Education Research Seminar 10th March 2016
The Education Research Centre and School of Education presented this seminar on 10th March 2016:
Dr Jo-Anne Dillabough
University of Cambridge
Cultural estrangement, ‘expulsions’ and the re-making of youth cultures in the securitized state: a South African and Canadian comparison
While ‘tolerance’ might be at the epicentre of global multicultural imaginaries, this paper examined 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.
The paper focused 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. It assessed 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). It discussed 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. It explored engaging with these concepts and their tangible functions in education and urban life through the ethnographic encounter. Key areas of methodological interest were: 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).
A recording of the event can be found here: