Responses to stigmatisation and boundary making: destigmatisation strategies of Turks in Germany

Witte, Nils

doi:10.1080/1369183x.2017.1398077

Cited by 17 publications

(10 citation statements)

References 31 publications

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“…In the last few years, several scholars have scrutinised in detail the responses given to stigmatisation by migrants and members of ethnic minorities around the world (see for example: Portes, Guarnizo, and Landolt 1999, Duemmler, Dahinden, and Moret 2010, Witte 2017, Morosanu and Fox 2013, Lamont and Mizrachi 2012, Holtz, Dahinden, and Wagner 2013.…”

Section: Boundary Work Strategies: Responding To Stigmatisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Boundary Work Strategies: Responding To Stigmatisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Responses to stigmatisation might be classified into two main types: situational reactions and boundary work responses (Witte 2017). The first category includes direct reactions to stigmatisation, such as confronting the stigmatisers and de-emphasising or ignoring the stigmatisation (Witte 2017). The second category does not include direct reactions to a particular act of stigmatisation but rather discursive strategies that situate one according to specific categories (Witte 2017).…”

Section: Boundary Work Strategies: Responding To Stigmatisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The first category includes direct reactions to stigmatisation, such as confronting the stigmatisers and de-emphasising or ignoring the stigmatisation (Witte 2017). The second category does not include direct reactions to a particular act of stigmatisation but rather discursive strategies that situate one according to specific categories (Witte 2017). By scrutinising how individuals respond to stigmatisation, the researcher will be in a position to analyse the boundary negotiation processes (Lamont and Mizrachi 2012, Wimmer 2008a, Morosanu and Fox 2013.…”

Section: Boundary Work Strategies: Responding To Stigmatisationmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The literature developed in the last few years regarding the responses to stigmatisation and discrimination on the basis of ethnic or national criteria has frequently resorted to boundary work theory (Wimmer 2008a, Lamont and Mizrachi 2012, Witte 2017. Scholars have sought to explain how external boundaries affect individuals and groups' identification and, in turn, how these stigmatised individuals or groups pursue different strategies to change undesirable boundaries or modify their position in relation to them (Wimmer 2008a).…”

Section: Shifting the Boundaries Of Belonging: Fighting Non-recognitimentioning

confidence: 99%

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Memories of the "liberation of Kosovo" among Albanian-speaking activists in Switzerland: narrating transnational belonging to the nation

Farquet¹

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The Albanian-speaking population living in Switzerland mobilised massively on behalf of the national cause in Kosovo in the 1990s. After the end of the conflict, that saw the departure of the Serbian forces from Kosovo (1999), some of the Albanian-speaking activists from Switzerland returned to their homeland. Many others remained in Switzerland, where they largely diminished or terminated their homeland engagement. Since the end of the war, very little attention has been paid to these former champions of the national cause in Switzerland. Furthermore, there is also very little literature on the memories of the mobilisation in Switzerland and the related discourses of belonging to the "Albanian nation". The situation differs in Kosovo where several researchers have analysed the memorialisation of the recent past. This dissertation explores the narratives of homeland engagement related by Albanian-speaking former activists who engaged on behalf of the national cause in Kosovo from Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s. In particular, it scrutinises how they narrate national belonging in their memories of the quieter postwar years (after 1999). As such, this study falls within the field of research on nationhood and ethnicity that examines how people negotiate and reproduce nationhood away from extreme situations of nationalist movements and warfare. Furthermore, this research analyses the narratives with a transnational perspective as it focuses on how the interviewees mobilise and negotiate different discourses of national belonging embedded in the different social spaces they inhabit at the local, national, transnational and international levels. This research mainly relies on oral history interviews conducted with former Albanian-speaking activists who were active on behalf of Kosovo in Switzerland in the 1980s and 1990s. Of the fifty former activists who participated in this research, seven were interviewed in Kosovo and the rest in Switzerland, where most of the research participants still reside on a fixed or irregular basis. The interviewees told me about their trajectory as activists on behalf of the national cause, their vision of Albanianness and their position in the evolving "Albanian nation". The thesis is chiefly composed of three articles. They highlight the trajectories of the former activists from the years of engagement in the 1980s and 1990s to the search for a new status during the postwar period. While the thesis accounts for the negative image of the Albanianspeaking population in Switzerland, it also shows how they feel excluded and forgotten in postwar Kosovo. Moreover, the research demonstrates how the former activists use narratives of homeland engagement to reconfigure the symbolic categories and boundaries that delimit the "Albanian nation" and seek to enhance their own position. The thesis thus underlines the evolution of the narratives of belonging as an adaptation of the transnational situation of the activists, from the period of "hot" nationalism during the years of engagement to the ...

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