Jean Beaman
My research pursuits focus squarely on examining and analyzing the relationship between race/ethnicity, culture and inequality, particularly for minorities in the United States and France.
My first book, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, September 2017), is an ethnographic examination in which I focus on the middle-class segment of France's North African second-generation population and show how, despite their upward mobility, being incorporated into French society and being accepted as French by others is not a question of professional success, educational attainment, or adherence to French republican ideology. Rather, these individuals are denied cultural citizenship as race and ethnicity remain a constitutive element of French identity and continue to be significant in French society.
My current book project focuses on police violence as a social problem and anti-racist mobilization in France and how that compares to other societies.
My other research and teaching interests include cultural sociology; international migration; race/ethnicity; race, class, and gender; urban sociology; and qualitative methods.
Address: Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
My first book, Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, September 2017), is an ethnographic examination in which I focus on the middle-class segment of France's North African second-generation population and show how, despite their upward mobility, being incorporated into French society and being accepted as French by others is not a question of professional success, educational attainment, or adherence to French republican ideology. Rather, these individuals are denied cultural citizenship as race and ethnicity remain a constitutive element of French identity and continue to be significant in French society.
My current book project focuses on police violence as a social problem and anti-racist mobilization in France and how that compares to other societies.
My other research and teaching interests include cultural sociology; international migration; race/ethnicity; race, class, and gender; urban sociology; and qualitative methods.
Address: Sociology, CUNY Graduate Center
365 Fifth Avenue
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So, it is not enough to say that race matters in migration but rather that blackness and Black lives matter in how migration unfolds. Using global blackness as a starting point in our analyses of migration reveals a clearer and closer entanglement of race, racism, colonialism, and migration. We argue that global Blackness structures notions of who migrates and under what conditions, as well as our ideas regarding migrants and their descendants and use the examples of New York City, Paris, and France as paradigmatic sites for understanding this relationship.
ORCID Icon,N. DoerrORCID Icon,P. KocybaORCID Icon,A. LavizzariORCID Icon &S. Zajak
term racial gaslighting (Davis and Ernest 2019) as an analytic to understand
racism and anti-racism in France. Specifically, I focus on mobilization against
police violence towards Black and Maghrebin-origin individuals and how activists
have to mount anti-racist struggle in a non-racial and anti-racial society.
This includes challenges that racism is a concept imported from the United
States and that France is a true colorblind society. In doing so, I build upon
David Theo Goldberg’s notion of Racial Europeanization, or the idea that race
is a problem everywhere but in Europe, where it is instead framed as an
exception. Such racial gaslighting is indicative of the continual struggles
between the ideology of French Republicanism, and its actual implementation.
So, it is not enough to say that race matters in migration but rather that blackness and Black lives matter in how migration unfolds. Using global blackness as a starting point in our analyses of migration reveals a clearer and closer entanglement of race, racism, colonialism, and migration. We argue that global Blackness structures notions of who migrates and under what conditions, as well as our ideas regarding migrants and their descendants and use the examples of New York City, Paris, and France as paradigmatic sites for understanding this relationship.
ORCID Icon,N. DoerrORCID Icon,P. KocybaORCID Icon,A. LavizzariORCID Icon &S. Zajak
term racial gaslighting (Davis and Ernest 2019) as an analytic to understand
racism and anti-racism in France. Specifically, I focus on mobilization against
police violence towards Black and Maghrebin-origin individuals and how activists
have to mount anti-racist struggle in a non-racial and anti-racial society.
This includes challenges that racism is a concept imported from the United
States and that France is a true colorblind society. In doing so, I build upon
David Theo Goldberg’s notion of Racial Europeanization, or the idea that race
is a problem everywhere but in Europe, where it is instead framed as an
exception. Such racial gaslighting is indicative of the continual struggles
between the ideology of French Republicanism, and its actual implementation.
how my identity as a Black American ethnographer was implicated in this
urban ethnography. Specifically, I discuss the intersections of researcher identity with that of the “researched” and how I was simultaneously framed as an insider and outsider due to different facets of my own identity. I further argue that these insights were data in and of itself as they revealed how race and racism operate in a society that has long disavowed their existence.
analysis of subjective and objective dimensions of belonging, A Place to Call Home. Focusing on New York City, Paris, and Barcelona,
Castaneda examines ‘‘urban belonging,’’ which he defines as a ‘‘subjective feeling of belonging that responds to real social integration that includes economic, political, and institutional integration’’ (pp. 5–6).
Based on ethnographic observations and ethnosurveys, Castaneda mostly compares Mexican immigrants in New York, Maghrebin
immigrants (i.e., Moroccan, Algerian, and Tunisian immigrants) in Paris, and Mexican and Moroccan immigrants in Barcelona.
Beyond focusing on traditional measures of immigrant incorporation, he fuses a macro and micro level analysis to emphasize the importance of feeling at home in each of these cities.
In short, he finds that place matters, as low social integration and urban belonging characterize Paris, but high social integration
and urban belonging characterize New York City and Barcelona. So it is not enough for an immigrant to want to integrate if the context
itself does not allow for it. Such context includes openness to diversity and multiculturalism, avenues for collective action and political voice, economic incorporation, support for migrant and ethnic group organizations, history of migration, and feasibility of life as an undocumented migrant.