Research Seminar: Dr Jo-Anne Dillabough, University of Cambridge

Come along to our research seminar:  Cultural estrangement, ‘expulsions’ and the re-making of youth cultures in the securitized state: a South African and Canadian comparison.

All welcome. To register your attendance please access: CLICK HERE

The Education Research Centre and School of Education present:

Cultural estrangement, ‘expulsions’ and the re-making of youth cultures in the securitized state: a South African and Canadian comparison

 Dr Jo-Anne Dillabough, University of Cambridge

Thursday 10^th March 2016, Mayfield 129, Falmer Site
4.00-5.30pm

 While ‘tolerance’ might be at the epicentre of global multicultural imaginaries, this paper examines Kearney and Taylor’s (2005) view of the ‘sacrificial stranger’ – the person or group that threatens the collective consciousness of such tolerance. This stranger exists primarily because when one endorses sameness through discourses of tolerance there will always be someone who is deemed beyond recognition and legitimacy and who therefore must be sacrificed in the name of multiculturalism or normative understandings of citizenship. Arguably, this sacrifice is more deeply felt when other discourses of social fear and anxiety are circulating. I will focus not only on the wider global discourses of social fear and bordering that are drawn upon to construct the ‘sacrificial stranger’ but also the representations of the ‘other’ that are realized at different scales of urban life within and beyond education. I assess these in relation to wider questions of borders, security and the ‘stranger’ and particularly in relation to young people living at the fringe of globalizing cities, using case examples of two urban concentrations of economic and racial disadvantage (South Africa and Canada). I will discuss in particular the importance of the idea of estrangement as it is experienced by young people, drawing on Rumford’s (2013) concern over the ‘globalization of strangeness’ and Kearney and Taylor’s notion of the ‘sacrificial stranger’, as these come to life at the level of the everyday in education and the city. I will particularly explore engaging with these concepts and their tangible functions in education and urban life through the ethnographic encounter. Key areas of methodological interest will be: the archive as a repository, oral histories, visual methods (photography, journalistic) and more traditional qualitative accounts such as interviews.

Dr Jo-Anne Dillabough is Reader in the Sociology of Education and Youth and Global Cultures, Faculty of Education, University of Cambridge and is Convenor of the Working Group, Education, Equality and Development. She is also co-editor of the International journal, Gender and Education (with G. Ivinson, J. McLeod & M. Tambouku).