Marion Manier

Marion.MANIER@unice.fr

PhD in sociology at Nice Sophia Antipolis University, URMIS laboratory.

PhD: Identity processes and creation of the social face of the “Muslim woman” in the integration system and insertion associations for immigrants.

Research interests:

 Inter-ethnic relationships, gender and class. The structure of racism, sexism and classism.

 Constructing otherness; the social face of “immigrant women”, “Maghreb/Muslim women”.

 Social action, social insertion, integration; categorisation and qualification of publics/users, the objectives and actions of insertion:

  • on an institutional level (public policies),
  • on the level of insertion bodies or associations
  • on the level of interactions between professionals and/or campaigners for social action and female immigrants.


Summary

This thesis focuses on the challenges which have crystallised around the social face of “the immigrant woman”, and more specifically the “Muslim woman” of her increasing visibility as a subject and instrument of social action, but also as a subject of feminist struggles (access to modernity, struggle against communitarianism, sexual equality, the debate around the Islamic headscarf…), at the crossroads of the problems related to integration, inter-ethnic relationships and gender relations. It is notably through this social face, often described by social workers as one of the most distant from “integration” and “modernity” but also as a face in a position to “relay integration” to “arbitrate” with fathers and sons that the idea of the republican model of integration updates and legitimises.
The survey work focuses on the area of integration systems and associations working for social, linguistic and citizen integration for immigrants or those from an immigrant family, which are vested with a certain number of assignments particularly concerning “immigrant women”. It is a question of being interested in the methods according to which the actors (actresses) of these systems structure ethnic and gender categorisations in their discussions and their activist or professional practices. Among the issues appropriate to these bodies (feminist activism, antiracist, or display of a neutrality of social action professionals, etc.), are those relating to an institutional mandate (referring to an “integration model”), these places of insertion reveal themselves to be areas crossed by various directives: areas of tension with political policies and areas of interaction, debate, negotiation even contradictions between managers, stakeholders and users in the structure of gender relations, ethnic identity and class.

Main publications

See french version of this page.