During the 1990s, an essentialist, bounded understanding of culture defining ethno-national group belonging became an established part of everyday life and politics, justifying exclusion in Western migration societies. Yet, academic work lacks a nuanced analysis of what we call “culture-as-defining-attribute.” We develop an analytical framework centered on discursive repertoires, sources of relational meaning-production, anchored in local, historical contexts and embedded in power. Based on an analysis of 125 essays written by undergraduate students in Toronto and Neuchâtel, we demonstrate that using culture-as-attribute results in an invisibilisation of power relations. Toronto students hypervisibilise a positively inflected conviviality across multicultural diversity, while invisibilizing racism and settler colonialism. Neuchatel students visibilise the production of migranticized others, invisibilising nativism and non-migrant/white structural privileges. We show that in/visibiliation is the “missing link” in current analyses of culture and exclusion. We end with a plea for context-specific analysis of culture-as-defining-attribute and a deeper understanding of in/visibilisation.

Janine Dahinden is Professor of Transnational Studies, director of the MAPS (Maison d’analyse des processus sociaux) and project leader in the nccr-on the move, University of Neuchâtel, Switzerland. She is interested in understanding processes of mobility, transnationalisation and boundary making, and their concomitant production of inequalities linked to ethnicity, race, class, religion or gender. She is also the co-director of the Standing Committee of “Reflexivities in migration studies” of IMISCOE. Please consult https://www.janinedahinden.net/ for more details.

Anna C. Korteweg is Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on immigrant integration as a politics of (non-)belonging. Her current projects look at the return of women who joined ISIS to their European home countries, the co-construction of borders and subjectivity in LGBTQ+ refugee politics, and the citizenship implications of refugee sponsorship in Canada. She has published two monographs: The Headscarf Debates: Conflicts of National Belonging (Stanford UP 2014, with Gökçe Yurdakul); Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics, and Family Law Arbitration (edited with Jennifer Selby, UToronto Press 2012) as well as numerous peer-reviewed articles and book chapters.