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Dr Anne-Marie Fortier

Reader in Social and Cultural Studies

Degree: BA Anthropology, Laval University (Quebec City) MSc Sociology, University of Montreal; PhD Sociology, Goldsmiths" College, University of London

Associated research centres and groups: Centre for Gender and Women's Studies, Centre for Mobilities Research (CeMoRe), Centre for Transcultural Writing and Research, Mobilities.Lab

Current Teaching

• SOCL 208 Women in Society (Undergraduate)
• SOCL 243 Race Relations and Social Change (Undergraduate)
• SOCL 310 Nation, Migration, Multiculturalism (Undergraduate)
• SOCL 929 Multicultural Societies (Postgraduate)
• SOCL 938/FASS 529 Key Thinkers in Feminist Poststructuralist Thought (Postgraduate)
• SOCL 939/FASS 530 Undertaking and Completing a PhD in Gender and Women's Studies

Current doctoral supervision:

Elisabeth Grindel - research topic: The experiences of partners/spouses of international students - An exploration of the re-construction of "home" and identity through migration/mobility

Tara Leach - research topic: experiences of black women working in HE organisations

Chun-Yu Lin - research topic: Southeast Asian transnational brides in Taiwan

Muzeyyen Pandir - research topic: imagining Turkey in the European Union

Ana Bê Pereira - research topic: everyday experiences of people living with a chronic illness in England and Portugal

Sabrina Squires - research topic: 'race', class and sexuality in GLBT cultures and politics

Past doctoral supervision/postdoctoral mentoring

Mia Falov Neighbourhood Regeneration and Social Exclusion in Denmark and England

Michaela Fay Internationalisms: Feminism, Mobility, Belonging: Exploring the International Women's University 'Technology and Culture'

Jennie Germann Molz Destination World: Performing the Self and the Global in Round-the-World Travel Narratives

Nina Held: 'Race, sexuality and space in "white" lesbian bars'Leon Moosavi: 'Islamophobia in Britain and the experience of Muslim converts'

Leon Moosavi: 'Islamophobia in Britain and the experience of Muslim converts'

Elisavet Pakis Playing in the Dark: Performing (Im)possible Lesbian Subjects

Adi Kuntsman Violent belongings: Russian-speaking GLBT immigrants in Israel

Lewis Turner Passing and crossing; an ethnography of gender transitions

Research Interests

I came to Lancaster in January 1999, following an 18 month postdoctoral fellowship in Montreal (my adopted city). Although I miss the radical weather of Quebec, I feel extremely privileged to be at Lancaster University. Also, having completed my PhD Goldsmiths' College (University of London), the return to England felt like a return to my 'intellectual home'.

My research interests are situated within the areas of critical race studies, gender and sexuality studies, cultural studies, postcolonialism, multiculturalism and nation formation, critical migration and diaspora studies, the cultural politics of emotions.

Current Research

1) Multicultural Horizons: I recently completed a book on discourses of multiculturalism in Britain (2000-2006). Entitled Multicultural Horizons: Diversity and the Limits of the Civil Nation, this book examines how the 'New Britain' of the twenty-first century is variously re-imagined as multicultural. Although the book is not about the Blair government per se, it covers the debates about 'multiculture' that circulate in the public domain during the Blair era. Introducing the concept of 'multicultural intimacies', I attend to the intensity of feeling that multiculturalism invariably ignites, and propose a new form of critical engagement with the cultural politics of multiculturalism, one that attends to ideals of mixing, loving thy neighbour and feelings for the nation. In the first study of its kind, this book considers the anxieties, desires, and issues that form representations of 'multicultural Britain' available in the British public domain -policy and consultation documents emanating for the most part from the Home Office, reports and debates in the national press, photographic stills, and a television documentary. Drawing on insights from critical race studies, feminist and queer studies, postcolonialism and psychoanalysis, my analysis considers:

• the significance of gender, sex, generations and kinship, as well as race and ethnicity, in debates about cultural difference
• the consolidation of religion as a marker of absolute difference
• the emergence of what I call 'moral racism'
• the criteria for good citizenship and the limits of civility.

2) Affecting citizenship: Following on from Multicultural Horizons, my current research focuses on the British naturalisation process as a site of 'citizenship-in-the-making'. The distinctive character of this study is its focus on the experiences of applicants and non-applicants (ESOL teachers/providers; Council registrars; ceremony officials; etc). The study draws on original ethnographic material to explore the making of citizenship: it traces the work, processes, documentation, artefacts, storing, educational and other practices involved in 'making citizens', while it also attends to the 'lived experience' of naturalisation from the perspective of a range of subject positions. In short, the study approaches naturalisation through material, cognitive (learnt), performative, and affective practices. The research is funded by the British Academy (Small Grants).

I have also written about forms of 'governing through affect' in the politics of 'community cohesion' in Britain under New Labour, and examines how interethnic proximities are conceived, monitored and managed. I argue that there is ashift of attention, in policies aimed at 'delivering cohesion', from the rational, autonomous subject to the affective subject. See my article entitled 'Proximities by design? Affective citizenship and the management of unease' is published in Citizenship Studies 14(1) 2010.

3) Technologies of reassurance and 'white unease': this research strand is about how digital photography, morphing technologies, population statistics and genetics are variously combined to operate as technologies of reassurance at a time of when we are said to be undergoing deeply transformative changes that threaten to fragment white Britain. For more information, see my electronic article The blood in our veins: White unease, introspection, and the promise of corporeal transparency in multicultural times.

Potential Doctoral Proposals

I would be interested in supervising research students within the areas related to my research interests, for example: Multiculturalisms; 'race', racisms; Migration and related aspects, including but not restricted to: migrant/diasporic/transnational lives; migration and national politics (policies, border controls, etc.). Sexuality and migration including but not restricted to: queer migrants and migrations; sexuality and migration (e.g. sexuality and border control); migrant sex workers; intimacy and migration. Citizenship and related including but not restricted to: cultural aspects of citizenship, sexual citizenship, intimate citizenship, citizenship and affect, or transnational citizenship; citizenship training or the like (e.g. citizenship curriculum in England; citizenship classes and ceremonies for immigrants), and so on.

Past Studies

Queer migrations and queer diasporas

In some of my past publications, I extended my expertise in migration and diaspora studies by bringing questions of sexuality more to the fore. My interest here include:

'queer diasporas': this includes a critical intervention of queer theory in theoretical discourses of diaspora, as well as an interest in the deployment the notion of a 'queer diaspora' in some quarters of queer theory, to describe the transnationalisation of the queer movement and of queer culture.

'queer migration': I have written about narratives of queer migrations and their conceptions of home and emancipation.

Émigré cultures and transnational belongings

My PhD dissertation, now published as Migrant Belongings. Memory, Space, Identity (Berg, 2000), concerns the formation of an Italian émigré culture and identity within institutional discourses and practices of collective belonging(s). The book links theories of performativity and of diaspora, offering insights into the study of cultural identity, migration and diasporas. More specifically, I reassess questions of sex/gender, ethnicity and 'race' in relation to broader questions of culture, nation, and multilocal spaces of belonging. Using a combination of participant observation, semi-structured interviews and the analytical survey of printed documents, I examine the ways in which new meanings of identity are encased in different forms of representation of the Italian presence in Britain: written histories and monographs; cultural productions; politics of identity; and the daily life of two London-based church-cum-social clubs (where I pay special attention to the relationship between the construction of the identity of places and the formation of group identity). Advancing a corporeal approach to identity formation, I argue that displays of the Italian presence in London operate through the repetition of regulatory norms that produces the effect of materialisation of cultural belonging through the dual process of ethnicising and gendering of individual and collective 'bodies'. In addition, the prominence of 'memory work' in Italian practices of identity leads me to interrogate geographically based definitions of diaspora.

Publications

Books

(2008) Multicultural Horizons: Diversity and the Limits of the Civil Nation. London: Routledge.

(2003) Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of home and migration, Oxford: Berg. (co-edited with S. Ahmed, C. Castañeda, M. Sheller).

(2000) Migrant Belongings: Memory, Space, Identity. Oxford: Berg.

Guest editorships - journal thematic issues:

(2006) 'European Migrant Horizons', Mobilities 1(3) (with Gail Lewis)

(2003) 'Re-Imagining Communities', International Journal of Cultural Studies 6(3) (with Sara Ahmed)

Journal articles and book chapters (selection)

(forthcoming 2013) 'What's the big deal? Naturalisation and the politics of desire', Citizenship Studies. Vol. 17: 8,966 word

(forthcoming) 'Migration Studies', in Peter Adey, David Bissell, Kevin Hannam, Peter Merriman and Mimi Sheller (Eds) Mobilities Handbook, London & New York: Routledge. (expected end 2012/early 2013)

2012 'Genetic Indigenisation in "The People of the British Isles"', Science as Culture 21(2): 153-175.

2012 'The migration imaginary and the politics of pershonhood', in M. Messer, R. Shroeder, and R. Wodak (Eds) Migrations: Interdisciplinary Perspectives, Vienna: Springer Science + Business Media: 31-41 2011 'Anne-Marie Fortier in conversation with Debra Ferreday and Adi Kuntsman', Borderlands 10 (2).

2007'Too close for comfort: loving thy neighbour and the management of multicultural intimacies', Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 25(1)

2006 The Politics of Scaling, Timing and Embodying: Rethinking the 'New Europe' Mobilities, 1(3)2006'Community, Belonging and Intimate Ethnicity', Modern Italy 11(1)

2005 'Pride Politics and multiculturalist citizenship', Ethnic and Racial Studies 28(3)2005 'Diaspora', in D. Atkinson, P. Jackson, D. Sibley and N. Washbourne (eds), Cultural Geography: a critical dictionary, I.B. Tauris

2003 'Making home: queer migrations and motions of attachment', in S. Ahmed, C. Castañeda, A.-M. Fortier, M. Sheller (e Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg.

2002 'Queer Diasporas', in D. Richardson and S. Seidman (eds) Handbook of Lesbian and Gay Studies. London: Sage.

2001 ' 'Coming Home': queer migrations and multiple evocations of home', European Journal of Cultural Studies 4(4): 405-424.

1999 'Re-membering places and the performance of belonging(s)', Theory, Culture and Society 16(2): 41-64. Revised and translated as "Actes de présence et constructions de terrains d'appartenance(s)", trans. A. Druelle (with A.-M. Fortier), in M. de Sève, D. Lamoureux and C. Maillé (eds) Malaises identitaires. Echanges féministes autour d"un Québec incertain. Montréal: Editions du Remue-Ménage.

Associated Keywords: Britain, Citizenship, Community, Emotions, Ethnicity, Gender, Gender identities, Intimacy, Migration and diaspora, Multiculturalism, Nation, National and nationalism, National identities, Queer, Race and racism, Racialisation, Sexualities, sexuality, Sociology, Women's studies

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