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Keynote Abstracts & Papers:

International Conference on Migration, Citizenship and Intercultural Relations

19 - 20 November 2009,Deakin University Australia

Keynote Abstracts:

KPN 001 - Emeritus Professor Riaz Hassan - Australian Muslims: Indicators of Social Inclusion
KPN 002 - Professor Michael Humphrey -‘The Domestication and Securitisation of Muslims and Islam as a National Security Project’
KPN 003 - Professor Stephen Castles - Migration, Citizenship and Precarious Labour: Global and Regional Perspectives in Times of Crisis
KPN 004 - Professor Ruth Fincher - ‘Transnationalism and social inclusion in the city’

Keynote Abstracts

KPN 001 - Australian Muslims: Indicators of Social Inclusion

Emeritus Professor Riaz Hassan
ARC Australian Professorial Fellow and Emeritus Professor, Flinders University, South Australia

Abstract:
This paper examines the demographic, social and economic position of Australian Muslims and its implications for their social inclusion. Although Australian Muslims come from more than 30 countries, the largest number, 38 per cent, are Australian-born and almost 40 per cent are younger than 20 years. Educationally they are high-achievers. Twenty-one per cent of adult Muslim men have a university degree compared with 15 per cent of non-Muslim Australians, yet their age-specific unemployment rates are two to four times higher than those of non-Muslim Australians. Overall 44 per cent of Australian Muslims had a job whereas the corresponding figure for Australian public was 57 per cent. Comparatively lower employment rates for Muslims and the general public in Australia also prevail in France, Germany and Britain. On other indicators of socioeconomic well-being Australian Muslims fall into a very disadvantaged category. For example their rate of home ownership is half the national average; 40 per cent of Muslim children are living in poverty, which is twice the Australian average; only 25 per cent of Muslim households have above-average household income while the corresponding figure for non-Muslim households is 34 per cent. These indicators suggest that a significant proportion of Muslim Australians occupy, both socially and economically, a relatively marginal position in Australian society. This marginalisation is conducive to the intergenerational transfer of disadvantage. It may also contribute to their alienation from Australian society and its values and, in addition, make them vulnerable to religious and non-religious radicalism. The paper will discuss these issues in some detail. It will argue that socioeconomic marginalisation and a sense of relative deprivation are often breeding grounds of religious and non-religious radicalisation. Theological and ideological impulses only further galvanise those who are socially and economically disadvantaged.

KPN 002 - ‘The Domestication and Securitisation of Muslims and Islam as a National Security Project’

Professor Michael Humphrey
Depart of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Sydney

The current so-called ‘problem of Muslim integration’ in Western secular national societies amounts to a post-multicultural revisionism re-imagining the nation-state as culturally singular in the age of globalization, global cities and transnational citizens. Muslims have been turned into nationally shared objects for transnational governance, a focus for national and international coordination of security, cultural critique and population management. Islam and Muslim cultural difference have been essentialized and constructed as embodied through a defensive politics of the domestication and securitization of Muslims in the West. Domestication seeks to redefine the cultural parameters of citizenship, especially through symbolic inclusion and exclusion, while securitization polices them as transnational objects of risk. Securitization and domestication are governance strategies based on the logic of spatial exclusion and inclusion through disciplining cultural bodies. While national sovereignty and territoriality have long been the focus of securitization what is new is the national/transnational dimension of governmentality and the impact of transnational securitization on culturally differentiated citizenship as conditional and degradable. But while securitization and domestication are state managed strategies they are at the same time expressions of transnational governmentality, the re-scaling of sovereignty up and down as one outcome of globalization. The political management of Muslim immigrants has also become a dimension of the increasingly complex relations with postcolonial Muslim states in which national security has been projected as intervention, democratisation, economic development, strengthening the rule of law and, in the case of Lebanon, Iraq and Afghanistan, the recovery of central state authority and legitimacy.

KPN 003 - Migration and Citizenship in the Making of a Global Labour Market

Professor Stephen Castles
Research Chair in Sociology, University of Sydney
Associate Director, Professor of Migration and Refugee Studies, International Migration Institute, University of Oxford

Abstract:
The central argument of this paper is that economic restructuring in the global North since the 1970s has been linked to a new international division of labour, in which workers are differentiated not only on the basis of human capital (education and qualifications) but also on criteria of race, ethnicity, gender, origins and legal status. The racialisation of labour and the hierarchisation of citizenship are central elements of the global labour market which developed during the neo-liberal ascendency from the late 1970s to 2008.

Migration has always been a way in which people seek to improve their livelihoods. Today, the mobility of labour and its differentiation into specific categories has become the basis of a new transnational class structure. People holding the ‘right’ passports and qualifications enjoy mobility rights which come close to global citizenship. People from the South who lack formal skills can often only move irregularly, running enormous risks.. Such workers are effectively non-citizens, and their exclusion from rights is justified through racialisation and gender stereotypes.

Neo-liberal practices such as temporary and causal employment, chains of sub-contracting and informalisation affect both native and migrant workers. However, it is disadvantaged and vulnerable workers – migrant women, irregular workers, ethnic and racial minorities – who get the most precarious positions. But the deprivation of human and worker rights is giving rise to new social movements, such as the strikes of migrant workers in Dubai in 2006, the migrant rights demonstrations of 2006 in the USA, and the movements of youth of migrant background in European cities. The global financial crisis of 2008 could be a turning point, but the direction is not predetermined: it may lead to new forms of exploitation of vulnerable groups, or to employment and migration regimes based on equal citizenship and rights for all.

KPN 004 - ‘Transnationalism and social inclusion in the city’

Professor Ruth Fincher
Professor of Geography, The University of Melbourne

Abstract:
Even as transnationals maintain their links to communities and places around the world, inhabiting their global social spaces, they are usually living in cities to which they have migrated (even if temporarily) and are contending with questions of social inclusion in their everyday urban contexts. It is clear that transnational social spaces of interaction range across varied geographic locales and may not be imagined as confined to single bounded places like the parts of particular cities. Nevertheless, the features of the cities of destination of transnational migrants deserve particular attention as contributors to their social inclusion or exclusion in their material home-places or work-places. This talk examines the relevance of the materiality and spatiality of destination cities for transnational migrants as they simultaneously maintain their networks of overseas connection and their local social practices. It uses a case study of temporary transnationals (students) in central Melbourne, to demonstrate that where the built forms and institutional arrangements of cities discourage local intercultural encounters for temporary migrant transnationals, their response in daily practice is to reinforce their transnational connections by associating with their peers from the same country of origin. Intercultural social inclusion is precluded in this context, though the formation of a transnational network of student peers is probably facilitated.