Confessions of a Customs and Immigration Officer (original) (raw)
Related papers
2016
This reflective scholarly essay explores privilege and institutional oppression as complex and multifaceted systems that merit the immediate attention of educators. Employing the Critical Race Theory (CRT) method of counterstorytelling, personal narrative in the form of autobiographical reflection describes the social-emotional impact and immobilization from encountering recurrent injustice, discrimination, and racism in the United States. Airports are viewed as a microcosm of structural isms in society, including but not limited to racism, classism, sexism, ableism, and religionism. Collective social action and transformative education, focused on increasing understanding and dismantling power and privilege, are encouraged. With significant social disparities and inequities, the author asserts that there is a deep need for critical, humanistic, and social justice education.
Policing the Nation: Acculturation and Street-Level Bureaucrats in Professional Life
Sociology, 2015
Assimilation of migrants is assumed to happen through acculturation, which is depicted as neutral, unintended and invisible. In most accounts the role of social actors is pushed into the background, and the conditions that shape and determine the direction of the acculturation are ignored. A further critique of the acculturation concept is that the content of the conveyed culture is not disclosed nor are the outcomes hinted at. We argue that the concept of norm images redresses these criticisms by eliciting the cultural content and specifying the role of actors, that is, professionals, in the conveyance of culture. Using the example of the Amsterdam police force, we demonstrate that police officers impose crucial elements of the Dutch nationalistic discourse, specifically language and loyalty, on migrant citizens and migrant colleagues alike. Thus these police officers operate as reproducers of the social order cemented by Dutch nationalism.
Journal of Borderlands Studies, 2015
Surveillance systems are an element of everyday life in Canada, implemented through a variety of strategies for a multitude of reasons. Regardless of differences in orientation and purpose, surveillance systems wield considerable influence over individuals and groups. Given this influence, surveillance studies are an important area of sociological inquiry that have garnered substantial theoretical development. However, relatively little theorizing has approached experiences with surveillance from a diasporic perspective. In order to support such inquiries, a theoretical model is constructed that examines experiences during Canadian border crossing in relation to race, invasive surveillance practices, and diaspora development. Based on the model presented, I maintain that perceptions of treatment during border crossing experiences are a means by which individuals structurally position themselves based on identity characteristics such as race and religious orientation within the broader cultural identity. Specifically, in the post 9/11 era of intensifying border surveillance, persons of particular racial heritage have been targeted by surveillance efforts at the Canadian border and this differential treatment is more likely to produce problematic diasporas. Negative experiences with actual or perceived omnipresent and oppressive surveillance systems may foster the development of problematic diasporas by accentuating difference. The model draws together existing theoretical frameworks to call attention to central components associated with the application of discriminatory surveillance systems and provides a foundation for future research. This area of inquiry is particularly relevant given the changing face of Canadian immigration and, as such, the Canadian population as a whole
Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2013
In this paper we report an analysis of individual and group interviews with 38 Scottish Muslims concerning their encounters with authority – especially those at airports. Our analysis shows that a key theme in interviewees’ talk of their experience in this context concerns the denial and misrecognition of valued identities such as being British, being respectable, and being Muslim. One reason why such experiences are so problematic concerns the denial of agency associated with being positioned in terms that are not one’s own. The implications of these findings for understanding the dynamics of intergroup relations are discussed.
No race at work? A metapragmatic perspective on ethnicity in a training for security officers
2019
No race at work? A metapragmatic perspective on ethnicity in a training for security officers. Intro Today I want to raise questions in terms of the power and the violence that are involved in the production of academic knowledge as it is always linked to the fixation of meaning and the imposition of a point of view. My analysis of spoken discourses seems to point to what we have learned to call 'race', an abstraction that wouldn't land well among research participants. However, I will point to the complexities that are involved, and acknowledge them in the understanding of what is going on. In doing so I will argue for "a greater awareness of transcription form" (Ochs 1979: 72) and argue that ethnography is much more than just the analysis of transcripts and necessarily involves me and the participants' biographical, economical, ethnic, and social position next to a wide array of contextualization cues that inform the meaning of the social interaction (cfr. Vigouroux 2007; 2009). Outline First, I will give you the context of my research. Second, I will address research as a fundamental power process and will introduce my origo. Third, I will present two pieces of data, my analysis and questions it raises. Fourth, I will conclude by arguing that as research is power it entails violence and therefore I need to navigate the tensions that arise between on the one hand a thick description that recognizes complexities and contradictions and on the other hand the imposition of order and abstractions that come with what researchers do. Context Following the March 22, 2016 Brussels suicide attacks, the Brussels government provided funding for the Brussels Public Transport Company (BPTC) to train and hire 107 security officers, increasing security staff with 50%. My gate of entry was their training and the required French-Dutch bilingualism. As only 7% of job seekers in Brussels know Dutch, while the majority is Francophone, 15 weeks of Dutch classes were offered to candidate security officers to pass the required Dutch language test. I did ethnographic research between July 2017 and December 2018. I followed 4 teams in training and subsequently 4 teams at work in 4 different metro stations. As BPTC's security
Policing Airport Spaces: The Muslim Experience of Scrutiny
Post-9/11, airports are one place where citizens are more likely to have interactions initiated by authorities and this may be even more so for Muslims; certainly, this is suggested by the phrase, ‘flying while Muslim’. In this article, I first review research conducted with Scottish Muslims, which found that the experience of being routinely stopped, treated with disrespect, having valued identities such as Britishness and respectability denied or (in the case of Muslim identity) devalued, and feeling publicly humiliated, is having a negative impact on relations with authorities (and potentially the wider community). I will then present a case study conducted with staff at a Scottish airport, focusing on the structural and organizational factors that may warrant Muslims’ concerns about being misrecognized as ‘other’ and dangerous, and constrained in how they may behave in the airport space. This research highlights areas for further investigation and intervention.
The Anthropology of Airports: Security and the Apparatuses of State Borders
In recent years, scholars across disciplines have increasingly turned their attention toward the study of international airports, especially in the context of “security”. The regulatory forces that exist in airports are meant to protect political livelihood from perceived foreign threats. These forces manipulate mobility, construct identities, and impact economies. For anthropologists, airports are both physical and symbolic sites of complex social, political, and economic activities. These activities have a tremendous impact on people at local, regional, national, and supra-national scales. Using a broad- based literature review and border theory, this thesis examines several functions of airports as contemporary borders, concentrating on the security apparatus. Building from this view, three aspects of security are highlighted: personal security, economic security, and state security. An examination of airports and the related security initiatives demonstrates how important it is for anthropologists and other scholars to build on existing research through ethnography.