This paper addresses ethnic identity reactions of young British Turks to negative stereotypes against Turkish people and Turkey during the Brexit. Existing social psychological research on ethnic minority groups and immigrants suggest that, once one’s group identity is threatened, they attempt to react to their perceived inferiority through different reactive identity strategies to attain a positive social identity. This perceived discrimination can increase in-group identification amongst minority members. The reactive ethnicity pattern was also seen in the case of some participants in the way they responded to the Vote Leave Campaigners who produced a poster with the slogan “Turkey (population 76 million) is joining the EU” to reinforce their identification with their ethnic group in order to defend their threatened self-images and collective dignity. They became self-conscious and sensitive to their ethnicity because it is a defence to threatened self-images and collective dignity. Accordingly, Turkish identity is one of the most sensitive issues for the young British Turks. In this paper, I will discuss how the young British Turks talk about and respond to the Brexit in the context of existing social psychological scholarship.

It is now common-sense to say that race is ‘taboo’ in France, and that French state universalism is ‘race-blind’ or ‘colour-blind’. The denial of racism in France, however, has not been studied through the lens of ignorance studies. Internationally, critical studies of race and racism have been late to take up insights of ignorance studies, and vice-versa. This paper contributes to the budding field of racial ignorance studies by providing a novel account of its means of reproduction in the French national context. This paper will analyse the production of white ignorance in France through the study of the convergence of different political projects around the notion of ‘anti-white racism’. More specifically, it will look at recent legal cases in which purported victims of ‘anti-white racism’ have come to be defended by three apparently contradictory political movements: the far-right, establishment antiracist organisations and the neoliberal state. This paper sets out to analyse the common ideological formation of ‘racial nationalism’ underpinning these political movements: the use of (distorted) racial equality themes by the far right and the neoliberal state to advance their xenophobic projects, and the involvement of anti-racism in themes of the right. Through the analysis of this convergence around ‘anti-white racism’ and the ideological formation of ‘racial nationalism’, this paper will expand and deepen discussion about the practices of ignorance involved in reproducing the racial status quo. This discussion expands existing sociological research on racial ignorance, necessary to understand its specificity in the French national context, as well as to contribute to comparative debates on the continuities and local variations of global white supremacy and global white ignorance.

This paper emerged from the theoretical approach I adopted in my PhD research. To develop an analysis on the ways in which LGBTQI Zimbabwean activists enact their sexual citizenship in their post-colonial context through their political action I embraced a decolonial and queer perspective and focused on the notion of a performative sexual citizenship. To contribute to understanding the relationships of LGBTQI activists with citizenship in Zimbabwe, I structured this approach intersecting two currents of citizenship studies. The first, sexual citizenship (Evans, 1993; Richardson, 2017, 2018, 2005), highlights how sexuality and gender are formally and customarily institutionalised and incorporated within the public material world, their regulation being a fundamental mechanism for the exercise of and the distribution of inclusion and exclusion. This perspective is useful to understand the situation of sexual and gender minorities in the post-colonial state and why they are excluded from full citizenship. Secondly, from an ethical position of developing the research as a form of reparative scholarship and with the aim of emphasizing the agency of LGBTQI Zimbabwean activists, I adopt a performative approach to citizenship, understanding it as the ‘practices of becoming claim-making subjects’ (Isin, 2017, 2008: 16). This perspective allows focusing on the politics which precede the legal status of membership in a state, that is, examining the acts through which subjects enact themselves as citizens, or ‘those to whom the right to have rights is due’ (Isin, 2008, 18) regardless of their formal status. This framework allows bypassing the opposition between being citizens and non-citizens. This ambivalence in relation to belonging in the polity is something which sexual minorities often face, having formal access to some rights but limited access to other entitlements and the moral recognition as part of the heteronormative community (Evans, 1993). It also queers the focus from the normative orders of citizenship to the acts performed by political subjects which disrupt the order reframing the sense of what is possible and creating possibilities of a citizenship that is yet to come (Isin and Nielsen, 2008, 4).

Digital technologies provide a potential platform for the voice and agency of diverse student groups through online social interactions. Educational technologies not only provide digitalized external symbolic storage systems but also extend students shared social memory. Both formal and informal technologies create spaces for research students’ identity construction. This proposal discusses the connections between digital technologies and online research students’ identity production and sense of belonging in a fully online learning environment. While theoretical analysis of students’ sense of belonging and discussions on students’ identity has been widely covered in the available literature, little has been written about research students’ understanding of digital technologies impact on their self-discovering and how their collective forms of belonging are shaped by formal and informal online social networking. The author uses the conceptual framework of ‘figured worlds’, a tool for studying emerging identities in certain educational contexts. Drawing on an ethnographic approach, the author attempts to incorporate visual methods to flesh out the multi-dimensional aspects of research students’ identity and sense of belonging in virtual learning. The proposal also shows the intended methodology, research design, and expected outcomes.