In this chapter we explore minority women’s strategies for survival in informal spaces: self help groups, DIY networks and grassroots community organisations, as well as our participants’ personal narratives of and reflections on coping within neoliberal third sector organisations. Throughout this book ‘activism’ is defined broadly in order to capture the diverse ways in which minority women assert themselves as political agents. We argue that minority women’s activism is either misrecognised or erased by the white left. Given this hostility to a politics that is organised on the basis of race, gender and legal status, this problematises the solidarity work that minority women activists seek to build with their white counterparts as well as ignoring the political dimensions of selfcare. We centre the activism of minority women and note that it is often connected to third sector spaces and should not be dismissed as ‘inauthentic’ for this reason. We conclude by demanding that this politics of survival be recognised as a first step toward solidarity and alliances.

Since the early 2000s several European countries have introduced language and citizenship tests as new requirements for access to long-term residence or naturalization. The content of citizenship tests has been often presented as exclusionary in nature, in particular as it is based on the idea that access to citizenship has to be 'deserved'. In this paper, we aim to explore the citizenship tests 'from below', through the focus on the experience of migrants who prepare and take the 'Life in the UK' test, and with particular reference to how they relate to the idea of 'deservingness'. Through a set of in-depth interviews with migrants in two different cities (Leicester and London), we show that many of them use narratives in which they distinguish between the 'deserving citizens' and the 'undeserving Others' when they reflect upon their experience of becoming citizens. In so doing, they negotiate new hierarchies of inclusion into and exclusion from citizenship, which reflect broader neo-liberal and ethos-based conceptions of citizenship.

Based on our study of minority women's activism in the context of the economic crisis in Scotland, England and France, we question how well third sector organisations, policy-makers and social movements have responded to minority women's perspectives and needs arising from austerity and racism. Apart from being disproportionately affected by the cuts, minority women are also undermined by dominant discourses which can (mis)represent them as either 'victims' or 'enterprising actors'. There appears, from our excerpted interviews, to be a disconnect between minority women's experiences and analyses of their precarity, their desire to take radical action and the compliant and domesticating projects and programmes that are currently being offered by some of their third sector 'allies'.

Citizenship tests are arguably intended as moments of hailing, or interpellation, through which norms are internalized and citizensubjects produced. We analyse the multiple political subjects revealed through migrants' narratives of the citizenship test process, drawing on 158 interviews with migrants in Leicester and London who are at different stages in the UK citizenship test process. In dialogue with three counter-figures in the critical naturalization literature-the 'neoliberal citizen'; the 'anxious citizen'; and the 'heroic citizen'-we propose the figure of the 'citizen-negotiator' , a socially situated actor who attempts to assert control over their life as they navigate the test process and state power. Through the focus on negotiation, we see migrants navigating a process of differentiation founded on preexisting inequalities rather than a journey toward transformation.

This article uses intersectionality as an analytical tool to explore struggles for institutional space in policy processes in two ostensibly contrasting contexts: "republican" France and the "multicultural" United Kingdom. Specifically, the article undertakes within-case analysis of three policy processes. In France, we discuss the debate over laïcité, or secularism, the subsequent formulation of the March 2004 law banning the wearing of religious signs in state schools, and the creation of the High Authority for the Fight Against Discrimination (HALDE). In the UK, we examine the problem definitions, language, and subject positions constructed by the 2008 Single Equality Bill. The result of these analyses is that institutional actors employ similar (though not identical) practices in relation to intersections, which have similar outcomes for minority groups on either side of the English Channel. Through what we term a "logic of separation," institutional actors severely curtail the "institutional space" available to minority ethnic groups to make complex and intersectional social justice claims. Even though France and the UK are often portrayed as opposites with regard to constructions of citizenship, we argue that these seemingly differing traditions of citizenship end up having a similar effect of misrecognizing minority women and men's experiences and demands.

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