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Dr Anne-Marie Fortier

Senior Lecturer, CGWS Director

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 310 Nation, Migration, Multiculturalism (Undergraduate)
• SOCL 929 Multicultural Societies (Postgraduate)

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

Nina Held - research topic: race, sexuality and space in lesbian bars

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

Leon Moosavi - research topic: Islamophobia in Britain

Sara Nobili - research topic: British policies of migration and integration, and the representation of asylum seekers - a critical discourse analysis

Elisavet Pakis - research topic: race, sexuality in British performance art

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

Past doctoral supervision/postdoctoral mentoring

All my past doctoral students have passed their vivas with none or minor corrections

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

Joyce Hsiu-Yeh Journey to the West: Traveling, Learning and Consuming Englishness

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) Affective citizenship: following on from Multicultural Horizons, this study centres on ongoing developments in the politics of 'community cohesion' in Britain, and examines how interethnic proximities are conceived, monitored and managed. I examine the shift of attention, in policies aimed at 'delivering cohesion', from the rational, autonomous subject to the affective subject. I explore the implications of this form of 'governing through affect' on governing practices. A critical study of 'affective citizenship' will further consider how policies translate 'on the ground' (how they are implemented at the local level), but also how we might consider forms of emancipatory and transformative 'affective citizenship' in 'minority' welfare organisations or political organisations. An article entitled 'Proximities by design? Affective citizenship and the management of unease' is forthcoming 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 relations, 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 editorship - 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)

(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 (eds) Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration. Oxford: Berg.

(2003) 'Global Migranthood, Whiteness and the Anxieties of (In)Visibility', in C. Harzig and D. Juteau (eds) The Social Construction of Diversity: Recasting the Master Narrative of Industrial Nations. Berghahn Books

(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.

(1998) "Calling on Giovanni: Interrogating the nation through diasporic imaginations", International Journal of Canadian Studies 18, Fall. Reprinted in P. Kennedy and V. Roudometrof (eds) Communities Across Borders. New immigrants and transnational cultures. London & New York: Routledge : pp. 103-115.

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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