water brengen en sluit daarbij
aan bij Genderstudies. Het betreft zowel het
verzamelen van de verhalen van mensen die
aan de zijlijn van de ‘grote verhalen’ van de geschiedenis
staan, zoals vrouwen, als ook verhalen
over gemarginaliseerde onderwerpen,
zoals seksualiteit. Daarnaast kan oral history
verborgen dimensies van de ‘grote verhalen’
naar boven brengen, de manieren waarop
mensen bepaalde gebeurtenissen beleefden.
Consequently, we have set out to provide an array of diverse, complementary perspectives both from within and aimed towards libraries and archives. Scholars, teachers, activists and information specialists reflect on questions such as: How can we ‘open the black box of the library’? How can we make visible the political entanglements of knowledge spaces with their social, historical, cultural and technological contexts? Are there analogies between gender studies research practices and the practices of collecting, preserving, ordering and disseminating feminist knowledge? What are the challenges involved in preserving and disseminating knowledge about gender issues? How can we produce situated feminist knowledge from within and about the social, institutional, symbolic and technological dynamics of libraries and archives?
Contributions from Iceland, Cyprus, the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Italy, the UK, Italy and Germany showcase archives and libraries as lively, fast changing and thoroughly political spaces, where students can engage both critically and creatively with a multitude of feminist practices, as well as reflecting on how the relationship between power and knowledge is enacted and materialized in particular libraries and archives. Each chapter offers suggestions for activities and discussions that can be used in or adapted to teaching settings.