reflection short writting for Prof. Mintella

Ch 11:

Dominant Narrative on Citizenship

• The Relationship between Schooling of Muslim Youth and the Construction of French Identity

• Assimilationist

• “The process by which immigrant groups come to adopt the dominant culture of their new homeland as their own” (224).

• Out-group

• “Group that is considered undesirable and is thought to hold values and beliefs foreign to one’s own” (224).

Constructing Meanings of Citizenship

• “Two seemingly unrelated events took place in Paris after the attacks on Charlie Hebdo and a kosher grocery store that reveal

much about the unhealthy state of France’s social contract. First,

Lassana Bathily, the undocumented Muslim man who saved

customers in the kosher grocery during the attack

was granted French citizenship for his actions. Then on Jan. 19,

Marine Le Pen, the president of France’s National Front party,

wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times that “stripping

jihadists of their French citizenship is an absolute necessity …

We, the French, are viscerally attached to our laïcité, our

sovereignty, our independence, our values.”

• Both cases — one in which citizenship is granted, the other in which a politician advocates for it to be

taken away — rely on a conduct-based metric for

citizenship. Such a conception of citizenship is

damaging for multiple reasons, but it is particularly

harmful to French Muslims and their continued

existence in France.” Saim Saeed,

http://america.aljazeera.com/opinions/2015/1/For-French-

Muslims-citizenship-is-conditional.html

Who is Marine Le Pen?

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jsMsHjIOHu8

Citizenship

 Citizenship as a “privilege and not a right” (Saeed

Saim, Aljazeera).

 The principle of assimilation becomes a means of

creating out-groups.

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lv9881LpTvI

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4R5cpdUmmq U

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dtDzDXg2GQ U

Research Question

• Why is the issue of schooling of Muslim youth in France such a contentious issue and what other issues does it

extend to?

• An issue around which the debate of being “French” is centered.

Opposing Positions on Muslim

Schools

• “ghettoization of ethnic communities … and the fragmentation of the Republic’s social fabric and

political ethos” (177).

• “plot against the Republic” (Ibid).

Laicite

• Consolidated in 1905

• Secularism

• “This is a law since 1905, which was designed to curb the powers of the Catholic Church of the clergy. And what it means today is a complete separation of religious identity and affiliation from the public space. In public, you don't have a religion. You're just a citizen of the Republic.” (ELEANOR BEARDSLEY, BYLINE, NPR, March 4, 2015).

Laicite

• French Political Philosophy

• “French public opinion has come to construct Islam as a new threat to long- standing republican traditions” (178).

Othering and Laicite

• Changing meaning of secularism in practice

• Laicite as a contested concept

• Assumes a unitary force with regards to schooling of Muslim youth

Education and Citizenship

• Historically schools have been sources of assimilation

• Institutions of education as nurturers of cultural production

Problems with using Laicite as a

Broad Term

• Ahistorical and Acontextual

• Overemphasis on “symbolic dimensions of integration”

• Over-mediazation – emergence of an exaggerated narrative

The Perspective of School as a

“Temple”

• Linear production and re-production of culture

• Religion lies outside the sphere of culture

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kWJRam64dQ Y

Schooling through Geographical

Enclaves

• 40% of youth from immigrant families attend 10% of Middle Schools labeled “colleges ghettos” (182).

• Urban Segregation = Ethnic Segregation

• Role of powerful parents

Arguments For:

• Liberation from the “iron cage” of culture (184)

• Encouragement of a “Triple Culture” (Ibid).

• Aim at practicing cultural openness by “enrolling youth of different religious backgrounds” (Ibid).

Arguments Against:

• Increased Segregation into enclaved educational settings

• Contribute to the rise of Confessional Institutions

• “Call for a political struggle for a tolerant and more inclusive public school system” (184).

“In France it’s like if you don’t belong to a certain part of the

population you are not considered clever or hard-working” (The

Guardian, “Revolt Stirs in France’s Schools Against ‘Elitist’ Education

System”, Polly Curtis, Marc 25, 2011).

European-ness

• Linkage between French Identity and European-ness

“What naturally united and makes Europeans and what

distinguishes them from others” (185).

• “Constructions of Europeaness”  “geographical forms of citizenship” (185).