BOOK Project

Anna C. Korteweg and Gökce Yurdakul (equal authors)
The Headscarves Debates: Conflicts of Belonging in National Narratives
Stanford University Press (under contract)

This book focuses on debates surrounding clothing that covers the hair, face, and/or body of Muslim women. In both popular and scholarly analyses of European countries, the headscarf, the burka and niqab, have come to symbolize the decline of the coherent nation state, a decline that is either embraced as bringing us one step closer to a cosmopolitan order or seen as threatening the very coherence of society. In Muslim-majority countries, the headscarf symbolizes a desire for an overarching umma or a Muslim community that transcends and therefore undermines the nation-state. We take a different approach and show that the headscarf is not a rupture of nationhood. Rather, the nation is being reinvented by different political actors, including Muslim women and men, in debates such as those surrounding the headscarf. Ultimately, we demonstrate that contemporary debates about the way Muslim women cover their bodies show what it means to be German, Dutch, French or Turkish.

RESEARCH Project

Anette Fasang, Gökce Yurdakul and Natalie Lohmann
The Headscarf Impact: Highly Skilled Muslim Immigrant Women’s Employment In the German Labour Market Between Social Mobility and Discrimination
(in preparation)

In Germany, Muslim immigrant women have been targets of integration policies, and they have been usually portrayed as victims of their families. One of the most important ways for Muslim women’s social mobility is to have their own careers and income. Despite of the growing literature on „saving Muslim women from Muslim men,“ many Muslim women report that they are discriminated against in the German labour market, yet the evidence is anecdotal. Previous research on ethnic discrimination has paid little attention to the intersection of ethnicity, religious affiliation and gender in this context. To fill this gap, we attempt to explore highly skilled Muslim women’s opportunities in the German labour market in the recruitment process. This research project aims to analyze Muslim women’s employment opportunities in the German labour market by exploring both the recruiters and the potential employees side. Drawing on Devah Pager and her colleagues’ research on discrimination in the labour market (2003, 2005, 2009), we use both quantitative and qualitative research designs to study highly skilled Muslim women’s labour market entry in the areas of law, medicine and business. We propose to study attitudes and discrimination on the recruiters’ side quantitatively with a factorial survey design. Muslim women’s experiences during the application process are studied qualitatively with in-depth interviews. We then link the quantitative component on the recruiter’s side and the qualitative component on the applicant side with an experimental audit study. The experimental audit study illumniates the relationship between employers’ attitudes toward hiring Muslim women, with or without headscarves, and their actual hiring behaviour. The mixed-methods approach enables us to disentangle the mechanisms of discrimination, and to explore the role of specific resources, such as ethnic-religious niches, for Muslim women’s labour market success.