The Israeli Site
Hanna Herzog and Nissim Mizrachi

Hanna Herzog and Nissim Mizrachi, senior members of the Department of Sociology and Anthropology at Tel Aviv University, and research fellows at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, head the Israeli research team. They represented the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute at two meetings in April 2007 and 2008 that took place at Harvard University and participated in formulating the general theoretical framework for the international study and in planning the research agenda.

The Israeli section of the research project focuses on three population groups: Palestinian citizens of Israel, Ethiopians, and Mizrahi Jews—all of them working class, lower middle class, and lower class (laborers and service workers without academic education). This study will fill theoretical and empirical lacunae in Israeli studies focusing primarily on “top-down” structural, institutional and discursive forms of ethnic inequality as well as in international anti-racism studies concerned with resource mobilization and social struggles against racism. The study's aim is, therefore, to uncover the cultural frameworks through which members of minority groups account for inequality and their active role in coping with it.

The study is based upon in-depth interviews. The Israeli section will undertake 150 in-depth interviews (50 from each group) using snowball sampling initiated at several starting points so as to ensure the broadest interview population. The questionnaires will be translated into English so that they can become part of the resource bank common to all the countries participating in the research study. The data will be uploaded to the website that is at present under construction at Harvard. The same software will be applied to analyze all the data—the Atlas software for processing qualitative data. This will facilitate the creation of comparable categories and easy data access for all the participants.

Terrified: De-stigmatization Strategies of Muslims in the U.S. and U.K.
Chris Bail

Chris Bail's dissertation compares the de-stigmatization strategies of Muslims in the U.S. and U.K. using longitudinal qualitative interviews collected in the aftermath of 9/11 and seven years later. The results will contribute to the growing literature on the production and destruction of symbolic boundaries between groups during "unsettled" cultural periods through an original synthesis of this literature with existing theories of collective memory.

Social Psychological Investigations of Discrimination
Leanne Son Hing

People tend to deny that they, personally, have been the target of discrimination, perhaps because discrimination can be seen as threatening to a person’s feeling of worth, their group’s worth, their sense of control, and their relations to others. Little is known about the psychological mechanisms that make it more or less likely that people will perceive discrimination. Leanne Son Hing will study how individual differences in three basic needs (i.e., for autonomy, competence, relatedness) predict perceptions of discrimination. She will also explore whether perceiving discrimination is differentially related to outcomes, such as self-esteem, stress, and health, depending on a person’s basic needs.

Canadian Apartheid: The Making and Unmaking of Aboriginal-White Boundaries
Jeff Denis

Jeff's dissertation research examines the relationship between First Nations, Metis, and non-Native Canadians in Northern Ontario, with a particular focus on identification processes, boundaries (sources of conflict & division), bridges (sources of co-operation & positive mutual relationships), and health. His research is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada, the Harvard University Native American Program (HUNAP), and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Canada Program.

Taglit-birthright Israel
Ron Levi

Ron Levi is currently a co-investigator in a study of Taglit-birthright Israel, a program that since 1999 has provided over 100,000 free ten-day trips to Israel for Jewish young adults from over 50 countries. The birthright program was designed to address the perceived problem of "Jewish continuity" in communities outside of Israel, including a perceived apathy and waning interest in Jewish collective identity among youth. The stated goal of its founders is thus to produce a transnational, diasporic connection to Israel as a strategy for producing a "joyous renaissance" of Jewish life. In seeking to build this cultural group identity, the birthright program emphasizes what other scholars call the "mythic Israel of American Jewish dreams," with the tours to Israel emphasizing specific religious and nationalist sites and events. This has led an Israeli newspaper to ask Israelis what sites they believe birthright participants should tour, and whether the tour should extend beyond these "mythic" sites to include everyday realities of the Israeli experience. Our interest is in precisely this side of the equation, to investigate the cultural identity that is produced beyond that of the "mythic Israel." In so doing, we are particularly interested in questions of group boundaries, whether these boundaries are between diasporic and Israeli Jews, class and ethnic boundaries between Israeli Jews, or boundaries between Jewish Israelis, non-Jewish Israelis, or the boundaries marked by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We are doing this in two ways: (1) By studying groups of Jewish Canadian birthright participants, we are focusing on their perceptions of Israeli social and political life, with an emphasis on their understandings of the class structure, political identities, and ethnic divides of the Israeli context; and (2) by studying groups of Israelis who engage with the tour, we are focusing on their understanding of diaspora Jewry, the possibilities of transnational Jewish identity, and the boundaries that they draw between Israel and the diaspora itself. In so doing, we also seek to contribute to a broader research agenda that explores transnational citizenship and the experiences of youth in creating and defining their sense of homeland, group identity, and cultural connections. This is a collaborative study being pursued by researchers from the University of Toronto (Ronit Dinovitzer, Ron Levi and Judith Taylor) and Hebrew University (Nachman Ben-Yehuda and Vered Vinitzky-Seroussi).

Jovonne Bickerstaff

As the riots and protests that raged through France in 2005 illuminated the role of race as a central issue in France, given increasing fragmentation between mainstream white French and French of North and West African origins. Media portrayals of the latter during the riots revealed numerous euphemisms to characterize them—spatial and age (banlieue-youth, jeunes des cités) as well race and ethnicity (African, Muslim, Arab, noir). They were called everything, it seems—but French. The omission of their French identity begs the question: What does it mean to be French? Who defines it: how and for what purpose(s)?

My research, drawing on 3-years of fieldwork, examines how ordinary, non-activist, adult French blacks of Sub-Saharan African descent (i.e. second-generation immigrants) rebut racism and discrimination in their daily lives. It examines the implicit racialization of French national identity and how such racialized representations of Frenchness impact perceptions of belonging, life chances, equality, and opportunity among black French adults. As notions of French republican universalism and color-blindness help perpetuate euphemisms that obscure the fact that many minorites visibles in France are not immigrants, but French—the assertion of a French identity is becoming an everyday anti-racist strategy that enables this group to rebut racially motivated social exclusion. In doing so they illuminate how ideas of universalism as a French national interest and the lived reality of ethnic distinction and racial discrimination pose serious contradictions.

African-American Responses to Racism and Discrimination
Michèle Lamont with the assistance of Crystal Fleming and Jessica Welburn

Having completed 160 in-depth interviews with African-Americans living in and around New York, the study analyzes the discursive and behavioral strategies that members of stigmatized groups use to cope with racism and discrimination. It compares the accounts of these strategies produced by middle and working class men and women ages 25-60 and considers how the range and salience of strategies are affected by perceived discrimination. The project also considers the association between strategies and mental health outcomes, with the goal of contributing to the literature on mental health and racial disparity, which has traditionally been more concerned with risk than with resilience, and with intra-individual processes as opposed to meaning-making. The intellectual significance of the project is to lay the bases for a grounded theory of everyday anti-racism that draws on insights from other literatures.

Brazil
Elisa Reis and Graziella Silva

The Brazilian section of the research project focuses on the destigmatization strategies of Black Brazilians of middle and working class background. The study is based upon 160 in-depth interviews (80 from each SES group) conducted in Rio de Janeiro between 2007 and 2008. The Brazilian study not only addresses the overarching question of destigmatization in a society with blurred ethnoracial lines (the reason why Brazil was included in the comparative project) but also fills an empirical gap in Brazilian studies of race relations by approaching qualitatively the issue of class differences within the black population. The Brazilian team is headed by Elisa Reis, senior professor at Department of Sociology at UFRJ and Graziella Silva, Sociology PhD candidate at Harvard.

Destigmatization Strategies in the 1960s Québec
Gérard Bouchard

I use the anti-racist and destigmatization approach at a broader scale to analyse a past situation. The Québec 1960s are known as the time of the Quiet Revolution. This decade is viewed as a watershed in that it witnessed the onset of the economic and social emancipation of the Francophone population, a cultural minority in Canada. Previously, and for almost two centuries, the Québec society had been dominated by the British and the English Canadians. All along, the French Canadians of Québec had been the target of racial/ethnic stereotypes and were treated as second-class citizens. Using historical sources but asking the same questions as other researchers in this program, I reconstruct the destigmatizing discursive strategies devised by the Francophone elite (intellectuals, social leaders, politicians, journalists, novelists, clerics…). My research also focuses on the contradictions or antinomies that they were faced with and the way they addressed them.