Roadworks: British Bangladeshi mothers, temporality and intimate citizenship in East London

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Gunaratnam, Yasmin. 2013. Roadworks: British Bangladeshi mothers, temporality and intimate citizenship in East London. European Journal of Women's Studies, 20(3), pp. 249-263. ISSN 1350-5068 [Article]

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Official URL: http://ejw.sagepub.com/content/20/3/249

Abstract or Description

Narratives of street life from British Bangladeshi Muslim mothers, collected in the aftermath of the suicide bombings in London in 2005, are the focus of this article. The author examines how temporal schema that combine the unpredictable time of racist events with a rendering of a foreseeable linear temporality of racism and of intergenerational identifications in the future provide the women with a means of livingwith ontological insecurity and threat. Although this reproduction of linear time can appear to exclude the singularity of unknown futures and others, with regard to the demands of multicultural living, understanding of time can be more open and undecided.

The author locates an ethicality of the mothers’ deliberations in how to live in situations marked by racism and multiculturalism in both their negotiation of temporal registers and in the sharing and interrogation of perspectives and strategies with others. Particular attention is given to the ambivalent use of temporality as an instrument of narrative agency. The discussion also considers how the methodological apparatus of the focus group is engaged with matters of intimate citizenship, conveying and participating in the production of the research problem.

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Article

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https://doi.org/10.1177/1350506813484134