Orders of Belonging and Education
Migration Pedagogy as Criticism
1Introduction
In this paper, migration is conceived not only as a phenomenon involving movements of people across borders, but also as a phenomenon of discourses, and to that extent as a phenomenon of hegemonic power relations.41 The discursive construction of migration is of particular interest to the field of pedagogy, as discourses can be understood to frame educational processes. Furthermore, education is itself part of these discursive relationships. This paper will explore what this means and what terminology can be used to describe this, paying special attention to critical references to discourses and discursive orders that transform people into subjects. This will be done in four sections. The first section will start with a general outline of the existing understanding of migration, and then focus on two examples that suggest that migration also generates reactions that involve the hegemonic preservation of natio-racial-culturally coded orders of belonging. Migration can be understood as a form of disruption of social orders. Here, education can potentially function both as a site of the reproduction of natio-racial-culturally coded orders of belonging, and as a mechanism to transform such orders. This is explained in the fourth section of the paper, which ends with a brief idea of migration-pedagogical research as criticism (of hegemony). In general, this paper aims to characterize migration pedagogy as a programmatically distinct approach.
2Movements and Discourses
Movements of people across borders have taken place almost everywhere and in every historical era. Migration is a universal human activity. In this sense, it exhibits a dimension relating to time and space: “Migration means crossing the boundary of a political or administrative unit for a certain minimum period” (Castles 2000, 269). The social significance of the crossing of borders is not simply given, but rather generated in complex processes in which social reality is affirmed, negotiated, and changed. Phenomena of crossing borders have long been and are currently significant drivers of societal change and modernization. The consequences of movements that cross, constitute, and weaken borders can be studied and understood as phenomena in which new knowledge, experiences, languages, and perspectives have been introduced into different social contexts, which have in turn been rearranged, modernized, and renovated.
Even if migration is not an exclusively modern phenomenon, it is nonetheless characterized by specifically modern conditions. At no point in history were so many people worldwide prepared to migrate; compelled to migrate due to environmental disasters, wars (civil or otherwise), and other threats; and able to shift their location of work and daily life across great distances thanks to technological changes that mitigate the limits of space and time: we are living in an age of migration (Castles and Miller 2009). In recent times, cross-border movements of people have gained a particular significance for individuals and societies worldwide. This is connected to at least three main factors:
a)Migration increases with the proliferation of modern thought and vice versa: this characteristically ‘modern’ idea is increasing in importance due to migration phenomena. Migration can be understood as the attempt in a very basic sense to take charge of one’s own life with regard to geographical, ecological, political, and cultural location, and it thus serves as a model of and also for a modern lifestyle – with all of its ambivalences, illusions, and questionable incidental consequences.
b)Migration increases with the consciousness of injustice and vice versa: due primarily to the brutality of modern warfare’s weapons technologies, the uneven distribution of poverty and wealth in the world, and varying degrees of ecological change and its associated destruction of natural resources, the intensity of global inequality grows. Given this manifestation of inequality, the total number of people living in this world, and the spread of global knowledge (which increases the representation of the world in people’s minds, through information technologies such as television and computers), global maladjustment and inequality have never been so intensive as in the present.
c)Migration increases with the modification of time and space and vice versa: the ‘shrinking’ of the world with regard to space and time due to technological developments in transport and communications is characteristic of the present, particularly regarding economic resources. This is quite significant for people’s understandings and perceptions of themselves and their opportunities in this world of transformed time and space relations. Furthermore, this facilitates movements across borders, or at least encourages attempts to cross borders.
Migration as the act of crossing borders goes along with both the transformation and the confirmation of existing conditions. As they are crossed, borders (such as those of nation-states) become visible in a particular way: they become weak and modified while at the same time their power and claim to validity is reinforced. Migration leads to the questioning and strengthening of borders and their validity in much the same way. As such, migration must be understood as a source of disquiet and perturbation; it is the object of discourses as well as the subject of conflicts of both political and everyday nature. The term ‘discourse’ is particularly meaningful here, as migration is not simply the physical movement of bodies. Rather, phenomena arising from the crossing of borders are generated by discourses, understood here as socially constructed systems of knowledge and understanding that label these phenomena: politically, aesthetically, educationally, and in everyday life, for example, as ‘forced migration,’ as ‘mobility,’ or as labor ‘migration.’
In general, the term ‘discourse’ refers to the dynamic complex of knowledge of a given topic. Discourses can be conceived as flows of knowledge: there are discourses on irregular migration, discourses on European values, discourses on economic migration and social inequality, discourses regarding the question of which migrants are welcome and which ones are regarded as dangerous. The subject of a discourse first comes into being within and from the discourse itself. Discursive knowledge generates social reality and gives rise to contexts, circumstances, and surroundings that enable or hinder the activity of real people. Discourses create topics and objects, and at the same time they create knowing subjects, people who by virtue of their knowledge and the use of such knowledge become what they are. In this respect discourses are doubly productive.
To the degree that knowledge and power, according to Foucault, are two sides of one coin, discourses are always powerful. They come about in specific power relationships and also produce power relationships. Power relationships are articulated in interactions by individuals as well as institutions that impact the addressed other and her or his capacity of activity in constitutive, restrictive, negating, or encouraging ways. For Foucault, power is a ‘total’ phenomenon; not only does it appear where repression is visible, but rather it is a constitutive dimension of the social and the symbolic. As Hannelore Bublitz states, “Power does not operate […] primarily in an oppressive manner, but rather in a generative one. It is not simply that which individuals struggle against, but rather, strictly speaking, what makes them what they are” (Bublitz 2003, 69; my translation). Power has the effect of creating subjects, turning individuals into subjects. In Stuart Hall’s usage, discourse as “one of the ‘systems’ through which power circulates” (Hall 1996, 204) produces differing opportunities for action. In his reflections on discourses, Hall (1996) writes about “the West and the Rest,” referring to the special way in which “the West,” “the Rest,” and their relationships are represented, and by extension the way in which this knowledge produces a discourse that “constitutes a kind of power, exercised over those who are ‘known.’” When that knowledge is exercised in practice, those who are “known” in a particular way will be subject (i.e., subjected) to it. Those who produce the discourse also have the power to make it true – i.e., to enforce its validity, its scientific status” (Hall 1996, 205). Discourses about those who count as ‘Others’ make the ‘Others’ what they are, and likewise produce categories of ‘non-others.’ Discourses on migration are definitely not all similar or uniform in meaning; they compete with one another, and this competition can be described as a struggle for symbolic dominance or hegemony. Within these struggles, the question whether social, institutional, or identity-based preservation or transformation should be the political aim is discussed with much controversy. Outcomes of these struggles in turn have innovative and restorative effects with regard to social orders.
This will be briefly illustrated using two examples. Both examples operate on the basis of the concept of ‘Othering,’ a tool from postcolonial studies. Based upon the psychoanalytical theoretical concepts of Jacques Lacan, the term was coined in the theoretical post-colonial context by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, and has been widely adopted since the 1970s, particularly in anthropological studies. Lacan’s ideas establish the theoretical framework in which subjectivization and identity formation can be understood not merely in the solipsistic process of the self, but rather as a constant ‘mirror dynamic.’ According to Spivak, colonized subjects can only be recognized as such through the dominant discursive practices of the colonial center, and indeed in a dependent relationship with it (Spivak 1985). Colonizing practices create subjects. Another perspective focuses on those discursive practices that designate some as ‘Others,’ and in so doing, create a collective identity. This perspective has become widely known and influential largely on account of Edward Said’s works on the construction of the ‘Orient’ as an antagonistic foil to the ‘Occident.’ Said did not use the term ‘Othering’ himself. However, in the post-colonial context, his thesis was understood as an analysis of a paradigmatic ‘Othering’ practice and further developed theoretically. In his work Orientalism (Said 2003, 1978), Said analyses the discursive practices that first created ‘the Orient’ and ‘the Orientals’ and places them in a constitutive relationship with the self-perception of the ‘West.’ The mechanisms and the efficacy of these practices can only be understood, according to Said, in the context of European imperialism and thereby as the legitimation and stabilization practices of claims to dominance in relation to the constructed ‘Other.’ In this context, ‘Othering’ can be understood as a double process; the ‘Others’ are constructed by means of specific knowledge-production practices that legitimate the establishment of colonial dominance, and likewise it is this hegemonic (political, economic, cultural) intention that makes these epistemic practices appear ‘plausible’ and ‘useful.’
2.1Example 1: Sexual Othering
Racist representations and speech have become socially acceptable in 21st-century post-National Socialist Germany.42 One example may be found in Focus magazine’s thoroughly biased and highly sexualized depiction of the widespread sexual assaults that took place in Cologne on New Year’s Eve in 2016. On the title page of the January 8, 2016 issue, we encounter the naked body of a young, white, blonde woman: a red beam runs diagonally across her body; her breasts are covered by her right arm, and her left hand coyly shields her pubic area from view. Her eyes are cropped out of the frame but her mouth is visible; her lips are slightly parted. Five black paw-like imprints of male hands mark her body: appearing at once both oily and dirty, they seem to declare her body a male possession. The headline asks: “After the sex-attacks of migrants: Are we still tolerant or already blind?”
Focus magazine’s portrayal of this issue is racist because of the lurid, obtrusive, and emotionally manipulative way in which, with the help of such sexualized representations, migrants are demonized and a white ‘us’ (“Are we still tolerant or already blind?”) is constructed. The title page plays the black versus white game: the ‘Others’ are black, violent, faceless, brazen, dangerous, and dirty. ‘We,’ on the other hand, are white, pure, vulnerable, civilized, chaste, and exalted, even sublime, superior. The ‘us’ that asks itself if it is tolerant or already blind – the ‘us’ that Focus is addressing – consists of white women who are groped by black migrant hands, and the white men tasked with protecting these women. The protection of ‘our’ women from the sexuality of the other race has always been a constituent element of simultaneously racist and racist-patriarchal traditions. The fact that such blatantly racist media representations can and have become socially acceptable points to an entrenched historical amnesia. The powerfully subjectifying and disciplining potential of the discursive interplay of sexuality, race, nationality, and religion in producing, reproducing, and inscribing racist patriarchal white European positions of hegemonic dominance in Germany has a clear history, which says something about the function of these practices.
During the French occupation of the Rhineland following World War I, 30,000–40,000 of the roughly 85,000 French soldiers present were from French colonies of North and West Africa (Algeria, Madagascar, Morocco, Senegal, Tunisia, and several other countries). Here, much like in Cologne in 2016, a single event tipped the tide of social tolerance, when a French Moroccan soldier fired his machine gun into a group of civilians, and in the process killed several German nationals. The repercussions were an enduring, statewide coordinated protest campaign that had widespread international support against the presence of ‘colored’ (farbige) soldiers in the Rhineland. In the national parliament, all parties except the USPD (the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany) and the KPD (Communist Party of Germany) declared the presence of colored soldiers as an ineradicable humiliation (Wigger 2007). Many politicians, including Friedrich Ebert and Adolf Köster, tried to rally support from the “white world” in the fight to eliminate this “black humiliation” from the Rhineland (Wigger 2007, 11). Their justification was that “the use of colored troops of the most inferior culture to guard a population of high mental capabilities and economic significance such the Rhinelanders” would seriously undermine and harm “the laws of European civilization” (Wigger 2007, 12). In the German public propaganda, it was the assumed inferior cultural position of the black French soldiers that was used as an official justification for public outrage. It was in the informal propaganda representations, however – in popular magazines, newspapers, flyers, posters, films, postcards, postal stamps, and even elaborately hand-crafted and mass produced copper coins – that derogatory stereotypes and portrayals of these men as sex-offending, sexually libidinous and uncontrolled, race-defiling rapists of white German women were sold and consumed en masse. In these representations, colonized French soldiers are violently stripped of all humanity, agency, and human dignity in a colonially inspired project of justifying and maintaining white European supremacy. When we look at these historic images side by side with the media representations of the recent Cologne New Year’s Eve events, the similarity of patterns, justification mechanisms, symbolic orders, and representations, and their hidden agendas in securing and maintaining positions of power are impossible not to recognize. The fact that this history is ignored in association with the recent Cologne events is evidence of an institutionalized, pathological repression: a kind of historical amnesia (see Stoler 2011).
Against this background it becomes clear that the current threat scenarios are linked to historical forerunners that continue to be productive as they are modified and re-inscribed in the present. The racist speech and affect among the German public today can be understood as practices of Othering in the form of threat scenarios. The affect that is currently intensely articulated against the discursively constructed others, and the intensity with which an imagined group can be condemned, can be explained if we are clear that we are dealing with a struggle for societal order in which privileges are distributed differentially.
2.2Example 2: Religious Othering
In her analysis of current hegemonic discourse concerning ‘Islam’ and ‘the Muslims,’ Iman Attia (2009) demonstrates that generalizing speech about ‘the Muslims’ is something different than the effect of ‘anti-Muslim stereotypes.’43 The interconnections between discourses on Muslims that have been passed down in cultural and academic spheres (Orientalist, Islamic, and religious studies) and powerful self-perpetuating negative narratives (the ‘oppressed Muslim woman,’ the ‘backward Muslim migrant,’ etc.), political dispositions, and everyday discourses point to the efficacy of a particular hegemonic discursive practice that defines a group through essentialization, attribution, and representation. This discursive creation of the ‘religious identity’ of Muslims is not a random phenomenon. It is constitutively bound to the creation of a non-Muslim ‘we’ narrative. The fixation of ‘religious identity’ makes Muslim subjects possible by constructing the self-perception of a complementary ‘we.’
Thus, the discursive practice of Othering includes the category of religion; this practice marks and reifies an epistemic, political, anthropological, and thereby quasi-ontological distinction between a more or less explicit ‘we-group’ and the ‘Other.’ This takes place in a context that is paradoxically not spatially (geographically, territorially) bound, but rather marked by the de-territorialization of identity-political relations. The defining characteristic of religious Othering is that it does not generally concern sociological issues on religion or the historical development of religious groups, but rather the delineation of ‘another religion.’ The ‘Otherness’ of the religion in this case is not defined in terms of categories one would find in religious studies, but rather on a more fundamental level. Thus the ‘other religion’ in these discourses is always the ‘religion of the others,’ with the Otherness of the others taking on a ‘quasi-religious’ quality. Attia (2009) demonstrates that diverse and contradictory tendencies in the discourse on Islam are all built around the essentialization of ‘the Muslims,’ even when their linguistic, pedagogical, and political intentions diverge. In order to appropriate, understand, discriminate, tolerate, integrate, oppose, or identify ‘distinctions and differentiation’ among them, it is necessary to have understood and formulated their ‘essence’ (see Attia 2009, 7).
‘Othering’ represents a practice of objectification by and a means of dominance. Objectification is an action and practice that transforms ‘Others’ into subjects under the conditions of “positional superiority” (Said 2003, 5). Practices of objectification are forms of symbolic violence that make ‘examples’ of subjects. Said pointed out that these practices primarily use description to produce facts. The use of the so called “ethnographic present” (Fabian, 1983, 81), which ‘freezes’ subjects (and collectives) into specific temporal and political contexts, can be conceived as a method of objectification. Objectifying practices not only elevate momentary and subjective experiences or observations to the level of objective knowledge, they both abstract and solidify the (power-political) differences that such observations and their articulation facilitate. According to Laclau (1991), hegemonic discourses require a radical other, a corrupt non-identity, a constitutive ‘outside.’ This ‘outside’ first makes it possible to demarcate ‘the inside of the society’ and make a vacuous and unfathomable yet apparently unquestionable ‘us’ appear to be a given.
With this in mind, it seems plausible to assume that discussions on the ‘religion of the others’ represent a hegemonic discourse. Indications of this are evident in the currently dominant discourse and representation practices (in academic discourse, mass media, literature, public debate, etc.) that portray ‘the Muslims’ as a homogeneous and closed group. This knowledge of Muslims in European migration societies is the knowledge of the ‘Otherness of the others.’ On the basis of this binary thinking, it is possible for very different and even contradictory practices to develop; these can range from a caring epistemic position regarding Muslims (‘one only has to understand them’) to constant calls for differentiation, and ultimately to manifest cultural racism. What these practices have in common is that they create specific subjects (Muslims) through epistemic dominance and use specific representation practices to transform them into a subjectified “constitutive other” (Laclau 1991), into ‘radically other subjects.’
Against the backdrop of the understanding of migration outlined here as both bodily and discursive, it becomes clear that scholarship on migration in general and migration pedagogy specifically are not only concerned with the conditions, forms, and consequences of movements of people across borders. They also direct critical attention to the discourses on migration marked discursively as legitimate and less-legitimate forms of belonging. In this context, migration pedagogy sheds light on what happens when migration becomes an issue in educational fields, and to what extent pedagogical protagonists and institutions weaken or strengthen natio-racial-culturally coded concepts of ‘us’ and ‘them.’ Education and pedagogy can be regarded in this context as both a mirror and a playground for those symbolic practices that differentiate between a natio-racial-culturally coded ‘us’ and ‘them.’
3Education as a Site of the Reproduction and Transformation of Natio-Racial-Culturally Coded Orders of Belonging
Migration phenomena challenge, unsettle, and disrupt the legitimacy and functionality of the natio-racial-culturally coded ‘us.’ In addition, the legitimacy and functionality of institutional routines such as linguistic practices or practices of collective memory (see Lücke 2016) are called into question. Finally, migration as the movement of people across borders, as well as a discourse that shapes new knowledge about belonging and citizenship, troubles culturally dominant views and opinions about the legitimacy and functionality of individual privileges, for example the privilege to not only expect but to claim that one’s own language is also the language of the other.
In this context, studying migration as a societal phenomenon cannot be reduced to the study of migrants. The basic analytical approach of migration research is the focus on individuals and groups in their relationship to natio-racial-culturally coded orders of belonging as well as the transformation of this relationship (Mecheril et al. 2010). The expression ‘natio-racial-cultural’ (natio-ethno-kulturell, see Mecheril 2003, 118–251) refers on the one hand to the fact that the concepts of nation, ethnicity, race, and culture are often used in a diffuse and undifferentiated way, both in research and everyday communication. On the other hand, this term indicates the fact that concepts of nation, ethnicity, race, and culture are manifested formally in laws and regulations, materially through border controls and identity documents, and also socially through symbolic practices that generate rather blurred meanings and outcomes that are subsequently used politically.
In natio-racial-culturally coded conceptions of affiliation, constructions of ‘race’ can have a significant impact, as can forms of religious references. Studies and analyses indicate an association between conceptions of national or cultural belonging and nationalist or racist images (Hormel and Jording 2016). Anti-Muslim racism in connection to the idea of the ‘West’ has been and is increasingly evoked in public arenas to negotiate issues of national belonging (Attia 2016). Migration movements take place in the context of natio-racial-culturally coded orders of belonging; they activate these orders and change them (‘mobility’ is a form of movement which, unlike ‘migration,’ does not necessarily suggest this natio-racial-culturally coding). The ideal type of natio-racial-culturally coded orders makes it possible to describe and study migration and its consequences for the subjects, spaces, and places of migration. These orders are created by “glocal” (Robertson 1995) processes – complex and dynamic, yet nonetheless displaying a degree of inertia – concerning the destabilization of identity and affiliation, as well as conceptions of location and space.
The concepts and practices in which a distinction is made between the natio-racial-culturally coded ‘us’ and ‘them’ mediate and influence the experiences, self-understanding, and activities of everyone. Migration pedagogy therefore focuses on the analysis and description of these concepts, experiences, and practices, as well as on the analysis of the empirical and possible conditions under which these concepts, experiences, and practices become more fluid. Migration pedagogy thus does not focus on a particular target group and is not a program of education and treatment of migrants or integration with the intention of changing (assimilating) migrants. Migration pedagogy may be considered in contrast to educational approaches, which focus primarily on improving the skills of migrants (for example, language competences in the hegemonic language or in the standard register) and the question of how the integration of migrants can be optimized. Instead, the migration pedagogy approach analyzes the power of institutional and discursive orders of belonging, and explores the question of how the capacity to act with dignity might be cultivated under given conditions without unreservedly affirming and accepting these conditions.
The decision to examine the relationship between migration and education from the perspective of migration pedagogy goes along with the interest in examining orders of belonging in the migration society, and the power relations that arise from them, as well as the investigation of enabled or hindered learning processes of all people – no matter what position or status they have in the respective migration society. The orders of belonging are historically developed structures that create subjective experiences of symbolic distinction and classification, experiences of empowerment and efficacy, and biographical experiences of contextual location. Membership, efficacy, and connectedness are the constitutional analytic elements of belonging (Mecheril 2003, 118–251).
Modern states and societies distinguish between those who belong to the particular societal context and those who do not. They accomplish this using natio-racial-culturally coded patterns in a highly complex, often contradictory, and ever-changing context. The education system and educational approaches play an important role in the affirmation and reproduction of these patterns of distinction in part due to the institutionalization of a special form of social work involving ‘work with migrants,’ or because schools may employ the mechanisms of institutional discrimination. Pedagogy also has the potential and possibilities to reflect upon these patterns and the practices that confirm them, as well as to consider and promote alternatives. Migration pedagogy focuses on the effects of natio-racial-culturally coded orders on people and their learning processes, on processes of becoming a subject as well as on educational practices that reaffirm, yet also shift and sometimes transform these orders. The societal circumstances and realities that are connected to postcolonial (see Dhawan and Castro Varela 2015) and transnational migration concern all areas of education, including elementary education, art education, adult education, and all levels of educational activity, including organizational forms, methods, contents, and the skills of professionals in the educational field. Educational institutions play a central role in the processes of affirming, iteratively generating, and, often, ‘naturalizing’ natio-racial-culturally coded orders of belonging. Not least, the most important pedagogical institution, the school, is a sphere in which individuals are introduced to preconceived understandings and practices structured by natio-racial-culturally coded orders that are intersectionally connected to other classifications such as gender and class. Educational institutions are productive with regard to the symbolic positioning of pupils. These positions – for example, as ‘migrant’ or ‘non-migrant,’ or ‘verbally limited’ or ‘able to speak’ – must be understood as the effects of practices of societal distinction, which, both existing within and extending beyond educational fields such as school-teaching, are taken up and affirmed by pedagogy.
This can be exemplified by taking a brief look at the portrayal of contents relating to migration society in German textbooks. Franz Pöggeler asserted that the existence of “migrants and foreigners was first dealt with in textbooks in the late 70s” (Pöggeler 1985, 35). Today migration is a well-established topic in German textbooks. For example, in the context of the project “Migration in Textbooks at the Georg Eckert Institute,” Hanna Schissler (2003) points out that it would be “unfounded […] to assume that German textbooks do not address the topic of migration,” adding that textbooks are better than their reputation suggests in that they have adopted the desired didactic shift in perspective from the majority society to ‘migrants’ (Schissler 2003, 43–44). However, Dirk Lange and Sven Rößler (2012) assert that education authorities and textbook publishers have shown increased sensitivity to the significance of migration, and migration appears on its own and in connection to other topics in the textbooks examined, though in quantitative terms (that is, the number of dedicated pages), its treatment was brief in comparison to other subjects. There are numerous findings available in the existing literature that describe the way people are portrayed and represented as migrants or as non-migrants, in a particular natio-racial-culturally coded symbolical status. One pattern of representation that has remained unchanged for decades is the construction of ‘migrants’ as ‘foreigners’ or ‘Others.’ Various studies point to a particular dichotomy, wherein ‘migrant’ is coded as its own natio-racial-cultural group and is contrasted against the ‘German national community’ (e.g., in Höhne, Kunz, and Radtke 2005, 592; Lange and Rößler 2012, 148). The discourse-analytical study on “images of strangers” in German textbooks conducted by Höhne, Kunz, and Radtke (2005) showed that over time, the attributed and ascribed ‘foreignness’ of this group increased steadily; first ‘guest worker,’ then ‘foreigner,’ and finally ‘asylum seeker’ (Höhne, Kunz, and Radtke 2005, 598). Additionally, the authors discovered that the figure of the ‘migrant as a foreigner’ previously found in books was also present in other media, reflecting a sort of national consensus.
The differentiation between ‘aliens,’ ‘migrants,’ and/or ‘foreigners’ and the society of ‘Germans’ results in an additional dichotomy: the contrast between ‘us’ and ‘them.’ The construction of an ‘us’ is grounded in the conception of an ethnic-racially and culturally coded homogeneous nation. The indirect construction of this dichotomy is evident in the treatment of issues such as homeland, foreignness, immigration, integration, the acquisition of German citizenship, xenophobia, and racism (see Pokos 2011). Such conceptions of homogeneity are problematic first because migration is dealt with as a constant exception (Stöber 2006, 77). Second, such conceptions lead to self-perpetuating stereotypes and reductive descriptions of the ‘Others’ as the only bearers or members of another ‘culture’ (Stöber 2006, 78). Even the supposedly positive function of cultural enrichment reinforces a thinking that distinguishes between ‘us’ and ‘them’ and leads to a reification of difference.
The cultivation of difference and cultural normalization of dichotomy in textbooks must, according to research, have significant effects on pupils whose ‘foreignness’ is addressed in the book. Taking difference into consideration can have exclusionary effects; even recognition is not a practice that is free from power. Textbooks are a specific medium that is meant to initiate processes of learning, and thus in part to ‘speak’ directly to the reader in the form of questions and tasks: “In this arrangement, the migrant children are given the task of giving information about ‘their culture’” (Höhne, Kunz, and Radtke 2005, 602). The reading book Zebra asks second graders “What countries are the children in this class from?” (Zebra 2010, 87). Asking children to see and understand themselves as ‘foreign’ or as ‘migrant’ children in a school environment creates a powerful direct and indirect appeal to the pupil to position himself or herself in a natio-racial-culturally coded symbolic space. However, educational relationships and pedagogical institutions were not adequately understood, if they would not be conceived with regard to their contribution to the transformation of these existing patterns of distinction and positioning. A critical approach to education in a migration society seeks to strengthen this understanding.
4Migration-Pedagogical Research as Criticism (of Hegemony)
Up to this point, this paper has described migration pedagogy as a critical practice. What this means shall be briefly explained in the following with reference to the concept of criticism. Criticism, as it is understood here, is a social practice that should be differentiated, for example, from cavils or complaints. “The question of the conditions and the possibility of criticism appears wherever given conditions are analyzed, judged, or rejected as false. In this sense, criticism is a constitutive part of human practice” (Jaeggi and Wesche 2009, 7). This general human practice can be found in the sciences as well as in the arts or media. Scientific criticism does not simply present moral, aesthetic, or political judgments on societal structures and phenomena, as its primary concern is not normative judgment, but rather analysis and reflection on societal reality. At the same time, it is hardly convincing to describe every scientific statement on societal relations and developments as a critical practice, as this can contribute to the leveling or trivialization of those scientific practices that explicitly act as criticism. “Criticism cannot simply consist of stating how something is; it also has to take a position on the matter […], how something should be or likewise should not be” (Jaeggi 2009, 279). Scientific criticism is normative in a very specific sense.
Criticism represents a non-affirmative mode of thought about established empirical structures and processes, and is disruptive in this regard. Thus, any reproach of criticism that suggests that criticism should be ‘beneficial and constructive’ misses the point and fails to grasp the nature of criticism. The argument that criticism is corrosive or not constructive hollows out and levels criticism’s content. The aim of criticism is not to preserve and improve given circumstances. Criticism is ultimately a practice that must claim to (provisionally) set aside the law of the given without meeting any requirement to establish a new law. In this sense, criticism possesses a constitutive tendency toward destruction or non-constructiveness, making it suspicious and uncomfortable for a culture that is bent upon the endless perfection of what already exists.
The analysis of the effects of the supposedly legitimate (and allegedly without alternative) institutionalized asymmetric relation between a natio-racial-culturally coded ‘us’ and ‘them’ is of great importance for critical migration research. These relations are not simply the result of oppressive structures, as the subject is “bound to seek recognition of its own existence in categories, terms, and names that are not of its own making, the subject seeks the sign of its own existence outside itself, in a discourse that is at once dominant and indifferent” (Butler 1997, 20). Orders of belonging create inferior and superior subjects who remain tied to the logic of these orders.
Because dominance and hegemony cannot be reduced to force and oppression, there is a need for a concept of hegemony that includes the ambivalence of domination and the momentum of compulsion and hindrance, as well as concession and facilitation. In this sense, domination can be understood as an institutionalized, relatively permanent and temporarily solidified, structured and structuring social relationship, in which the opportunities for the mutual exertion of influence are asymmetrically allotted. In contrast to power relations based on force, relations of hegemony are characterized by an asymmetry that is taken for granted. As a reality that is built upon a solid history of individual experiences, such asymmetric relations appear to be implicit, unalterable, or putatively natural. Critical migration research examines the supposedly legitimate institutionalized asymmetric relations of difference, which are not only implicit, but represent, in their implicitness, impalpable asymmetric relations.
Against this backdrop, critical migration research has three main goals. In the sense in which Lawrence Grossberg (1997, 257) has described the central interest of cultural studies (“Cultural studies is always interested in how power infiltrates, contaminates, limits and empowers the possibilities that people have to live their lives in dignified and secure ways”), we can say that critical migration research is concerned with the analysis of those power structures of the migration society that hinder the opportunities of subjects to live a freer existence, and that limit their dignity. Second, critical migration research addresses subjectivization processes that take place within the context of these structures. In the frame of a non-or post-orthodox critical understanding, terms such as ‘freer existence,’ ‘hinder,’ and ‘dignity’ cannot and should not be conclusively determined, but instead need a constant conceptual reflection and empirical debate. If we are interested in analyzing the intrusion and penetration of power into the opportunities that “people have to live their lives in dignified and secure ways” (Grossberg 1997, 257), if we are interested in investigating the ways that power curtails people’s options and opportunities, then we cannot avoid dealing empirically and conceptually with issues such as obstruction, limitation, and marginalization, as well as resistance. The fact that we are dealing empirically, here, with diverse forms of hindrance and facilitation that can be flexibly connected, formed into new constellations in specific contexts, decoupled, and reconnected, and thus inhibit simple analyses and suggestions for change, should not and cannot hamper efforts to deal with the basic fact of uneven relations of hindrance/facilitation. In a context marked by a commitment to criticism, it is impossible to abandon the motive to analyze the possibilities of people to live their lives in a more dignified and secure way. It is however necessary to keep the conception of what it means to live in a ‘dignified and secure way’ open, and to return to these conceptions and address these phenomena again and again in an interminable project of criticism. Third, critical migration research focuses on the analysis of possibilities for and forms of the shifting und transformation of orders of belonging and hegemonic structures of domination, as well as resistance to and within these orders and structures. Relations of domination are neither strictly determinative nor necessary; they feature spaces and latitude for action and are contingent. Critical migration research is very much concerned with the exploration of these spaces and options for contingency, because in this spaces may be researched practices that approach the comparative forms of ‘freer’ and ‘more dignified.’ The ways in which these may be ‘freer’ and ‘more dignified’ in any specific context is a topic for conceptual and empirical analysis. That which is ‘freer’ and ‘more dignified’ appears in varied contexts, diachronic and synchronic, differently. It is not fixed, and it is precisely this aspect of not being fixed, this modulation and variation, that must be understood.
Migration-pedagogical research explores orders of belonging as hegemonic forms of differentiation that allow members of a given society to make sense of societal phenomena in symbolic, material, institutional, and discursive terms, as well as to make sense of their own position in society. In other words, people experience, recognize, and understand societal reality and their own position within it with the help of natio-racial-culturally coded orders of belonging. In this context, the migration-pedagogic approach deals first with the examination of the situated or local generation of differences (for example in a school), and second with the analysis of general discursive practices, political or legal regulations (related to educational issues), and socio-economic conditions. Within the interrelation of these two ‘analytical levels,’ educational migration research concerns itself primarily with the investigation of the relationship between situated practices and the more general structures that generate relations of difference and orders of belonging. It thereby examines relations of belonging and difference as orders that display a certain inertia and inevitability, as well as relations that are historically and regionally determined and originated in specific contexts; it examines relations and orders of belonging not only with regard to the power that such relations exert over individuals, but also with regard to where and how subjects problematize, change, and shift these orders of belonging, giving them new meanings. Of particular interest here is the analysis of the contribution of educational institutions and pedagogical discourses concerning orders of belonging and opportunities to deal with or change these relations. Migration-pedagogical research examines societal structures, rules, and practices in formal education institutions and beyond these institutions in such a way that processes of the transformation of symbolic relations between the self and the world become the subject of investigation, with a particular focus on those processes of symbolic transformations that refer to the question of freer and more dignified lives.
The greater part of the German language original was translated into English by Michael Larsen.
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