Next to the coats for a range of other times,
like culture, religion, skin color,
discussions around skin color, and so on.
So, I mean, I'm alluding to those discussions,
but we use the tone in our project and our work,
racialization rather than race,
to draw attention to the process
by which people are made to be raised.
This is a social, political, historical material process
that is drawn attention to by this rather unwieldy
or clumsy normalization.
So, the same thing happens with the term minoritization.
So, there's big discourse,
lots of policy discussions around
black and minority ethnic groups.
In English, it's contracted into,
to be at equal groups, black and minority ethnic.
And we preferred, in our project,
work to use the term minoritized
to draw attention to the fact that
if people aren't part of a minority group,
they're not all part of, what is part of a minority
as a result of being in a relationship with a majority.
There is a social, geographical, historical context
for that positioning.
So, in a way, in discussions of
of contemporary feminist and post-plural theory
is already saturated with a subscription
to some kind of discourse analysis, you could say,
by virtue of using these terms
that try and draw attention to and problematize,
render problematic the prevailing terms of debate.
So, I'm not aware that I actually used the term minoritized.
I might have done it in the street,
if I did I meant it in a virtual commerce.
But with clearly, practices of racialization
require explanation, interrogation,
and in our work, we're trying to always challenge
the ways in which certain kinds of bodies
appear to be produced as race when others are not.
So, typically, it's the kind of the non-dominant,
a non-normative group in a European context,
usually black, who appears to be race.
Of course, there's a whole, this whole area
of whiteness studies that draws attention
to the practices of racialization and enculturing
of all those who are in the broadest sense blind.
Is that against your question?
Thank you for that, thank you for that.
Any other comments or comments?
Thanks.
There were many comments dedicated to this.
As you've said, the feminist investigations,
I mean, you thought that the theoretical question
was defined as, in your case,
the difference between the objective of research
and the theoretical question that is formula is.
Because now, the objective of research,
but the theoretical question of the gender or the gender of others.
I don't know if you're going to say that.
Not entirely, no.
What I was trying to say is that a feminist,
a feminist politics,
I was trying to ward off some simple equation
between method and politics.
So, in terms of what guarantees a research project
to be feminist,
it's feminism arises from the politics of the issues it's addressing.
And that will include theoretical politics as well,
the politics of every sort of politics of practice.
And then one has to have a debate between feminists
and about what we mean by that.
But I don't think you can say that any particular technique
of analysis has a particular politics in it.
And I say this because some people like to claim
that one kind of discourse analysis is more political than another
or more suited to certain kinds of political analysis.
And I have my own history and alignment in that discussion,
but I think it's important to use the kinds of analytical tools
that seem useful for the kind of work that you do.
In the analysis, the kind of text that I'm going to be talking about,
I drew upon a different set of dispersive approaches
from analysing the rest of the material
and probably that's to do with volume of material
and probably that's to do with being a different kind of text.
I don't know, does that answer your question?
Yes, but the goal of the research has been to improve the services of gender violence.
The theory, that's the theoretical question.
Because the services of the attention to domestic violence
of women in Pakistan do not work or are perverse or whatever.
Yes, thank you.
Well, the theoretical question and the practical question
is the sense that minorities are women.
There is a justice in the asylum system that women...
So in a sense, if I were to phrase the theoretical question,
it would be a kind of retrospective reconstruction
because this project arose from problems around legal practice,
where there was a very clear sense arising from practice
that women asylum seekers were not getting a fair hearing.
There are applications to staying in the UK
almost always being refused.
So the practical question is how to try and prove their chances
and change some of the understandings of policy
and of basically immigration judges
and those people involved in the immigration system.
So that's the kind of practical political problem.
I suppose that one could extrapolate the theoretical questions from that
as feminist theorists should.
And I think you've phrased that very nicely.
And that's where one gets back to thinking about
how discourse is around domestic violence,
but really discourse is around racialisation
and citizenship and those wider concerns
about contemporary feminist theory and politics.
Can you say any question?
I'm particularly interested in...
You were talking about the importance of using
the different way of doing discourse analysis
and not being fixed.
But one of the ethical questions I have sometimes
is how or if we can...
I'm not sure if we can use discourse analysis
or which kind of discourse analysis we can use
when we work with the subject that we would like in some way.
So for example, I perfectly understand the use of discourse analysis
to construct the text of the home office,
but are you using also this approach, for example,
of discourse analysis for the text of asylum seekers?
And in which way?
And in which way can this use,
that is a problem that's being used,
can you use it in a carousel way?
In a carousel way?
Well, I think this is the common concern
that discourse analysis seems to ironize what people say,
that you're treating what people say with some suspicion,
and so it's being kind of unkind or disrespectful
to the people that you like
or the people whose accounts you want to promote or legitimize.
And I think, again, it depends on what you want to do
with your projects, really.
Sometimes I think that's absolutely right,
and the one is documenting certain kinds of counts
and one's position as a researcher
is to use the privilege of your position
to put those accounts in the public domain,
and so some of our analysis in this report, I would say,
is not a discourse analysis,
and certainly not a discourse analysis of the kind
that I'm doing with the Home Office text, absolutely.
On the other hand, there are times when doing
what might be called a discourse analysis
with people that you like is actually in this platform,
because people in office are not absolutely
uncontrollable, they say, and the resources they draw upon
in formulating what they say are not, you know,
arise from their linguistic, cultural context.
We don't say what we mean and we can't mean all that we say,
so drawing attention to some of the unintended effects
and consequences of framing problems or questions
and the ways that we do is something that,
in the very first project that Ian and I were involved with,
which was around using discourse analysis,
we used this as a kind of educational training tool
with professionals to draw attention to some of the consequences
of talking about children and families in particular ways,
where it was actually very helpful to say to people,
these are ways of talking, these are not bad ideas you have
or that you're a bad person for saying these things.
So I think it depends, obviously, on what you're doing, why.
Indeed, it might be that I could take aspects of some kind
of discourse analysis to do some work with the home office
in training them if I wanted to, which I wouldn't actually,
you know, want to imagine.
But nevertheless, I do think a wider model of home office
is what it does and how its own performance of discourse
is constrained in particular ways in order to take account of.
So in answer to your question, I think it's not a simple binary
opposition, you know, a thematic analysis
or a sort of straight giving voice or kind of a model
for those accounts that, you know, you want to privilege
in some way versus a deconstruction of ironising
kind of suspicion as well as a lot of popular ties.
I think we have to, you know, deconstruct that opposition.
Okay, so now we need to stop for a break
and come back in.
So I'm going to bypass a lot of wider,
more discursive issues about gender and domestic violence.
Of course, one could spend a huge amount of time commenting
on the discourses around domestic violence,
the terminology used, whether we use domestic or gender violence
or violence against women, et cetera, et cetera.
And we can come back to that if you like.
But I want to tell you about this text
and for us to look at some text together.
And so what you need to know is a little bit about the questions
that this text, well, the generations of this text.
There were questions that all our participants were asked.
Some slight variations according to what their positions were
whether they were service providers or service users.
Questions about policy and policy in general
and position of Pakistani women in particular.
Questions about practice in assessing a case.
This is legal assessment for the Home Office
in terms of a case that is an asylum claim.
Questions about knowledge and information needs
which include the kind of information that they draw upon
to make an assessment about the safety of Pakistani women.
And questions about their understanding of women's experiences.
Now, I just wanted to be able to skip through
some features of the slideshow.
Questions about understandings of women's experiences
and through the assignment process
including some provision issues around interpreters and so on.
And the Home Office response is basically six and a half pages.
So compared to all the rest of our material,
it's a drop in the ocean compared to many, many sort of 50 interviews
in both countries which generated enormous amount of text.
So I've obviously faced a different kind of problem
analysing six and a half pages than I am
hundreds and hundreds of pages of other kinds of responses.
So now I'm going to ask Barbara and Jordy to hand out these extracts
and also these cards.
And on these cards you find our website which has a lot of material.
The discipline studio website has a lot of material
about different kinds of discipline analysis
and materials that some of the material seem to have in that sense.
So I'm going to move to discuss these extracts
where you can look at the English
and a translation that Barbara and Adoné have done
which is not intended to be an idiomatic translation
into Castilian but a translation that helps you understand some of the English
whilst also keeping some of the phrase theology of the English terminology
so that you can see how problematic it is.
Now what I'm leaving out here is a whole set of strategies
for working up an analysis that would include asking
who's being addressed and who the subject is
and who the object is, thank you.
And trying to assemble lists of the main discursive objects and subjects
and thinking about what's absent as well as what's present.
But I think it's probably easier and more interesting
if we look at these extracts now.
So the first extract, which can I, if I spring down there,
can I now maximise this?
So the first extract I would say
is a kind of claim about being unbiased.
If the extract in front of you extracts one
that reads, to ensure a high standard of decision making,
decisions are routinely sampled by senior officers
and extolled by the Treasury solicitors
and the UNHCR, that's the United Nations High Commission for Repugies,
broke both intended to burn on this.
And weaknesses or inferences in decision making
identified by the sampling process
is brought to this decision maker's attention.
We believe this process helps maintain impartial
and soundly based decision making.
In addition to sampling, initial training
plus supplementary courses and seminars,
sometimes by organisations such as the UNHCR,
the Medical Foundation and other British based NGOs
help to ensure that asylum decision making
remains without bias.
Now this is where they're offering a description
of how they assess the case.
So here I hope you can get a flavour of what I meant
when I said that this seemed to be a difficult text to run on.
Initially you think, well, what can you say
about this kind of description of the process
of bureaucratic process?
One thing that one could perhaps say about it
is that it involves a discourse of independence
as indicated by terms like routine sampling
and external scrutiny as being a guarantor
of sound decision making.
So it all sounds like it's independent
and it's unbiased.
And to try and look at how this claim of being unbiased
is set up, one can take it apart.
You can look at the first two sentences
that begin with to ensure,
after decision makers attention,
and it's an assertion about quality control, if you like.
In the third sentence,
the second part of the claim is used to support
claim and conviction.
We believe that this process helps
maintain impartial and soundly based decision making.
And then the third part, which is the fourth sentence,
talks about training of supplementary forces
and seminars on NGOs
and international performance organisations.
So what this adds up to is a claim that says,
routine sampling, external monitoring,
plus extra training by so-called independent providers,
ensures, as they put it,
decision making remains without bias.
So what can we say about that?
We can take it in parts.
There's a discourse about internal and external chance.
Weaknesses and unfairnesses,
a tax used to go out of its way,
even becoming ungrammatical
avoid using the word injustice.
That's completely absent.
There's a rarefication that's going on.
We're not talking about women or people or bodies.
The cases become even more abstractive
to become decisions.
And so to me, this seemed to make it all sound
like some kind of defective service quality audit
rather than a concern over human rights abuses.
Interestingly, the discourse around human rights
is completely absent from the global discount.
Discussion about standards and sampling
sounds like the evaluation of the project.
So we've got a kind of rational service review.
We've got a review going on here.
And then there's a discussion about
sampling from external monitors,
which make external seems to be equated
with being independent.
We could say how independent are these external views, really?
And then there's plain weaknesses
that are identified by the sampling process.
If you want to kind of get into the linguistics of this,
clearly there's lots of abstract normalizations going on
and what happens when verbs are turned into nouns
is that you don't see who is doing what.
It disguises the interpretive character
of the actions that are being performed.
It's also unclear what criteria would be used
to determine a weak or unfair decision.
And interestingly, if you think about this process
as being described a bit more,
since a statistical understanding of sampling
doesn't affect individuals,
there seems to be a very indirect
or unwielding system of accountability
being described here,
despite the way in which it's at an initial reading
appears to be very persuasive in its claims
to be unbiased and systematic.
Another thing that I was very struck by
in my reading of this extract
was the sense of repetition and redundancy
and reformulation going on that indicated
that they were having to work,
although the text is working really hard
to try and convey its own conviction,
its own sense of credibility.
There's a discourse around statistics,
discussion of the sampling process,
routinely sampled,
and yet we aren't told what the routine
or process for sampling is.
But this claim is used to back up the other claim
we critically evaluate our own practice.
And then there's another kind of issue,
another kind of claim to credibility
that comes from external,
the externality and independence
and the sense that other people might have.
And this leads to a claim about
being impartial and soundly based.
But we could pause to think for a moment
and reflect that being impartial
and being soundly based are not necessarily the same thing.
They're being treated as equivalent here,
but there is not a necessary connection between them.
They're not the same.
And then in terms of the discussion
about initial training
plus supplementary courses in the seminars,
which is in the last sentence,
this sounds like it invokes the training
and support needs of an individual worker,
but if you think about what the claim is,
initial training plus supplementary courses
and seminars sometimes by organisations, et cetera,
it's not clear that the same individual worker
would actually receive both the initial training
and the supplementary training.
So what this adds up to is a set of strategies
to portray home office decision making
as sound and impartial and without bias.
We have actually no exploration of how it is like function
with another claim that the home office made many, many times
in the six and a half cages,
which was of treating each case on its own merit.
So you have a lot of discussion about statistical sampling
that sits in a rather uncomfortable way
plus scrutiny with a claim to treat each case on its own merits,
which is of course what the law claims it tries to do.
And in terms of why the discursive tensions,
of course what we have is a tension
between notions of equality and specificity
with the claim that all asylum claims
are considered on individual merits,
which is discourse around merit
to support the intention of general fix
for the equality and the tension for the individual situation.
And this is where we get into some kind of complex discussion
around how gender figures in these kinds of counts
and that's what figures in the major extracts
that we can look at.
This is where we can see a move going on
talking specifically about gender,
gender specificity to gender neutrality.
So is it worth asking if people have any comments on that extract?
This is my meeting with that first extract.
Basically five extracts are sections that I took
from the Home Office response
that seemed worthy of taking preferred analysis,
partly because I was puzzled by how they managed
to achieve the claims that they made.
So this first one was about their own process
of standards of decision making.
And I wonder if you have any other reflections.
Barbara has the microphone.
I would like to comment on the subject of gender infarcts
and I would like to explain that it is the end of the conversation
but it is a very long sentence.
Yes, I mean you can see how bizarre this text is in a way.
It's just very strange.
So as I was working with this text,
I was trying to find what subjects and objects are the same.
So you can see that we believe
but we don't know who this wee is really.
We don't know which particular people or subcommittee
and everyone else is completely abstracted.
So one of the things that I was really struck by
in engaging with this text
was this massive process of rarefication and pre-modification
and avoidance, if I can say that,
it's in the reluctance to talk about UVs.
And you can see that it's very strongly a rational bureaucratic discourse
of dealing with processes and trying to ensure
that this process is a rational and efficient one.
You can see why initially we didn't want to touch this text.
Any other comments?
Shall I move on to the next one?
I don't know.
When we're talking about the difficulty of understanding the meaning
to translate a large number of languages,
and sometimes we think that our limitation on English language
is also part of it,
but it's also part of these grammatically written errors
that allowed us to understand each other well
and seemed quite easy to understand.
And as I was saying before,
it was quite complicated to translate.
And let's continue with a basic error
that was evident in the question of the injustice they don't use.
But of course, there are diseases that don't exist in our languages.
We have been shown as injustices.
So that's an exemplification of how in translation
there's a problem with discourse analysis, isn't it?
You already have to engage in this process
in order to work out how to translate this.
And I think it is anti-language in many ways.
The problem, if you like, that the respondent had
in answering these questions is that there is no,
I think there is no, from my position,
there's no adequate answer they can provide in the current situation
because their practice is severely lagging in all kinds of ways.
And the rest of this report is all about, you know,
what other people's experiences,
what other people's accounts of their experiences
of being at the sharp end of these processes,
which very far from the account that the home office is providing,
as you can imagine.
But still, this is a very good example of sort of policy discourse, isn't it?
So we are, you know, routinely subjected to
and have to find ways of engaging with and picking, I think.
Now, I don't know if you would agree with this being a rather curious little text,
I want reflections around it.
They're always talking about what this culture accepted in a particular society
and in this way he's taking, he's paying someone else
and making himself better, so he's placing himself in a position
or very certain position in which he can judge.
And so once we're doing the harm, it's the culture.
Yes, I think that's a very useful observation.
And so if it fails to acknowledge the relational character
of their own responsibility in making those judgments,
the judgements, the evaluations of the culture always come from somewhere else.
So this is yet another, I mean, this is very difficult material, as you can see,
to work with and it's kind of rather peculiar to be involved
in this discussion around gender violence and persecution.
But you can see how in the case of the determination of our silent immigration claim
that these kinds of discussions and nuances about gender and specificity
and discourse around culture, they really matter.
If I move on, this is what I was talking about,
the fourth extract is about, in response to our question about knowledge,
information and training needs.
And their response was, COI reports.
COI is Country of Origin Information Reports.
COI reports provide accurate, objective and up-to-date information
on assignments to countries of origin.
The reports quote from a number of independent, reliable and well-recognised organisations.
They are helpful sources of information used by countries specific,
asylum policy team, Pakistani country policy officer,
used in COI report when assessing the main categories of claim from Pakistan
to formulate the operational guidance note.
Now, this is where it's very tempting for me as a discourse analyst
to invoke other kinds of extra textual, other kinds of knowledge.
And this is where I need to say that our project was partly formulated
as a piece of research to be able to improve the country of information reports
that asylum decision makers draw upon.
And this involved us, because part of the project involved assessing domestic violence
and service provision in Pakistan.
And of course, it also involved us looking at the country of origin information reports
that the office can be used, because you can access the ideas being on the net.
And I assure you, they're far from independent, reliable or well-recognised organisations.
In fact, most of it counts for...
Well, there are lots of problems with construction of these reports.
Most of it counts from the CIA reports.
And there's a problem of recycling of information that's quoted across
different kind of vice and vice sources.
Anyway, just to try and unravel this as a piece of text, what can we say?
Yes, as I said, I think one could argue it's far from independent.
And the problems have been identified with what's called information round tripping
where there's a self-referential character claims being made.
And that only recently have non-government and international non-government sources
being included.
By that I mean, for example, there are human rights organisations in Pakistan
that have only recently started to figure within the Pakistan country of origin information report
of British government.
So, what's important here is that the claim is made that this report is objective and non-interpretive.
So that in its claim, it's juxtaposing what is in fact an arbitrary and security agenda selection
by which I mean gendered and it's motivated by a security agenda.
And it puts all goodness and interpretation on the reader.
Basically, the report consists of quotes.
It just consists of quotes and with a link to the website that it was gone from.
And so you see this country of origin information report and I'm sure it's the same for all the other countries
that British government generates its reports about.
Because it's just a quote after quote after quote.
There's no commentary.
And so that's why they claim it's independent and non-interpretive because it's just quotes.
It's fascinating, actually, to me.
But it means that all the interpretation is in the reading of these quotes.
And if I move on, perhaps, too, you want to make some comments about that?
And then at the back, they're talking about women with any agency.
And at the same time, they're talking about how can they reach them, but they are not reaching an object
and not just without gender and an object without agency.
So how can they reach an object that cannot be reached because it didn't have any way to go there.
So it's kind of a messy stuff and all the time it's kind of a political material, making kind of things like here,
like we're used to, in a political way, like stuff of everyday life.
Like the fact that violence is cultural accepted and that each case should be considered on its own merits against the country.
And then it's like such treatment is common and why it's spread.
It's like we have to make something very particular for each woman, but at the same time they cannot talk.
And at the same time, they're not subjects, they're kind of objects by cultural treatment.
And it's kind of, it makes me like...
That's right. And of course, those are precisely the sets of assumptions that we're throwing into question in our report.
And that was precisely why, in a way, we didn't, we didn't analyse this for this report here
because it was a precise reiteration of all the problems that we, and sets of assumptions,
about the way in which disabilities of culture and gender figure in relation to domestic violence and immigration claims.
So what we have here is a kind of precise performance of these inaction.
Through the discourse of a government agency that is trying to present itself as being rational, efficient and just.
And so the problem then becomes how, you know, how, to what extent do they succeed in presenting themselves as rational and just.
It's easy to sit here, for us to sit here and generate some considered kind of reflection, critique.
But these are everyday, the tropes of everyday racism and our thing that we need to be developing strategies to combat.
So it's nearly nine o'clock, so I guess I should move towards a close.
I would accept that. The final extract which you have is quite sweet really.
It says, it may sound trite for us to say that we are constantly seeking to improve the system through independent monitoring of our decisions.
But a process of dialogue between case owners and policy workers, that is precisely what we do.
We have welcomed external input on these issues in the past and would welcome more.
So I think this is where they're trying to say that they're really open and transparent and would like critical feedback and so on.
Except that when we ask the question, is there any, and the training that workers should have access to, they said, not a deliberate comment.
And when we ask the question, is there anything that you think would help a woman to disclose any difficult or sensitive issues, their answer was a less adversarial attitude on the part of her representative.
So it's very tempting to think that by this stage of the interview, they were getting a bit, in their formulating answers, they were getting a bit irritated.
But that's not really a sort of, a very textual, that's not a textual analysis unless one is ascribing to a model of inferring emotion into the text, which is, you know, it's a big debate amongst disability analysts at the moment.
But of course what this does is it puts the responsibility back on the advocate rather than considering the setting or the practice or the responsibility of the office workers themselves.
As well as perhaps a comment on the process of the interview itself, of the email interview in this case.
So what might we say about law in this kind of possibly feminist, possibly discursive analysis? You can see I hope something of a style of text, a kind of banality of it as well as the complexity of it.
I think it's important to look at how the standards of just a coherent system is achieved, to look at the asymmetries in the attribution of interpretation of the significance of gender positioning, how gender appears and disappears,
how the interpretation is responsible for understandings of culture and cultural practice in the text.
It's also possible to take apart the ways in which a monolithic coherent system, a coherent system of functioning of an organization on close scrutiny appears quite discontinuous and not so rational in its functioning,
even in its own terms of sampling and decisions and so on.
So it puts the rationality of the organization in question and in that sense one can also, in its own terms, question its adequacy, its procedures and its sort of guidance.
And of course this making these kinds of criticisms is, in my case, informed by an entirely consistent with our other participants accounts of the arbitrariness of the Home Office's silent decision making.
But we might also make wider theoretical connections about how gender specificity becomes neutrality and then it raises racialized differences in the name of equality.
And one can then kind of draw wider political theoretical discussions into play here around critiques of bureaucracy and the way in which bureaucracy works alongside practices of racialization.
And I think this helps to explain the covert racial violence of so-called rational egalitarian law and bureaucracies like the Home Office Order and Immigration Agency.
I've just moved on actually to think about discourse analysis here.
I've drawn in generating this analysis, I drew upon lots of different kinds of discourse analysis here.
Some of it was lexical thinking about the meanings of substitutions of different words, some of it was grammatical, some of it was narrative, some of it was about forms of argument, some of it was about posing dilemmas and oppositions and false oppositions.
And I think in your responses you were drawing on varieties as well, different kinds of approaches.
So that relates to my comments about varieties of discourse analysis.
And I think it's also useful to move from the close analysis of detail to the analysis of wider disciplinary practices.
Which has implications for our understanding of also the performative and perhaps in some sense fragile or contestable status of the nation or the state of the nation.
In which we might see immigration control as not simply a practice but a reflection of the nation state but also a central in constituting and forming a nation state.
And this is where I say thank you and it's up to 9 o'clock.
Well, actually it's very, very short and we're already very tired because I wanted to thank all the people who made it possible for this seminar to be held.
Because if it weren't for the talks, the way and the content that you're reading, I think it would have been very difficult.
To all the others who have come to give us their presentations and also a special thank you to Angelina and Edurne who have been in the room.
Well, this evening Angelina and Edurne who have been in the rooms, many of whom have served well.
They have made much more work than what it seems.
When I was here together with the producers, there are many people who have created this space.
They have created a web page and apart from that, of course, all of them have been able to distribute and all of these institutional spaces and spaces here.
And they have already made a presentation that has also been believed in the project and has already been done by them.
There is a great and long, and long, etc.
Obviously, it's not here with us because we were in Congress, but it's here with the spirit.
And well, I hope that tomorrow, with some of your questions, we will see each other again.
But I hope that this continues.
So, look at the web page, www.sin-reg.net and see what we can organize for the next year.
Well, we will try to do something, but all the ideas and the individual space and the self-management will be very useful in life.
And well, thank you very much again, Erika and all of you.
