 Firstly, welcome to this Development Seminar. Today's seminar is on Islamophobia in the name of women's rights. Our speaker is Sara Farris, who is a senior lecturer in the Sociology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Max Weber's Theory of Personality, Individuation, Politics and Orientalism in the Sociology of Religion, which was published in 2013, and in the name of women's rights, The Rise of Feminism, which was published this year. Her discussant is Lindsay German, an activist and an academic, a lecturer at the University of Hertfordshire, and a founding member of the Stop the Walk Coalition and a prominent organizer of demonstrations against Islamophobia. So Sara will give her talk, followed by a response from the discussants, and then we will open up the floor for your questions. If you want to tweet during this seminar, the hashtags are hashtag soestepstudies and hashtag ESRC. So Sara? Thank you. Hear me well? Okay. So first of all, thanks a lot, Faizi, for inviting me and the Development Studies department here at SOAS. It's really an honour to be here, and wow, look at you. I mean, so many people. I wasn't expecting this crowd, so it's great. So today what I want to do is really, I'm presenting my book, the book I've just published, so I want to give you a bit of, not of a summary of the book, but I want to go through especially what are the main points, and I'd like to have a discussion with you about this. But I thought I would begin by telling you a bit about what prompted me to write this book in the first place. So it was 2011. It was a time when I was not living in this country, and together with colleagues we organised a conference on the mobilisation of women's rights by various right-wing parties across Europe. The book by Jasbir Puar on homonationalism, which some of you might be familiar with, had just been published in 2007. And in this book, for those of you who are not familiar with the work of Jasbir Puar, she analysed, she uses the notion of homonationalism to analyse what she calls the collusions between homonormativity, homonormative frameworks, and American nationalism. More precisely, she looks at the ways in which American nationalism, particularly after 9-11, began foregrounding Muslims as homophobic and instead portraying the United States as the country of gay rights and gay liberation. But also she looks at some of the collusions between some sections of the gay movement in the United States and American nationalism. So what was interesting about her book was that she was among the first, I would say, to highlight, to look at the ways in which emancipatory projects such as gay rights were instrumentalised by non-emancipatory political formations or within non-emancipatory political frameworks. And also lots of work had begun to be, was done about the ways in which the feminist emancipatory projects had been mobilised increasingly within non- emancipatory frameworks. And obviously I'm thinking, talking about 9-11, I'm thinking of the ways in which the war in Afghanistan, the bombing on Afghanistan, had been justified in the name of women's rights, in the name of liberating women from the burqa. So all these discussions were there and we, my colleagues and myself working on this conference were quite keen on understanding what was going on. For me was also an opportunity to somehow bring together different parts of my work because I am a gender and migration scholar and I also work on representation of migrant and Muslim women. So I was particularly struck also in light of my work by all the ways in which the representation of migrant and Muslim women was increasingly appropriated within these Islamophobic discourses. So I just want to give you maybe some examples of what exactly I mean for those of you who might not necessarily be familiar with what I mean by how these right-wing parties are appropriating women's equality or gender equality issues within Islamophobic frameworks. This is a poster from the Northern League which is an Italian anti-immigration far-right party and this poster is from 2006 and it was the time in which there were discussions in Europe about the possibility of allowing Turkey to enter into the European Union and this is what the Northern League writes. The message is very very clear if you allow Turkey to enter into the European Union this is what will happen to women in Italy or to white women to European women so they will be turned into very women just behind in a cage basically. This is Marine Le Pen she is as you know the leader of the Front Nationale, the National Front, the far-right party in France and as she says I'm scared the migrant crisis signals the beginning of the end of women's rights now what's tracking again here that is that the National Front in France is not exactly famous for being a party that cares about women it's been considered usually quite homophobic but also misogynist party and so the sudden endorsement of women's rights by Marine Le Pen again was as you can see it's just conceived within the framework of bashing migrants and the final example I have today is the graphic example at least is from Italy again the message I think is very very clear this woman is Laura an Italian name an Italian woman and the reason why she's like that is because she married a mad obviously an Arab sounding name what's interesting here I didn't have a more graphic example to show actually what I'm going to say but is that all these examples well apart from the one in the case of Marine Le Pen but these examples show the ways in which Muslims in particular have been foregrounded male Muslims have been foregrounded as sexual threats or threats to Europe more generally but these discourses as I will try to say also today they actually apply to non Western migrants more generally so one of the things that I want to discuss is the ways in which these gender dichotomy that it's been constructed by these parties and not only these parties in which the migrant Muslim non-Western non-white men is portrayed as the threat and the migrant Muslim non Western non-white woman is portrayed as a victim is something that we see very visibly and very vocally the case of Muslims but it doesn't it's not a discourse that is made just in the case of Muslims and I'd like maybe to have a discussion about all of these so these things I'm showing you the ways in which these parties are mobilizing have mobilized the women's rights against Muslims and immigrants has been analyzed also by other scholars I'm certainly not the only one who has been studying this what I found one of the reasons that also prompted me to write this book was that I was not entirely happy with the way in which these these analysis were done in a way by which I mean that I thought there was a tendency to overestimate or at least to overemphasize the political dimensions and the political implications of all of these discourses which don't get me wrong absolutely important and crucial particularly after 9-11 is obviously the war on terror or obviously plays a prominent role within within these discourses but at the same time particularly as someone who belongs to that strand of feminist theory that is social reproduction feminist and Marxist feminism I was particularly interested to see if we could find also a political economic logic to understand these discourses if we could also see somehow how these ideology that was increasingly present and widespread in Europe who would somehow be read also in light of political economy so that's really what these books try to do so I the books focus is really an analysis of the convergence on anti-Islam politics by three very different political agendas in France, Netherlands and Italy so I focus exclusively on these three countries although as maybe we can discuss in the Q&A there are possibilities also for generalizations or in any case for discussions also how these issues and this phenomena play out also in other countries and in particular I look at the convergence among the three these three actors right-wing nationalists some feminists and femocrats and by femocrats I mean a female bureaucrats in gender equality state agencies and finally neoliberal policies so what I have been really trying to understand is how is that these three very different political formations and political agendas tend to converge when it comes to describing Muslim men in particular as a sexual threat as misogynist and oppressors of women and Muslim women in particular as victims to be rescued so the book is also an attempt to understand particularly the political economy of these rescue narratives so-called rescue narratives I want to give you here some examples when I say that some feminist the prominent feminists have been part of these of these ideology of these way of portraying Muslims as a sexual threat to women this is perhaps one of the most prominent and clear examples which is Elizabeth Badinte she's a very famous French feminist philosopher very famous in France but I would say also in the English speaking world because her work has been translated also into English so this is what she writes in 2010 when asked by the French government to give a statement as to why the government should ban the full veil in public spaces this is what she says in this possibility to be of being looked at without being seen and to look at the other without him her being able to see you I see the satisfaction of a triple perverse enjoyment the enjoyment of one's supremacy over the other the enjoyment of the exhibitionist and the enjoyment of the voyeur I think we are dealing with very sick women and I do not think that we have to be determined according to their pathology so that's what she stands for and again as I said that she is a very prominent feminist not a right-wing feminist although perhaps after these texts we might suspect that that's not exactly the case but in any case she's not identified in France as right-wing she does not identify herself as right-wing so one of the things perhaps I should say is that when I look at the feminist what I call the anti-Islam feminist front we are not dealing just with self-identified right-wing feminist or self-identified right-wing femocrats those who work in general quality state agencies but also often left-wing feminists I'm not saying they are the majority but they have been very vocal in the last ten years and certainly they have been given a prominent space within the mainstream media I want to give you this is an example of a neoliberal policy because as I said I'm looking at the convergence among the nationalists the feminists and now I want to give you an example of a neoliberal policy document to start explaining a little bit to you what I mean by this this is perhaps it will take me some time to explain how this is neoliberal but this is basically comes from a booklet is in French and it comes from a book that which is which targets migrants it is given to migrants as soon as they arrive in France and it is given to them within the framework of the so-called civic integration programs now these programs are increasingly have been increasingly implemented across Europe you have something similar here in the UK although there are also differences with these other documents but basically the thing this document says quite in a way even in innocent so it says that if you're a migrant you come to this country you need to understand that men and women are equal so if we can say that on the surface there is nothing wrong in telling people that women and men are equal and women should be respected the problem comes because the ways in which the gender equality framework is foregrounded within these civic integration programs is done in a way is premised upon the idea and the assumption that these migrants do not do not know anything about women's rights that they need to be taught what gender equality is about because they are assumed not only to be ignorant about gender equality but also to be misogynist so there are all these assumptions within the civic integration materials and the other reason why these civic integration materials are neoliberal actually the main reason is because as I will explain a little bit more in a second they are framed within a work fair logic which is a neoliberal work fair logic according to which in order to be rescued from these misogynist frameworks these migrant women need not only to integrate by acknowledging that they live in a country that celebrates women's rights but also they need to work so they can't be a burden for the welfare state they need to integrate economically so I will talk a little bit more about this because obviously this in many ways is the core of my argument and it goes at the core of this political economic logic of what I'm trying to say so these are the three driving questions of my book why are these different movements invoking the same trap and identifying Muslim men as one of the most dangerous threats to Western societies are we witnessing the rise of a new unholy alliance or is this seeming consensus across the political spectrum merely coincidental and contingent and why are Muslim women being presented with offers of emancipation and even rescue in a context of rising Islamophobia and anti-immigration sentiments particularly regarding employment and welfare so these are the questions that I try to address in this book in order to answer these questions I coined this term which is female nationalism which as you can tell he caused the concept of homonationalism that was very much an inspiration in many ways for my work although there are also several differences between my work and just before us work as we perhaps will discuss in the q&a so for female nationally female nationalism what I mean this is a concept is short for feminist and femocratic nationalism it refers both to the exploitation of feminist things by nationalists and neoliberals in anti-islam but as I will show and as I said already also anti-immigration campaigns and to the participation of certain feminists and femocrats in the stigmatization of Muslim men under the banner of gender equality female nationalism thus describes on the one hand the attempts of western european right-wing parties and neoliberals to advance xenophobic and racist politics through the touting of gender equality while on the other hand it captures the involvement of various well-known and quite visible feminist and femocrats in the current framing of Islam as a quintessential misogynistic religion and culture so with this concept I try to capture particular these convergence have been talking about to you and I have been giving new examples my point in the book is that female nationalism and this is one of the differences I have with just via puar cannot be simply understood as a free floating discourse as something that somehow belongs just to this mainstream media but I conceive of it as an ideology an ideological formation that springs from a specific mode of encounter of what I prefer to call a convergence and I will explain to you in a second why amongst different political projects and that is produced by and productive of a specifically economic logic so in the rest of this presentation I want to explain particularly two things why female nationalism is a convergence and why and in what sense it is a neoliberal political economy I will go very briefly on why it is a convergence so I was telling you at the beginning the the concept of homo nationalism that was introduced by just be poor was precisely trying to understand the association between gay rights and gay movements and american nationalism when she studied these for these associations just before talks of collusion so she in a way thinks that this association also there is an implicit or sometimes explicit intention by some sectors of the gay movements themselves to associate with these with these nationalist frameworks the other concept beside collusion that's been used to understand some of these weird associations these kind of unholy alliances was that of instrumentalization and it's also something I use sometimes so we often hear how right-wing parties are instrumentalizing women's rights how they are exploiting women's rights and these for example this is a concept that was used by Liz Fecchetta who you might know she is or she was the director of the the race studies center here in the UK and she was a wonderful article or what she calls in light and fundamentalism trying also to make sense of some of the things that have been describing now I wasn't too convinced by these two concepts for the following reasons first I don't think that the association between the feminist femocrats nationalists and neoliberals that I describe at least in the context that that I study are actually necessarily colluding I think that in many ways they are converging on this islamophobic space sometimes even in spite of the intentions of the actors so the feminists don't want to be associated necessarily with these right-wing nationalists and the right-wing nationalists are attacking the feminist in many ways so I thought it was more precise to talk about the convergence there is also more complex theoretical reason why I do that but perhaps if someone asks me a question during the q&a we can go into that and I thought I don't talk so much about instrumentalization because this would also be patronizing particularly towards the feminist because I think that these feminists even though they are not necessarily colluding with these nationalists but there are specific reasons why they are framing islam as misogynist and as a particular threat for gender equality in the west so it's not just about being instrumentalized these are the general reasons why I prefer to talk about convergence but I want to spend more time explaining to you why I talk about female nationalism as neoliberal political economy as I said there have been studies already that try to understand these convergences associations and as I said already the majority of them have particularly emphasized the political aspects and they have used a political framework to understand these these associations so I could say that the the main contribution that my book does is really that of trying to introduce this political economic lens into the discussion there have been however a few studies that also have tried to take the political economy economic aspects into account and here I'm thinking of the work of Sirma Bilge who is a Canadian feminist who also tried to understand the association between some Canadian feminists and the Canadian nationalist against Muslims in the Canadian context she tries to understand how neoliberalism plays a role into this but somehow my feeling with the works that have been done on this is that they tend to treat neoliberalism as the economic theater of operation for the encounter between these different array of forces but not as one of the main characters on stage so while I agree that neoliberalism is central for understanding this phenomena I argue that neoliberalism is not simply the contextual ground on which the female nationalist convergence takes place but it is itself constitutive of such a convergence when I say the contextual ground maybe I should use an example otherwise this could sound a bit obscure those scholars who say neoliberalism actually can help us to understand the association between these different forces but basically they say neoliberalism creates the conditions of possibility between these for these associations for these kind of collusions because neoliberalism tends to foreground the cultural elements and so is very in a way is the a very fertile soil for forms of cultural racism because within neoliberalism we don't want to talk about the material conditions or the economic aspects or the structural aspects behind for instance racism so in this sense by treating neoliberalism as this kind of horizon culturalist horizon within which we need to understand these forms of racism it seems to me that they are capturing something I'm not saying that there is not these aspects but we are not really looking at specific neoliberal policies we are not really looking at what neoliberalism is actually doing in terms of facilitating concretely these types of associations this is what I've tried to do and this is basically my main argument in the book and now I want to explain to you in what sense I think female nationalism needs to be understood in terms of political economy now this is a specific example that comes from the Netherlands one of the countries on which I one of the countries that I investigated in my work so in 2007 what was the minister of education culture and science which was also responsible for gender equality so it was the themocratic component so they launched the so-called a thousand and one force project which had previously been designed by the Pavan commission the Pavan commission was a commission specifically designed to address the problems of integration of migrant and ethnic minority women's in the in the Netherlands so this project these a thousand and one force project which you might detect already the Orientalist undertone the thousand and one night so this project sought to encourage women undergoing civic integration programs to participate in civil society by explicitly inviting these women to undertake volunteer work so in a bizarre twist of means and ends unpaid volunteer work was presented as the main way for reaching the goal of economic independence so one of the things I did in this in this project as I told you at the beginning as I mentioned briefly I looked specifically at these so-called civic integration programs now to get to give you a little bit more details about these programs basically they ask migrants since 2006 all in different European countries immigration and integration policies have merged which means that now migrants particularly those coming for family reunification which often tend to be women they are asked they have to demonstrate to be integrated in order to be given residency rights these works in different ways in different countries but the logic is the same for all of them not so how can they demonstrate to be integrated for example in the Netherlands they arrive and they need to go through a number of they need to attend courses which sometimes are quite expensive in which they learn the Dutch language and they also learn about the history and the values of the Netherlands so they need first of all to be familiarized with discussions and values and at the end of these three years this is the time they have to be integrated they have to do a test and this test asks them about the history of the country they test the level of language and the test also thinks like have you been involved in your children's education have you gone to see the teacher of your children if they have children so they are quite they also want these women to develop a portfolio of their integration and gender equality is very prominent in all of this and as I said they even want these women to watch videos women and men actually in which they are told or maybe in your country it is normal to be subject to domestic violence but we actually take it seriously and we have we have laws against it so again it is premised on the idea that these people somehow come from countries in which is normal to bash women and as I said this is incredibly strong within the civic integration programs but there are not just cultural aspects of these programs the economic aspects of this program has been completely understudied but it's actually very very important so particularly since 2007 the European integration fund has been instituted which is a fund which is it's been instituted specifically to basically give money to organizations and programs all across Europe to facilitate the integration of migrants now what is interesting about the civic integration European integration fund is that they tend to privilege at least to give lots of prominence to programs particularly targeting migrant women the idea is women in particular need to be emancipated integrated precisely because they come from these non emancipative cultures but also there is lots of emphasis in the idea that women these migrant women Muslim and non Muslim alike they need to find a job the premise again is that they don't work probably they don't have work experience because they come from backward cultures and they come from contexts in which they are not allowed to work so these programs give lots of emphasis to the idea that these women need to find jobs because they need to be emancipated because you know the economic integration is the best way to emancipate for a woman to be economically independent to be autonomous and so forth so what I did is I looked specifically at the programs funded within the European integration fund and I I went to see what these programs do so for example you find that in in the Netherlands these funds have been given to specific women's organizations or migrants organizations very often and sometimes very good organizations and they have been given for these organizations to develop initiatives and programs to help these women to find a job so one of the things that they did for example but this was actually governmental program partly funded by the European integration fund was to ask these women to volunteer to to in order to gain those skills that they need in order to find a job in the labor market that this is already very paradoxical because all of these emancipation discourse for those migrant women was foregrounded as a way for these women to be economically independent so it's absurd to say you need to be economically independent and then to actually ask them to volunteer which is not exactly again allowing them to gain any economic independence but what struck me and I think it's even more important to understand about these programs is that when you look at the jobs that these women are systematically and I want to stress systematically channel to do it is always jobs as babysitters cleaners within private households or in hotels and elderly carers so they are all exclusively jobs in the so-called social reproductive sphere so this for example is from an italian organization which is called Nosotras it's an organization composed of italian and migrant women particularly from south america but not only and this is a report you can actually find it online it's a report in which the organization is reporting on what they did with these european integration funds so they say this is how we used this money we accompanied migrant women to the job interviews so we helped for example with translations if they couldn't speak italian we try to help them in this way and so forth and this is what one of the women who actually she's a member of the organization she's probably actually i remember she's a migrant who's been living in italy for a long time and she says i accompanied migrant women to the job interview in almost all cases it is for care and domestic work so just to give you an example of how actually these are the only jobs that are actually left for these women so one of the things that i try to say in this book that what i find extremely paradoxical and actually what i call a performative contradiction is the way the the ways in which feminists and feminocrats in particular urge emancipation for muslim and non-western migrant women while channeling them towards the very sphere from which the feminist movement had historically tried to liberate women so this is not just a rhetorical contradiction but it's concretely performed in action so in other words there has been so much talk about emancipating muslim women emancipating migrant women but when we look concretely at the ways in which this emancipation takes place it is particularly in those sectors very low paid with a very low status that have no recognition from society and in many ways are not even considered work that and also they have been attacked particularly by the feminist movement as non emancipatory for women so i i really want to highlight what i find a very disturbing contradiction but it's not just the feminists who have this contradiction and here there is another aspect of this political economy of this ideology that i want to help you to understand and is really the core of my argument in the book as i said the the parties the nationalist right-wing parties that i analyze they as you as you might imagine and as you probably know they have particularly used a very strong anti-immigration rhetoric and so in a way one of the quest the driving questions i had in in this book as i told you the beginning was how is that these parties have this very strong anti-immigration rhetoric but then they talk about migrant women as victims to be rescued so there is this kind of gendered dichotomy a gendered we can say double standard which is applied within these racist discourses but again here it's not just about discourse there are very concretely very concrete material interests and very concrete economic logics behind this for me is one of the quintessential examples is a statement from Roberto Maroni who was the leader of the far right-wing party northern league i already showed you one of their posters and he said this in 2009 when he was the ministry of the interior so in the most prominent position in the country dealing with immigration 2009 just remember was the midst of the global economic crisis and it was a time in Italy as in other european countries that we where governments were increasingly talking about stopping quotas for immigration the political spectrum was going more right-wing because in the midst of the crisis there is a tendency to scapegoat migrants for the economic crisis so in Italy this discourse was particularly harsh also because we had the right-wing government and they they continually said we don't want any more migrants coming into this country and we are not going to do an amnesty for the migrants who are illegally present in the country because we want jobs for Italians first but he says so there cannot be a regularization for those who entered illegally for those who rape a woman so again see how easily this association is made the migrant is a sexual threat or for those who rob a villa but certainly we will take into account all those situations that have a strong social impact as in the case of migrant caregivers so in 2009 there was an exceptional regularization done only for migrant women because they work as caregivers in the country they are so-called badanti which means that they especially work for children and elderly people within Italian families so these right-wing parties were willing to close an eye to their anti-immigration rhetoric particularly in the case of these women because they are essential to the economies of these countries these countries simply cannot reproduce themselves literally on a daily basis that cannot provide the care needed for elderly people for children the cleaning up households hotels and so forth the preparations of foods if it were not for these migrant women and just think also of this is really one of the things that prompted this political economic understanding of this phenomena just think of the ways in which even here in Britain particularly after Brexit but not just after Brexit there has been lots of rhetoric and talk about how migrants are reducing the wages of native workers or stealing jobs from native workers and I have to say even within the Labour Party this discourse has been very kind of vague they have been at times also even recently they have also somehow reinforced this kind of ideas which are totally denied by the majority of studies that have done work trying to understand whether actually migrants lower wages or not but this is another story that I get we can discuss in the Q&A but what I want to say is that when you think of these this course is about migrants lowering wages or stealing jobs usually what we have in mind is the migrant men so just think even of UKIP there is a famous poster by UKIP that shows a British man begging on the street I don't know if you remember that poster but in any case even if you don't remember the point is in the public imagery the idea of the migrant who steals a job is always a male migrant it's never a female migrant and in fact even when Corbyn tries to say oh migrants are really useful for the economy the example he makes is always that of nurses who are in the majority of times female so what I'm trying to say and I really want to go to my conclusions now is that I think the main reason why perhaps the main is to straw but one of the the most important reasons why the there is this gender double standard is applied to migrant men and migrant women I believe it is because the women are playing a very different role within the contemporary European economies there is a willingness to say we want to rescue them we want to emancipate them we want to integrate them because actually we need them to carry out and to carry on doing these jobs and this work which is essential for the reproduction of our economy so if I had to give you like the perhaps one paragraph perhaps summarizing the main argument of my book I would say it is this which is the double standard applied to Muslim and non-western migrant women in the public imaginary as individuals in need of special attention and even rescue operates as an ideological tool that is strictly connected to their key role present or future in the reproduction of the material conditions of social reproduction Feminism nationalism should be understood as part and parcel of the specifically neoliberal reorganization of welfare labor and state immigration policies that have occurred in the context of the global financial crisis and more generally the western european crisis of social reproduction so that's why I think these political economic framework is actually very important to understand what's going on thank you very much all right and we'll now hand over to the discussants okay um I I would very much like to thank firstly Sarah for that uh very very interesting talking the talk and to the development studies people for for laying this on to the place in particular for inviting me I just in the few minutes that I've got it's very hard to kind of cover uh more than a few points so I hope that and obviously lots of people have lots of things to say I just wanted to make a few points in response to what uh to what Sarah said and to maybe bring out a few things which perhaps we can we can discuss a little bit the first is to really talk a little bit about this question of the sexualization of racism which uh which it when you look at racism and sexism has often been connected you know there's always been the sort of uh the discourse about black men being sexually aggressive to white women which was something that was common in the united states but and in brettly for that matter but I think with Islamophobia in the uh era of neoliberalism I think we've got the most sexualized uh racism that we've we've really seen and it's it's portrayed in all sorts of different ways as Sarah said it's portrayed in terms of the um the male migrants and muslims who are predatory who are rapists over she didn't talk about it but we're all aware of these cases where the grooming cases of mainly muslim men grooming young teenage white girls those those kind of things is this this on the one hand and on the other hand women who somehow are forced to wear veils or forced to wear the niqab or or the burqa or whatever it is and this kind of discourse I think is fantastically important in the whole way in which Islamophobia is being used and particularly one of the things it's also perhaps worth commenting on is the number of far-right female politicians that there are now if you think not just marina penn but in the aft in germany in a whole number of different parties so I think that's something that's very very interesting to kind of think about when we think about Islamophobia and also I think the role of the state in promoting some of these ideas which you know Sarah talked about the different elements of of female nationalism but I think this role of the state in terms of the prevent program in terms of its justification for wars or for immigration controls or any of the things that it talks about I think is very very much a question that how it you it instrumentalizes this idea of Muslim women in particular to to do those sorts of things I wanted to make a couple of points about some of the issues to do with work because I think it's very very interesting this point about work there which is is a general thing about the illiberalism I mean obviously it's been talked about today in terms of migrant women but it's true in general that work makes you free in the illiberal society that everybody has to work and that even if you're disabled even if you want to stay at home with your children this is a luxury which has denied you unless you are very very fortunate indeed and that you're you're in this sort of process of of work there and this is the idea that for women who are migrants to this country or to any other that somehow the the the path to sort of liberation is that you get a job where you're paid minimum wage where you're working in very insecure conditions and that you're subject to all the problems that people are faced with at work is is a grotesque distortion of any idea of work being a liberating being a liberating thing I think that it's it's also something I don't quite think I don't know if Sarah was was was saying this I don't think you can quite assume that second wave feminism was about just getting women into work there was a big element of women's right to work but there was also big elements of nursery rights of equal pay of some of those sorts of things and to me as somebody who was part of that generation I think it's always been about women's choice as to whether or not they wanted to work and we see this now very very clearly that maternity leave you can have for a short period of time but don't do it for too long because you'll lose your career pathways you'll lose being made lose your job although it's illegal although it's one of the things we don't really talk about but but actually there's a huge problem with women wanting to have maternity leave there's a huge problem with the gender pay gap in this country which is the figures that released last week so it's got worse again particularly for younger women so this idea that this is ideal of western society where women really do have it all and have achieved it all and somehow the women who are coming from these benighted poor countries and suffering from domestic violence is something that that's alien to women in Britain just simply isn't true what is it one or two women a week who are killed as a result of domestic violence I mean these are huge things but it's always now put in terms of the in terms of it's people who aren't part of western society western civilization who carry those things out so I think it's I think we need to look at what's happening not just in terms of it's a kind of continuum of second-wave feminism because there was always divisions in terms of second-wave feminism but I think that even today those who regard themselves as socialist feminists or Marxist feminists or on the left generally would reject the view of Muslim women or most of them I think reject but particularly in Britain it may be different perhaps in France I know that you know there's actually much more sort of problems with those sorts of those questions in France but I think in Britain that is true at the same time there's a division within feminism where a section of feminists have identified very very clearly with neo-liberal aims and who've seen themselves as this is about individual women's progression rather than the whole of the mass of women really succeeding in in going forward so that I think is another thing that I'd be interested to hear what what Sarah thinks about it and just perhaps finally the whole question of social reproduction of work I think it's absolutely true in terms of the women that you're describing I'm not sure if you look again at Britain if you look at say Muslim women and migrant non-western women which are the categories you talk about in the book in terms of both of them obviously being victims of racism and so on I'm not I mean there are differences here for example in this country there are very big settled Muslim communities particularly Pakistani Bangladeshi Gujarati and and so on whose work isn't just I mean there's quite high proportions of them are still in unpaid labor in the home higher than the average number but I think that that is something which is if you look at where those women are working they're working in a range of things retail and and all sorts of other things which isn't just the caring occupation so whether you can just say that all of this is about social reproduction jobs I think it's very important the role of these sorts of jobs these caring jobs but I think if you look at migrant labor and female migrant labor it takes much much wider forms in many in many instances so those are the kind of questions I wanted to I wanted to raise and I just I'd just like to say thank you very much for for doing this and I think that this is a topic that really is of such importance to people it isn't going to go away there's many many complicated questions and difficult questions and so on but it's a topic we really should see it's very very central to the way in which we think about things in our society all right thank you so before opening up to the floor I mentioned this leaflet that you got which is about Sarah's new book and it has a discount code on it so if you want to buy it definitely keep it so I'll open up to questions and we'll try to take three to four questions at once seeing and if possible try to keep them short thanks Sarah you've got another book to write because the Islamophobia is virulently generated in the United States with Israel lobby the the Israel lobby and the Zionist lobby even the whole of Congress and the Washington is occupied by it's a territory you see by Israel lobby nothing is raised you see where about of virulently 100 fold Islamophobia is generated in the United States and here I think you should look at and book another book Sarah you should write on that all right yeah thank you it's good evening especially because you're looking at European countries do you see any parallels between the discourses you analyze and the ones that were used during the colonial projects to legitimize the colonial political economy and you know discourses like the white civilizing project and black peril for example hi thank you two questions one is I would like to push you on your invitation to stress the kind of difference between convergence or collision that you were talking about in terms of just before as well so if you can offer a larger theoretical argument for that and I'm also wondering maybe it's a silly question but in the absence of the migrant crisis how would you have presented the kind of growth of Islamophobia do you think it would have happened so rapidly or or not I don't know just kind of thinking about if the migrant crisis hadn't happened how would we be talking about this today in the absence of the migrant crisis yeah right before I take the next one people would like to move into the empty seats that are now available we're seeing on the floor it's much more comfortable thanks a lot and I loved your presentation I'm actually enjoying the book very much I think mine are just explicatory questions so when you talk about convergence between right-wing agendas and feminist agendas and liberal policies I'd like to know if you can unpack a little bit more which feminist agendas because of course they're feminism's plural and if you're only talking about western liberal feminism what we know today is white feminism or instead it's trickier than that because then of course some of these claims can actually be used as you said at the beginning for emancipatory projects so if you can talk a little bit about differentiating what you mean by feminist agendas and the second is I think following from Lindsay's comment on work I wonder if you can actually spend some time to perhaps talk about the differences between the three cases because for instance if you look at the geography of social reproduction in Italy at the very least it works very differently so you don't have an incorporation of Muslim migrants Muslim migrant women as such in those activities as yet doesn't mean that will not happen but at the moment the estimates do not tell that story so we have actually geography of Latin Americans Eastern Europeans etc so I'm wondering if you can actually spend a few words on the differences on that thanks so thanks Lindsay a lot for those comments and questions so I will begin maybe addressing some of those first of all on second wave feminism I I would say I agreed with you and I agree that second wave feminism was not just about portraying work as emancipatory and in fact I would say that sections of second wave feminism and I'm thinking particularly of the Marxist feminist sections sections or components of that movement always and even the black feminist always had the position that work wage the work was exploitative and it was certainly not the real for the liberation or emancipation of women at the same time when my argument in the book is actually a little bit of a critique of an Nancy Fraser because I think Nancy Fraser was the one as you might remember in this very well known article about the ways in which second wave feminism somehow created the ground for neoliberalism I actually disagree with her argument because one of the things Nancy Fraser says in that article is that precisely the emphasis of the feminist in second wave on work as emancipatory was also one of the reasons why there are these affinities with neoliberalism now I disagree with her on this point because I think that we need to historicize very concretely the demand that second wave feminist the majority of them had four women to enter the workforce so second wave feminism really at least in continental Europe I think in some ways the story is different in the United States and in the UK but at least in continental Europe coincides with so-called Fordism and it's really towards the end of Fordism which means that Fordism was a period as you know in which there was the so-called the predominance of the so-called family wage and the male breadwinner and the majority of women from working class background and middle class background were fundamentally confined at home and I'm talking really about the continental european context here so it was not just middle class women who didn't go to to work because there was a family wage but it was also very much a working class context so I the argument I try to make is that the feminist in this during the second wave in the 70s in the 60s in the 70s asking for jobs for women were actually operating making the demand in a context in which women were confined at home and in fact it is the years in which we have the wages for housework campaign in which the domestic labor debate is one of the most important discussions within Marxist feminism but I would say feminism more generally so that we I think we need to understand the specific political demands in their own historical context and we cannot abstract for those that's my way of saying that I am critical of those positions who try to blame second wave feminism I don't think that's that simple I think we understand the demands of those feminists in those specific contexts and that's why I think so-called neoliberal feminism is actually very different because it's not about saying simply women have to go to work but it's about saying working powers you and so you need to work harder and harder in order to affirm yourself so again there is a different framework so I guess we agree on this because I think you were saying something something similar I would agree that in the UK that's why I want to stress that my work really is only about these three continental European countries and not about the UK and I'm sure there are ways in which what I'm saying perhaps does not apply to the UK because you are right that lots of women Muslim women and migrant women in the UK are not just confined in the social reproductive sector and that also has very much to do with the history of immigration in this country with the history of colonialism and immigration here we've in a way we are already seeing here the third generation of migrants in the UK in a country like Italy it's just in the last five years that we talk about second generations so also it's I think we need to see the differences in that sense and I agree with you here perhaps these political economic logic I am using it might not be necessarily that apt although I would actually be very interested in seeing what happens in this country in civic in civic integration programs I would be interested to see what I don't know I don't have the answer but it would be interesting to see if the civic integration programs in this country what do they do to women what do they tell them in terms of where do they can find a job and so forth because even in this country newly arrived migrant women still usually find jobs in these sectors all the Eastern European women are working as cleaners and the same goes for Filipino women South American women and so forth so I guess it also depends on the stages of immigration it might not be the case for ethnic minority and Muslim women although actually I have a good story in London about the Muslim women which is there was an article in The Guardian a couple of years ago about a new clean it was not a clean it was an elderly care company that got a prize as the best enterprise for ethnic minority people in London and what and what this company does they specialize in elderly care they provide elderly care to families across London and the the company is based in Tower Hamlet so they got the prize because the program was to help Muslim women in Tower Hamlet who are not working to to to work and to emancipate and to integrate in society by doing elderly care work so actually I'm not saying this is generalizable but I just thought it was an interesting example of how also in actually in this context we find this kind of rhetoric I will write another book thank you I don't know I don't know exactly that will be the topic but hopefully yeah thank you we'll take some time though I totally agree with your question about the colonial legacies this I write extensively about this in the book I say we can't understand this double standard applied to migrant men and migrant women muslim men and muslim women as these oppressors and victims without understanding the colonial legacies without understanding the colonial histories of these representations and I give examples looking at France the during the occupation the colonial occupation of Algeria already in the 1950s the French state was carrying out the French army was carrying out the so-called unveiling ceremonies asking muslim women with the veil to take it off we find similar stories in Indonesia with the Dutch colonization the colonization of Italy in Ethiopia and Eritrea is a little bit different but we still we don't have the unveiling ceremonies but we have certainly this idea that the men are uncivilized and barbaric and the women they are of course also considered to be barbaric by the Italian colonizers but they can they can be sexual objects there are lots of stories about how the Italian army was actually treating these women as sexual objects but they are also redeemable one of the the reasons why migrant women usually are considered to be more redeemable than men is also because they are essential for the second generations they are mothers and they are considered to be the so-called vectors of integrations because they educate their children and therefore one of the main ideas is we need to teach to integrate and even better to assimilate these women to the values of our countries so they can transmit those values to the children and one of the examples I have which is very telling is the for instance in France the 2005 riots so-called riots were represented were justified by saying oh these kids just doing all these riots in the city in the in the periphery of the cities especially they come from polygamic families and therefore these are families in which they don't receive a proper education so we need to get rid of polygamy and we need to assimilate the women this was said by Sarkozy the president of France in 2006 so there was a very clear connection there was a very clearly the idea these women need to be assimilated because they need to educate these kids properly um on the convergences no there was sorry first the the collusion you asked me about the collusion I mean as I said really um I think what first of all I have to say just people are is dealing with the United States and dealing with Europe and so the context is obviously very different I just found that I could not simply apply this idea of collusion to the European context because I don't think that it's a necessarily a collusion that's taking place I think the ways in which these forces are converging is not necessarily and very often is not at all because there is an intention collusion made us think of a complicity and I don't think there is necessarily a complicity these actors do not share the same platforms for instance in the mainstream media but nonetheless what I try to highlight is that they are converging in this islamophobic space they are converging in this space which allows them to say in a in a way that seems to be publicly legitimate that muslim men are oppressors and misogynists and muslim women are the victims this is a kind of common sense that is bringing together these very very different political forces I would say the migrant crisis I think that the discourse would be exactly the same because actually all these discussions that that I reconstruct they I reconstruct these histories from the early 2000s until 2013 so actually it's before the so-called migrant crisis so I don't think the migration crisis changes anything to these kind of referees someone also asked me I don't remember anymore about to say a little bit more about the differences between the agendas maybe it was you and also the differences between the countries so the differences between the agendas so maybe what I should say okay she's asking me basically in what sense in what sense are these feminist agendas using these feminationalist tropes so my answer to this would be that what I look at in these countries is a very broad array of feminist forces so as I said it's not just the right wing feminist but it's also the left wing feminist all of them are precisely what brings them together even not physically in the same space but what is ideologically bringing them together is the strong emphasis on Islam being a misogynist religion as the most as quintessentially misogynist religion in a way that all these feminists foreground that Islam is actually the the main repository of of misogyny now what I try to say in the book that is that there is not one feminist agenda obviously the right wing feminist have a different agenda from the left wing feminist we can't bring together you're Italian right so we you can't bring together swaths by for example or the women involved in the union the woody union of Italian women which used to be close to the communist party they're very different and they have different agendas but nonetheless they both for example have endorsed the anti-anti veil bands and the woody the women of the these left wing organizations were in favor of the anti burqa ban of the full veil bands for example and what I say in the book is that it seems to me what brings them together is a form of what I call western supremacism which is the idea that they share that the gender relations in the west are superior than those in the rest of the world and so even though these feminists come from different places they tend to share this idea so in a way I was tempted when I was writing the book I remember I was tempted to call because I was really struggling to understand what does bring them together they are so different why what is the the common ideological matrix that allows them all to say Islam is the real danger without seeing how actually this is building racism and Islamophobia and I don't think that the framework of secularism for example works because it's not just secular women who are actually endorsing these arguments I'm thinking of France where the idea of laicite and secularism is very strong but it's not just secular women I think more fundamentally than that is really this idea the west is superior to the rest when it comes to gender relations in the west we have more advanced relationships amongst the genders and we need to teach these to other women who might be more backward because of the histories and so forth so I think the notion of western supremacism it seems to me at least is a good way of making sense of these convergences in the feminist camp and when you ask about the difference between the countries I I would say that in one way I think you're right Muslim women for instance in Italy are not necessarily only employed in in care and domestic work although they actually are much more than we think I'm increasingly discovering myself doing work in on on on Muslim women in domestic and care work also in the country they tend to be employed in the sector differently than Eastern European women so lots of studies actually recently show that Muslim women tend to work much less or not at all as Badanti so they tend not to live in the family with the the person they care for but they tend much more to do like cleaning for a few hours a week so there is a difference but it seems to me nonetheless that that seems to be the prevalent job even for many Muslim women but apart from that my argument is that precisely we shouldn't look at just at this discussion is this discourse as pertaining Muslim women that's why I talk also about the non-western migrant women because I think it also extends beyond the Muslim women all right let's do another round of questions yep hi Sarah thanks for the fascinating talk my question is basically related to what you just said you seem to suggest that the ideological threat is what causes this convergence so it seems to me it is more of an ideological explanation rather than a political economy explanation which you you state is the most important paragraph in your book so my question is I guess I'm trying to understand what is the link between the ideological phenomenon and the political economic explanation because it seems to me like ideology is more important and this is not new right this is this was a case in colonialism that was what they did and this is what Joseph Masat says the liberal missionary project and I fail to see how the political economy side is more important than the ideological explanation just a clarification so okay I have questions to both Lindsay and Sarah so starting with Lindsay on the comments what Sarah said and you were mentioning that Muslim women mostly disagree with Marxist feminism and I would like to know more about what you think is actually known in the west about the different types of feminisms in in the Muslim societies around the world and because we know that feminine there are different feminisms depending on different contexts and cultures so I'd like to have your point on that and then for Sarah and you just talked about the western supremacism supremanist view and what do you actually think because you were focusing how I understand this the book mostly on immigrants and migrant Muslim women do you think what do you think would change if we would look at the at the position of Muslim national so Muslim citizens female citizens that actually are Muslim bad citizens since a longer time or they they grew up there so they have different identities identifying themselves for example as French and Muslim and do you think that there is space for Muslim European women in the media to create more transparency on this topic thank you thank you for a very interesting discussion I had a question about your idea of work as emancipation and volunteering work particularly I think that's really interesting idea often even for me as a white western woman volunteering has been touted as a way of future employment in a way to be self-sufficient so I don't think it's just for immigrants why do you think it is that women this is the kind of anti-feminism by the back door so to speak in the name of emancipating women these women are in fact as your research shows going into professions or traditionally associated with domestic life why is that is that because their skills aren't recognised in our societies or what do you think the main reasons are for that I have a question for Dr Sarah before I ask my question I will have to ask your forgiveness for my ignorance because from the part of the world where I come from there isn't as much discourse about Islamophobia and the migrant crisis as much as it should be and so I'm from India and I've grown up in Saudi Arabia so again not talked about as much as it should be the question being that in context of the three countries that you are discussing in your book do those governments through their integration programs take into consideration whether or not the migrant coming in is a skilled worker or a qualified person and if they do so would that then render the integration program in a more positive and more beneficial to the public interest thank you thank you it was very interesting um is there perhaps a double standard within the double standard of the non-western Muslim man as rapist and sexual predator and the woman as victim I'm thinking of this case maybe it's an anomaly in France where police rather violently forced a Muslim woman to remove her veil on the beach and she was used as a threat a symbol of a threat so not at all a victim so I'm curious to hear what you have to say about that and if I can add a second question and I ask this as a Syrian immigrant in your research or in your work what is the crisis of women involved in this themselves is their dialogue within these communities have you encountered that and can you comment on that thank you what just on the um yeah um just on the question that that I was asked about the I don't know whether you maybe misunderstood what I said I wasn't saying that um Marxist feminists were hostile to Muslim feminists although some are but many of them I think will be in support of it I think the problem is with feminism is that it started in the United States and was an absolutely huge movement there it then kind of went to Europe before it went and came here Italy a little bit later you know by the mid 1970s and it never really I mean it was it was inspired by lots of anti-colonial struggles I mean it was called women's liberation in identification with the Vietnamese people who were fighting against the Americans so it was inspired by those sort of things but it didn't particularly take root that quickly in the developing world and of course what's happened is lots of feminists have since then have developed all sorts of ideas in India in in Afghanistan I mean there's a very good book by somebody who used to be I don't know if she's still she's retired I think Eli Eli Hebristami Povey who wrote a very good book about Afghan women and said look you know we don't really need Western feminists or indeed Western men or anybody to tell us what we already know and we're developing our own ideas so I think I think there's a lot of ignorance about these questions you know the idea that the can't possibly be feminism in in some countries or even the idea that if you wear a veil or you wear a burq or you wear for whatever reason that people do that that prevents you from developing you know egalitarian ideas feminist ideas and so on so I think the attitude of us in countries like Britain should be that we need to find out and engage with what is going on in different parts of the world and not treat it as a kind of imperial project which is always the danger I mean this is you know Sarah referred to Laura Bush and Cherie Blair in this country in the Afghan war we were told this was about liberating women and they went on the radio and you know they did radio broadcasts saying you know these women are going to tear off their veils when we go and bomb them they even got a few women to tear off their veils but of course it wasn't really about that as I guess most of us realize it was about much more fundamental things so you know they use these kind of things in actually a way that benefits imperialism and benefits neoliberalism and I think we have to say that's wrong and we need much more discussion about what feminism and to my mind what socialism means in different parts of the world and how we can actually integrate those ideas within different societies in what sense in the sense that it's well I think this is a kind of misunderstanding what liberation is about I mean for me liberation isn't actually about how you dress you know liberation I mean people should be able to dress exactly how they want and as far as I'm concerned that's end-off you want to wear makeup you want to wear a veil you want to wear a bikini I don't really care I mean you know it's not really it's not really that important so I think liberation is about something much more fundamental it's probably you know I mean I'm a socialist and a Marxist so I would like to see a much more systematic change of society and that's what liberation is about now of course people in different cultures in different countries have different ideas about what that might mean but I think for all of us it means an end of oppression within the family an end of anybody telling people what to do and people collectively deciding how they want to bring up children how they want to work how they want to do all those sorts of things so that's my kind of view of it so I don't think there's a contradiction at heart but I think very often the way it's projected particularly with some of the women that Sarah has been talking about in her book I think there is a contradiction there because they're not really interested in you know we're told that we need modernization I noticed Tony Blair said we need modernization Saudi Arabia is leaving the way to modernization by having a kind of palace coup or whatever's going on there but you know modernization would start with ending colonial rule and ending imperialism that's how it would start not by whether women wear a veil or not I mean I'm in favor of them not having to in Iran or in Saudi Arabia or anywhere else but I'm also in favor of women having the right to wear what they want in France in Britain you know I think this is something that's that's the beginning of liberation it's not the end your question about the ideological you seem to oppose ideological the ideological aspects and the political economic aspects if I understand your question so my answer to you would be that actually I understand the ideology you know we know at least in this book and with some cabinets there in the ways in which Louis Althusser and Stuart Hall also talked about ideology one of the important lessons for me from Louis Althusser for example who is this Marxist philosopher from French philosopher from the 1970s is that we need to understand the material aspects of ideology ideology is not just a free free floating discourse as if there is not a material root behind ideology even behind ideologies usually there are material roots there are material interests there are reasons why we have certain ideas that are circulated rather than others there is for instance just to give you a little example there is a very material reason why the neoliberal ideology is that of free choice it's not simply it's not at all in fact because neoliberals care that much about people having free choice of choosing perhaps between one service and another service but it's precisely because the ideology of free choice actually has enabled neoliberals and the neoliberal project in the last 30 years to privatize all sort of sectors under the idea under the banner that people need to choose freely they can't just have the public childcare setting because that means they can't choose there is only one and so there is not really the respect for individual choices this is just an example so i would say that i don't see an opposition between political economy and ideology for me the point was precisely to understand that the material aspects that behind the idea of human nationalism in this altruistic way and also still at all says something similar about the uk and he talks about ideological formations um there was a very someone asked me maybe it was you the muslim women who are not migrants what happens to them so i give you two examples again from the countries that i study in france for example i did research a few years ago before i began to do this book project about the transition from school to work of young muslim women so we are talking about second or third generation muslim women who are french they were born in france they identify as french very often they don't wear the veil they don't even speak arabic so they are fully french so what it was really striking for me was to discover in these interviews we did with these young women in marseille and in paris that many of them those who didn't continue who those who didn't go to university and who stopped after the baccalaureate after the secondary school usually they the way in french works is that young people who want to find jobs go to these agencies in france they are called mission local for these young women and so they they are helped to build their CVs and you know they are also given information about the kind of companies that are searching for people so it's a place where you can find a job and usually these young women told us that when they went to this mission local they were systematically sent to to do jobs for child care and cleaning and they thought they were actually struck by that because they said i remember one of them particularly saying but we have a baccalaureate we have studied so why do i have to do cleaning jobs and it was actually we found one reason why they were sent to do these jobs was because usually they were the low skill jobs available for which there is a low supply of lots of women don't want to do these jobs and there is a reason for that they paid very badly they have very little rights and so forth the second reason there was a systematic form of racist discrimination against these women even though they are french they have arabic sounding names and therefore you know usually those are the jobs for the migrants for the arabs and there is a very strong form of what they say postcode discrimination or surname discrimination so automatically these might or these even if they are no migrants but they have migrant sounding names they are sent to these kind of jobs so i'm not saying that this happens to all muslim women but certainly is one of the main i would say niches of the labor market even for muslim women who are not migrants the second example is from the Netherlands where again muslim women particularly from turkey and morocco who are the main communities in the Netherlands even when they are not migrants and they are in fact the Dutch Dutch women if they don't work they are actually sent letters by the municipalities in which they are actually invited to do either volunteer work in their neighborhoods and communities schools for example or they are actually invited to to work in in these elderly care sectors because there is a huge demand for these jobs in these sectors sorry for people in these sectors and so again these are these are not migrants one of the slides i didn't show you actually was about how i have written extensively on this is about how during the recent economic crisis 2007 2011 there are various i've done research on some countries but actually it's something that is quite well known for those who have worked on this so you we can see that there is a big difference between the ways in which the crisis has affected main migrants and female migrants so male migrants mostly employed in manufacture and construction they were very badly affected by the crisis many of them lost their jobs because the crisis affected specifically the sectors of the economy the women employed the migrant women employed in social reproduction so cleaning babysitting child care and so forth actually their sectors even grew during the crisis so these sectors were not affected by the crisis and these all studies have shown this this is just a way of saying that one of the reasons why i think there is so much emphasis on rescuing integrating assimilating these women is because the demand for people to work in these sectors is growing and the reason why it's growing is because also we are in europe there is an aging population and more and more elderly people are you know projected to need someone to care for them women are increasingly native whatever that means women are increasingly working outside the household they are not willing to to go back if they have jobs and so there is someone who you know who needs to take care of children someone needs to take care of elderly people so many native women are not willing you know to go back to four these times in which they were actually the main carers at home so these are some of the structural reasons explaining why the demand for carers in europe is so high and this demand is increasingly met by these women and that's my argument that's why everyone wants to rescue them because without them these economies are collapsing there is no one doing these jobs i mean putting it very in a way not everyone wants to rescue them because obviously it's a bit of a rhetorical way of putting it but you understand what i'm saying and i think these also answers someone asked me why are these women channeled towards social reproduction i think i just answered this this is precisely the reason these sectors are growing i think it was maybe you these sectors are growing and you know that's really the reason the skilled migration actually that's a very good question because it actually allows me to say one reason why civic integration programs are well i should say first civic integration programs the the programs i described they are meant exclusively for low skilled migrants so called high skilled migrants usually don't go through the civic integration programs and that's because at the european level since the mid two thousands i believe maybe before europe has created two tires for migrants one is for high skilled migrants they you know usually a very pump no one bothers them they get you know it's much easier for them to get visas and residency permits and another tire is for low skilled migrants those are the ones who are increasingly unwanted in a way so it's harder for them to get visas and it's harder for them to you know to be allowed to get residencies this in spite of the fact they are very needed by the european economies but obviously within the european union framework not all migrant i'm talking about overseas migrants migrants who are you know not part of the european union so those who need residency permits and so forth so for these migrants particularly because eastern european migrants have increasingly provided the labor force for the low skilled jobs is increasingly hard for those outside of shengen outside of the european union to get jobs for low skilled to to get low skilled jobs so actually i hope this answers the questions and i think there was one final question on the burkini women are not just victims that's yeah this is um i mean this is a great question and i think you're right i would say that i'm not sure the burkini example is the best example though because i think that even in the burkini the case of the woman was obliged to undress on the beach are you asking obliged to undress on the beach because she had a burkini i think there was still let's say two representations of migrant women of muslim women were operating there on the one hand she was still a victim because the idea that is that muslim women when they were burkini or availed they are not doing that they're victim of their cultures they are not doing that freely they're obliged by their fathers their brothers and so forth so that's the main narrative in france but you're right i think that on the other hand there was also a second representation operating which was that the she could be a threat especially a threat to secularism and i think but i would say that if i had to write the book now i would probably stress this element much more because i think that particularly in the last four years so in a way when i had already finished the the book project there is more emphasis particularly in countries like like france and the uk on muslim women being a threat particularly in the case of all those young muslim women who joined isis who fled to syria and so forth i don't think this means that the representation of muslim women as a victim doesn't exist anymore i think these representations still coexist but i would say that in the last few years there has been also more emphasis on muslim women also as a threat so yeah i would agree with you on that okay so we're going to have to finish now thanks everyone for attending and please join me in thanking