For sometime now I have been posting to a Tumblr blog. This gives me more opportunity to share ideas with academics and get instant feedback. Do check out the blog as it has details on my forthcoming book. I shall not be updating this blog anymore.

everydayhybridity

New Article - Journal of Intercultural Studies

This new article of mine on young Muslims in Hong Kong, has just been published in the Journal of Intercultural Studies. It is part of a special edition on young people and everyday multiculturalism. The research in this edition forms a very interesting collection with work from India, Germany, Australia, Canada, Italy, and Hong Kong.

I am very proud and pleased to have contributed to this project intially conceived by Dr Anita Harris. Her passion for the topic brought a number of scholars together in Italy to present and work on the papers which are now collected together in this journal. The focus on youth and everyday multiculturalism is clearly a vibrant and topical issue for youth studies. These papers provide support for the emerging concept of everyday multiculturalism and indicate that there is much more that can be researched within this field.

The Journal of Intercultural Studies is published by Sage and is currently sponsored by the Centre for Citizenship and Globalisation at Deakin University.

The Modern Hajj

This summer my research on the modernisation of the Hajj was published by Lambert Academic Publishing. The text explores transformations in the organisation of the pilgrimage to Mecca over the last 200 years. In looking at the social, political, and mechanical changes a nuanced picture of the Hajj is provided. We come to understand that the modern Hajj remains that which took place over 1,400 years ago. The same rites endure.

This text is perhaps most valuable because it also addresses the experience and organisation of Hajj from a British perspective. It reports the work of the ABH (Association of British Hujjaj) and also recent developments in the foreign office to aid British pilgrims.

Its publication comes at a time when Islam continues to be a topical and contentious issue in the West. This work, originally drafted in the year 2000, provides a refreshing change of perspective. Worded in a time just prior to 9/11 it is free of the imposing rhetoric of terror that has become suffocatingly synonymous in all discussions on Islam. It is however prescient of the events that have now come to pass and acknowledges that the Hajj has also been involved in political conflicts and terrorist activity.

The modern theme has also been a topical issue recently with the building of an enormous clock tower by the grand mosque in Mecca. With all its traffic infrastructure, concrete, air conditioning, five star hotels, and fast food chains Mecca has made an enormous departure from what pilgrims would have encountered just 50 years ago.

This book provides an overview of the modern pilgrimage to Mecca. It will be of interest to those wishing to know more about its recent history. It is unique in its focus on British Muslims

'The Modern Hajj' is available at Amazon.

Visual Anthropology and other Arts Journals free till 28th Feb

This month's special edition on Hybrid Hong Kong has been offered by Routledge for free until the 28th of Feb. You can get access to my recent article on Everyday Hybridity here and the rest of the articles on Hybrid Hong Kong.

Also there are many back issues of other excellent journals available. Do have a look.

Halal Hong Kong

I will be presenting a paper on halal food in Hong Kong at the Crossroads ACS conference on the 17th of June.
I have put together some interesting snaps from across the city, but I particuarly like this one. Taken at Eberneezers takeaway in Wanchai we see a halal certificate on the left and to the side of the till on the right a collection of different beer bottles.
Whilst the Incorporated Trustees of the Islamic community fund approve of the meat used in the establishment, they do not certify the establishments themselves. For a number of Muslims the serving of alcohol on the premises t is an annoyance. When they see a business advertised as halal they believe that this means that the whole establishment is halal not simply the meat on offer (see this review of a Jordan curry house).

In Singapore establishments like McDonalds have applied for, and received, halal certification. In Hong Kong there are now over 220,000 Muslims but halal foods are often ambiguously detailed and large food chains have not sought halal certification.

Furthermore the prominence of pork in Chinese foods mean that Muslims in Hong Kong seldom eat Chinese food. There is an association that Chinese food is always haraam.

So, many Muslims (Pakistani, Chinese, and Indonesian) will visit some of the halal butchers that are dispersed across the territory. Here is one stall in Causeway Bay.



Finding halal food in Hong Kong can take some special effort. For those that live in the South Asian community, it is reasonably easy to access food stores, butchers, and restaurants that cater to halal diets. However young people at school, and Indonesian foreign domestic workers may find that there everyday environments problematise their halal diet.

Facebook, Goffman & de Certeau: Visual Culture

On browsing through Facebook the other day I got to thinking how Erving Goffman would respond to Online Social Networking. In many respects Facebook brashly lauds the findings in Goffman's "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life". People are invited to manage their identities, strategically providing a polished example of their idealised selfs. The pictures of social celebrations, holidays, weddings, and children, convey how people would like to be imagined. The more mundane aspects of uploading photographs, editing profiles, and managing privacy settings are overlooked, yet they are really what makes the site tick. Only mobility is addressed, photos uploaded from phones are given credit as such, other ones, presumably from the home, or office are not given such acknowledgment.

But ultimately 'photos', image, and appearance, is what the site is really about. This should be plainly understood from the name of the site. I recently overheard a friend speak to a colleauge whom they were not facebook friends with, and questioned why. The colleauge, who appeared on good terms with my friend replied 'But I don't want you to see all my photos', implying that there were too many embarrassing images for a work colleague to witness. My friend replied 'but the photos are the whole point'.

To me Facebook signals something more that our often stated hyper connective globalised world. It corresponds with our delight in the visual which has be growing incessantly. In fact the whole success of Information Technology and the Internet relates to how it has been a visual exercise. Windows and Visual Basic enabled people entirely disinterested in computer technology the competence to use PCs. The rapid development in mobile technologies has similarly been facilitated by the visual dynamic, the ease of use, the intuitive.

A Critique of 'visual' culture exists in everyday life social theory where some works and methodologies have addressed the dominance of the visual in Western culture. Michel de Certeau’s (1984: xxi) critique of visual culture as a destructive element in modern societies that measures ‘everything by its ability to show or be shown’ provides a challenge to Facebook in a very different way to that of Goffman. De Certeau caustically argues that ‘our society is characterized by a cancerous growth of vision, measuring everything by its ability to show or be shown and transmuting communication into a visualjourney’ (1984:xxi). It is here that my reference to Facebook seems most apt, but beyond this connection his argument evokes not only the pervaise use of new medias, but also contemporary thinking, even policy. Terms like transparency, inclusion, and trends such as cosmetic surgery, conspicuous consumption, and CCTV, are all tied to visual culture. Ultimately de Certeau asserts his concern that the use of the visual image is a form of robbery that both denies experience and makes people passive in their pursuits, ‘what is given to the eye is removed from the hand’ (1997:18). He urges us to consider how we can be involved when we thirst for only the images of lived experiences, rather than living. This assertion is something that Henri Lefebvre (1991:75-76) agrees with. For him the predominance of seeing and looking has become the mode through which people live and it has ultimately ‘turned into a trap.’ He argues that we work, consume, and understand ‘on the basis of image’.

So what is absent in our modern culture? To begin with what is absent on Facebook? Perhaps listening? Les Back argues that ‘we need to find more considered ways to engage with the ordinary yet remarkable things found in everyday life’ (2007:7). By approaching research with methods that seek new ways to understand society, visually, physically, auditory and spatially, he argues that new ways of listening can be achieved. Back states that ‘social investigations that utilise a “democracy of the senses” are likely to notice more and ask different questions of our world’ (2007:8). In this way we need not revoke the visual but find ways to complement it.

The social aspect of Facebook holds the promise that more can be made of these shallow connections and online identity management. It is the nexus built up by social groups that Facebook wants to exploit in dominating web use (see here also). The critique of the visual is much needed, however it is also something that should be balanced. As technology develops the visual may be supplanted for more advanced modes that enable a democracy of the senses in both the supply and reception of information and social connections.

Review: Youth Identity and Migration

I recently got a copy of "Youth Identity and Migration" edited by Fethi Mansouri. I enjoyed the work and thought that it would be good to include a review here.

This collected work is framed by the experience of youth growing up in an era of increasingly complex ethnic and cultural diversity. It addresses the social connections that migrant youth have and seeks to identify their wellbeing as the next adult generation of workers, educators, and adults. The book is a collection of thirteen chapters divided into three broader themes of: cultural adaptation and wellbeing, the social experiences of migrant youth, and migrant youth and the new media. The book looks at how day-to-day exchanges, education, and media relate to identity for migrant youth. It also takes a critical stance in assessing issues of access, inclusion, and social capital for these young people. The book provides a broad engagement with migrant youth including work that encompass new, second and third generation migrants, refugees, and Muslims.
In introduction Mansouri addresses Vertovec’s concept of superdiveristy (p. 12) and argues that this new era of diversity is more complex than census data and recourse to country of origin enables us to identify. The works that follow support this argument and also contribute to an understanding of this complexity. One of the clear contributions this work provides is that of situating migrant youth in a new epoch to that of their parents, an age where media enables youth to create and engage with global communities. This is described as a departure from their parent’s transnationalism, as the youth in these studies are connected to not only others from their ancestral communities, but also other minorities in their own locale, and globally (p. 53, 157). This ‘unity in difference’ is a recurring theme of the collection and is given different representations in the chapters by Mansouri & Miller, Santoro, and Hopkins & Dolic. Another strong feature of the collection is the reference it provides to the different experiences of education by migrant youth. In Arber’s work which discusses popular racism in the teaching profession we engage with migrant youth coming to a largely monocultural school as transnational consumers of white middle class education. In Santoro’s study a contrast is provided by addressing the lack of ethnic minority teachers in schools with a multicultural student body. These works along with the chapters by Latrache and Windle highlight the global context of contemporary teaching and the need for teachers to gain professional competence in real life multicultural settings. Both the unity in difference and educational themes provide insight into the social connections of migrant youth and their wellbeing and inclusion.

The fact that this work is largely a collection of Australian research does not detract from the wider implications of its findings. As the youth in several studies indicate, contemporary migrant youth in Australia share much with migrant youth globally, and also more generally with all youth growing up conversant with new media and in multicultural surroundings. However, a number of chapters look beyond Australia and the book includes research on Arab youth in America and France, and a comparison of educational disadvantage between Australia and France. The book also does much to integrate the subject of Muslim youth, too often dealt with as a separate concern, into broader debates of migrant and ethnic minority youth. Similarly refugees, Turkish, Indigenous Australian, and Pacific Island youth are all included in various debates that are focal on the experience of being young and a minority, rather than being a particular ethnicity. Generally the chapters in the book are complimentary and readers interested in one or two specific chapters will find value in the rest of the volume.

The book is slightly impeded by the lack of clarity that the table of contents provides, where chapter number are omitted and the detailing of chapter sections is included at the expense it seems of their full titles. This is made prominent by the fact that there is no index to trace themes across the anthology. I note this precisely because the collection of texts are complimentary, in some cases even reiterating a theme, such as unity in difference, or providing different perspectives on similar themes like multicultural education from both student and teacher points of view. The engagement with wellbeing and health is at times nuanced and uneven. This is made more distinct in the concluding chapter by Paradies et al, who note that the health impacts associated with the experience of racism are most well established in terms of negative psychological effects and social behaviour (p. 214). The strong case these authors make highlights the need for some of the previous chapters to have made more of these connections. In addition, an issue that was lacking across the book as a whole was an acknowledgement of gender difference; this is only really touched upon briefly by Francis in reference to Pacific Island migrants (p. 198). This is a little disappointing as the volume handles the complexity of addressing a variety of different ethnic groups most competently, making their experiences relevant to both the reader and the other works within the collection.

On the whole the book is timely addition to the field of minority youth studies and includes a balanced collection of conceptualisation, research, and analysis. The issue of migrant youth health as an important issue is given context. A connection is made between the subtleties of social inclusion, wellbeing, and friendships, and educational success, criminality, and ill health. The authors achieve this by engaging in themes that are at the forefront of youth research, media use, ethnicity, and education. It is relevant and useful to youth researchers in Australia, and similarly to those beyond the region.

Book details

Youth Identity and Migration: Culture, Values and Social Connectedness
F. Mansouri (ed)
Common Ground, 2009
226 pages ISBN 9781863356213-3