Title of Deliverable: Due date of Deliverable: July 2010 Project coordinator:        Panteion University (UPSPS) Partners:        International Center for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations (IMIR)         University of Cyprus (UCY)         Universita di Bologna (UNIBO)         ‘Dunarea de Jos” University of Galati (UDJG)         Concorci Institut d’ Infancia I Mon Urba (CIIMU)         “Euro-Balkan” Institute (EU-BAL)         Bilkent University (BILKENT-U) Project no. 216065 Thematic Area: Cultural Interactions and Multiculturalism in European Societies Start date of Project: February 2008 Duration: 3 years Dissemination Level     PU  Public X     PP  Restricted to other programme participants     RE  Restricted to a group specified by the concortium     Co  Confidential WP Coordinator: University of Cyprus, (UCY) Cyprus Research teams Cyprus: UCY Main Researcher: Zelia Gregoriou Assistant Researchers: Paraskevi Michael, Costas Stylianou, Emily Christodoulou, Mantalena Tsouka, Kalipso Charalambous, Giorgos Stoyias, Rena Choplarou, Valentina Chlorakioti, Georgios Zoitsas, Loizos Loukaides, Vera Paschali Greece: UPSPS Main Researcher: Alexandra Zavos FYROM: EU-BAL Main Researcher: Ana Blazheva Assistant Researcher: Viktorija Borovska Synthesis Report The writing of the Synthesis Report rests on the writing of three authors: Zelia Gregoriou (author of the Cypriot WP5 National Report), Alexandra Zavos (author of the Greek WP5 National Report) and Ana Blazheva (author of the Macedonian WP5 National Report). The synthesis was composed by Zelia Gregoriou but the content, especially the presentation of findings from the national studies, draws from the analysis of data and discussion developed in the national reports.  Repetitive references to the individual authors of the National Reports were avoided.  This bestows flow to the final text but overshadows individual authorship.  Thanks are extended to all the researchers who participated in fieldwork and to Alexandra Zavos and Nikos Kokosalakis for their insightful feedback on earlier versions of this report. Z.G. Table of Contents Introduction: The limits of culturalism and the quest for the repoliticization of Intercultural Education WP5 focuses on the intersections between gender and migration in the context of intercultural education. Intercultural education presents a considerably controversial area of socio-cultural development in multicultural societies and migrant integration policy applications insofar as it is understood as one of the main apparatuses and sites through which gendered national (cultural, religious, linguistic, ethnic) identities and histories are constructed and reproduced. In this sense, education is a highly political and politicized field, both for natives and migrants, minorities and majorities alike. Over the last decades education has been celebrated across traditionally migrant receiving societies in the west as the paradigmatic social sphere for promoting intercultural dialogue, combating xenophobia by foregrounding diversity as a source of cultural capital, and cultivating the sense that tolerance to difference is an essential condition for the promotion of social cohesion and social harmony in an age of mobility and multicultural becomings. One of the most representative samples of EU policy documents that reflect this approach is Decision No 1983/2006/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 18 December 2006 concerning the designation of 2008 as European Year of Intercultural Dialogue: At the heart of the European project, it is important to provide the means for intercultural dialogue and dialogue between citizens to strengthen respect for cultural diversity and deal with the complex reality in our societies and the coexistence of different cultural identities and beliefs. Furthermore, it is important to highlight the contribution of different cultures to the Member States' heritage and way of life and to recognize that culture and intercultural dialogue are essential for learning to live together in harmony (Decision No 1983/2006/EC, 2006: p. 44). In outlining the specific aims of 2008 European Year of Intercultural Dialogue, the Decision calls for fostering the role of education as “an important medium for teaching about diversity” and “increasing the understanding of other cultures and developing skills and best social practices” (ibid.). The “intercultural competence” approach of European Year of Intercultural Dialogue has been deployed in guidelines for migrant integration and educational campaigns attempting to bridge the call for “cultural awareness” with “global challenges”: 2008 has been designated as the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue […] Indeed, at a time of increasing societal heterogeneity characterized by globalization, migration and European integration, one of the most pressing questions facing policy-makers and politicians is how to combine diversity with inclusion and cohesion. The field of education is seen as crucial for the promotion of cultural awareness and expression as a key competence for successful participation in knowledge society (Faas, 2009). This grounding of intercultural dialogue in teaching about diversity and teaching for tolerance is becoming acclaimed across multiple levels (local, national and EU) and diverse strata of policy (migration and security, social inclusion, Lisbon objectives) at a time when critical voices from within the field of intercultural education are increasingly questioning the content, the politics and, mostly, the absences in popularized understandings of intercultural education.  Invocations to diversity and tolerance are increasing criticized for becoming banners for a depoliticized version of intercultural education, particularly a conservatized version that does more to sustain inequities than to demolish them (Díaz-Rico, 1998). Some critics argue that the prevalent version of intercultural education focuses not on eliminating educational inequities, but on human relations and celebrating diversity (Hidalgo et al., 1996; Jackson, 2003). Concerns about the depoliticization of intercultural education echo similar concerns that have already been expressed about the overall project of multiculturalism as a hegemonic response to migrant Europe.  In decoding some of the major formulation of anti-racist policies in Britain in the early 90’s, Anthias, Yuval-Davis & Cain situate their critique of multiculturalist thinking against the background of growing racism and fascism in Europe.  Their target is not multicultural education as such but rather the view that there is no racism in Europe and that racist attitudes can be treated by promoting cultural understanding for immigrant others: Multi-culturalism emerged as a result of the realization, originally in the USA, and then in Britain, that the ‘melting pot’ doesn’t melt, and that ethnic and racial division get reproduced from generation to generation … Multi-culturalism constructs society as composed of a hegemonic homogeneous majority, and small unmeltable minorities with their own essentially different communities and cultures which have to be understood, accepted, and basically left alone -- since their differences are compatible with the hegemonic culture -- in order for society to have harmonious relations (Anthias, Yuval-Davis & Cain, 1993: p. 158). Whereas additive approaches to multicultural education promise inclusion, representation and recognition to the unmeltable minorities, “competence based” curricula come to cater for the ‘rest’. Analyzing the ideological cohort between the individualistic ethos of the competence approach and the espoused “managed diversity” of the multicultural ‘new’ Europe-- managed and regulated so as not to disrupt systemic cohesion—Alexandra Zavos (author of the Greek National Report) points out that multicultural education is preserving existing hierarchies of power.  Idealized “competences” such as “cultural awareness” and competence for “participation” sound more like user tools for a multicultural neo-liberal market of skills than education aims.  The emphasis on cultural awareness and expression marks the eclipse of a vision for whereas the so called 'competence for participation’, drawing on individualistic and market-derived models of social relations, subsumes the vision of multicultural education to an economic rationality where educational aims are blurred with profiles of psychological qualities. As argued in the Greek Report by Zavos, the premises on which current intercultural educational approaches are based are drawn from neo-liberal, nationalist, euro- and westo-centric, individualistic and market-driven priorities, re/presented as ‘multiculturalism’ and ‘diversity’. This framework is centered on the West, and therefore cannot develop appreciation of difference, or of the inequalities and oppressions that attend it. In addition, this outlook frames the individual and not social processes as the main subject (and object) of both education, and social change.  The invoked individual has to fit the model of the enterprising and well-adjusted participant, who through ‘cultural awareness and expression’ deals with diversity (not difference and inequality) competently, that is without disrupting social cohesion, i.e. without stirring the waters. This kind of framework does not account for the ways in which different processes of neo-liberal globalization (such as urban de- and regeneration) affect local neighborhoods and schools with migrant, refugee and other marginalized populations. This is the intersecting (racialized and classed) diversity that the educational system does not want to deal with. More recently, cultural critic and social theorist Paul Gilroy has recast the concern with Europe’s reluctance to engage with issues of racism in a postcolonial framework. He argues that [i]n seeking an explanation for the widespread reluctance to engage racism analytically, historically, or governmentally, we may observe charitably that questions about “race,” identity, and differentiation have a distinctive, mid twentieth century ring to them. They sometimes feel anachronistic because they do try to return contemporary discussion to a moral ground that we feel we should have left behind long ago (Gilroy, 2005: p. 14). The refusal to think about racism, according to Gilroy, structures the life of the post-imperial polity. This is not a mere case of a post-traumatic historical silence.  Europe’s refusal to think about race structures its inability to see how the imperial system of race thinking has transformed into modernist rationalities (“rational irrationalities of raciology,” as he calls them) and how these constitute a driving element in the development of Europe’s self-fashioning, its modernity, its cultural processes, its political theory.  Browsing through EU member states’ National Campaign statements and National Action Plans on “2008 European Year of Intercultural Dialogue” we will realize that words such as ‘culture’ and ‘difference’ are used in abundance whereas the words race and/or racism are slimly or never used. In fact, in the document of the Parliament’s Decision, racism is mentioned once, as one among a series of problems to be handled with intercultural dialogue:   Intercultural dialogue is an important dimension in many Community policies and instruments in the fields of the structural funds, education, lifelong learning, youth, culture, citizenship and sport, gender equality, employment and social affairs, combating discrimination and social exclusion, combating racism and xenophobia, policy on asylum and the integration of immigrants, human rights and sustainable development, audiovisual policy and research (Decision No 1983/2006/EC, 2006: p. 45). The idea that intercultural education is a practical necessity in educating citizens for a new global and multicultural world has become by far an orthodoxy for any educational initiative that claims to be progressive, modernizing and European.  The meanings, nuances, uses, effects and implied silences of such formulations will be subjected to critical analysis in our research.  What exactly do we mean when we declare a campaign of intercultural education towards combating racism and xenophobia? If, as Gilroy argues, cultural raciologies structure Europe’s modernity, including the educational declaration of respect for migrant and ethnic students’ difference, perhaps we fail to understand race the very moment we reduce racism to a practical problem of attitudes or ignorance to be tackled through intercultural education. “If it survives at all, critical reflection on racism,” Gilroy argues, is likely to be diverted to toward two equally unsatisfactory destinations. The first can be identified through its affirmation of practical action. This is commendable in many ways but becomes suspect where enthusiasm for praxis combines with hostility toward reflection.  The evasive unity of theory and practice is then replaced by the unconditional exaltation of practice, unencumbered by thought. What was racial politics becomes policy or therapy and then simply ceases to be political. At best, the enhancement of racial equality and the battle against racial injustice become technical problems to be managed and administered (Gilroy, 2005: pp. 16-17). One of the major challenges for this work package has been to develop theorizations of intercultural education and frameworks for research in intercultural environments which repoliticize the field.  Revitalizing the links between theory and research constitutes in itself a step towards this direction.  Terms which are have become commonsensical in intercultural education such as culture, difference, the other’s culture, inclusion, integration, European values etc. will be investigated in situ. How do teachers understand intercultural education? How do teachers deal with the challenges posed by intercultural settings and arenas?  Does the talk on intercultural education, xenophobia and ethnocentrism finally disrupt reluctance to deal with racism or does the preoccupation with others and others’ difference constitute another raciology that is used to normalize borders and hierarchies?  Pegging the question in a more acute way, Gorski (2006) asks: How do we conservatize multicultural education?  When he asks multicultural education professionals in the US to define multicultural education, Gorski finds that their responses typically reflect more of a “compassionate conservative consciousness than an allegiance to equity and justice”: a majority of well-intentioned equity advocates respond that multicultural education is about ‘learning about other cultures’ (which brings to mind the question, other than what?) or ‘celebrating the joys of diversity.’ And although such lessons and celebrations may be valuable educationally; they do not, when unattached from a transformative vision, move a classroom or school toward authentic multicultural education (Gorski, 2006: p. 167). The theoretical question we have been posing throughout our fieldwork and the analysis of our data is this: What remains unspoken between formal understandings of the goals of intercultural education and the realities of the intercultural interactions in schools?  Or, to phrase this in a reverse way, what kinds of boundaries are established when we speak about mobility and exchange of cultures in the multicultural classroom? Are regimes of patriarchal thought, racism and postimperial colonial melancholia replicated, contested or negotiated when schools, capitalizing on their multicultural agenda, fashion themselves as harbingers of tolerance to others?  Furthermore, what happens with the colonial baggage of terms such as ‘culture’ and ‘civilization’ when, in a postcolonial European context (or heading), the mere coining of these terms signals one’s commitment to the combating of racism?  No speech act is used with such disciplinary certainty and sense of intercultural civility as the invocation to the significance of the “the others’ culture”. And yet, both “otherness” and “culture” are indebted to what Etienne Balibar calls the re-instantiation of the “colonial moment”. Etienne Balibar echoes Gilroy’s thesis on racialized rationalities of modernity when he engages with Europe’s “liquid modernity” as a machine of self-projection and border protection that produces otherness and transforms strangers into Europe’s enemies.  In a recent exchange with Zygmunt Bauman, Balibar argues that the concept of “European Civilization” which is often projected as the irreducible and unassimilable core of European identity, that irreconcilable maxim that migrants will have to learn to respect and reconcile their value systems with, is a specific historical construct whose roots can be traced in different phases of European imperialism. Analyzing the “contribution of the colonial moment” to the construction of the European identity, Balibar states: It has become common wisdom that Europe framed its image and the criteria of its membership in as much as it conquered and colonized the world. Accordingly, it developed its civilization which it perceived as Civilization per se as an instrument of power to be exercised over other peoples and cultures in the world, in the rest of the world, but also as a framework where to incorporate products, images and discourses from its “colonial subjects” in a conflictual relationship which remained dissymmetric until the colonization finished and even after but was never, I believe, completely one-sided …  As Eric Hobsbawm recently pointed out, there was not really a concept of Europe as a juridical system of international relations among European nations and also not a feeling of common cultural identity before colonization, that is, before the citizens from rival colonial powers collaborated and fought against each other to divide the periphery or what they perceived now to be a centre occupied by themselves, collectively (Balibar, 2009). If intercultural policies, arrangements, measures, activities, actions and performances are played amidst, with and not against the conflictual and dissymmetric relations, any research committed to repoliticizing the concept and field of intercultural education must remain alert to recording and decoding both the instantiations of the colonial moment that Balibar describes but also its displacement and interruption.  This requires that researchers as cultural others preserve that essential estrangement that will enable them to study from a critical distances the ethos of multicultural schools and investigate the origins, effects and opportunities for the interruption of what Gilroy calls the “romance of  racial and ethnic absolutism” (Gilroy, 2005, p. 57). At the same time, in order to apply intersectionality toward the research of intercultural interactions in schools, researchers need to be equipped with theoretical tools that enable them to see how gender, race and migration are played out, interplayed but also displaced in what we could call the intercultural moment.   PART ONE: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORKS, METHODOLOGY, NATIONAL CONTEXTS The intersectional framing of GEMIC’s methodological approach to migration, gender and ethnicity as well as GEMIC’s theoretical indebtedness to critical race theory, postcolonial theory and transnational studies invite new theorizations of intercultural education, both at the level of educational goals and at the level of research methodology. This section attempts to renegotiate the conceptual and political limits of intercultural education by importing ways of thinking, concepts and questions from fields outside the disciplinary boundaries of education. This attempt to chart new terrains of research on intercultural education along GEMIC’s axes of interdisciplinarity and intersectionality is outlined under three headings: (a) Engendering migration studies (with comments and recommendations on how some of these theories and methodologies could be re-iterated in WP5 towards the engendering of school-based ethnography), (b) Racializing and Genderizing the study of intercultural Interactions, and (c) Racialized and Gendered School Practices: Bringing performativity in. Engendering our research on multicultural schools and intercultural educational interfaces means overcoming the usual understanding of gender as inclusion of the variable sex or intensifying the comparison of what boys and girls do across the axis of ethnicity.  Our attempt to engender the study of intercultural education draws from three areas of research. First, we have reviewed how the engendering of migration studies has developed over the last years (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1999; Pessar and Mahler, 2003; Piper, 2006; Jones, 2008).  Second, in order to avoid the trap of conflating the engendering of intercultural education with a focus on differences between migrant boys and migrant girls (which might also limit our understanding of resistance, hegemony and agency), we focus on theorizations of gender as performance rather than identity (Butler, 1990; Youdell, 2005; Davies, 2006). Third, in order to avoid the trap of cultural essentialism and the idealization of difference we have taken into consideration both the interpretive turn to culture (Geertz, 1973) as well as recent quests in the academic field to politicize intercultural educational with regards to conflict, global inequalities, securitization of migration and national politics.  By bringing performativity in the study of power relations and subject positionalities in schools, we want to analyze moments of ambiguous positionings, that is, moments where students and teachers are hailed (and subjucated) by dominant discourses but, at the same time, performative opportunities occur for subjects to break from context, that is, to defy dominant discourses and claim new solidarieties and struggles. In a critical genealogy of gender in migration studies, Mahler and Pessar note that, beginning in the 1970s, the dearth of research on women was replaced by a “a flurry of historical and contemporary studies that took women migrants as the primary subject of inquiry” and many other studies that incorporated gender by inserting the variable of sex into their quantitative data collection (Mahler and Pessar, 2006: p. 28).  As they note, this kind of interest in women migrants did not amount to the engendering of migration studies itself.  In a literature appraisal, conducted in the late 1990s, Hondagneu-Sotelo points out that “the vast majority of immigration studies are still conducted as though gender relations are largely irrelevant to the way the world is organized” (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1999: p. 566).  Hondagneu-Sotelo notes the proliferation of works on women migrants as a category but makes the cautionary remark that a dynamic and fluid conceptualization of gender as relational and situational is still missing.  She herself outlines such a conceptualization of gender back in 1994: Gender is not simply a variable to be measured, but a set of social relations that organize immigration patterns. The task, then, is not simply to document or highlight the presence of undocumented women who have settled in the United States, or to ask the same questions of immigrant women that are asked of immigrant men, but to begin with an examination of how gender relations [which are exercised in relational and dynamic ways] facilitate or constrain both women's and men's immigration and settlement (Hondagneu-Sotelo, 1994: p. 3). Mahler and Pessar acknowledge the contribution of poststructuralist approaches to the shift from the comparison of gender roles to a more dynamic and fluid conceptualization of gender. As they point out, conceptualizing gender as a process yields a more “praxis-oriented perspective” wherein gender identities, relations and ideologies are fluid, not fixed. But, iterating Ferree et al. (1999), they attach a crucial caveat to this appraisal of poststructuralism’s contribution: gender should also be understood "simultaneously as a structure, that is, a latticework of institutionalized social relationships that, by creating and manipulating the categories of gender, organize and signify power at levels above the individual" (Ferree et al., 1999: p. xix). The call to theorize gender as situational and procedural, in tandem with the cautionary remark not to dismiss structures, is traced in Mahler and Pessar’s own work.  In a 2003 article they advocate "gendered geographies of power" as a framework for analyzing people's gendered social agency given their positioning within multiple hierarchies of power which are operative within and across multiple terrains. This framework, they suggest, allows the study of gender as envisioned and practiced within and across different scales and transnational spaces while, at the same time, acknowledges and accommodates the inconsistencies and contradictions across these spaces.  The authors cite from Fouron and Glick (2001) examples of how patriarchy is both challenged and buttressed by transnational migrants' actions across geographic space and scales of agency.  A similar kind of that shows the ambivalent deployment of power and agency in transnational trajectories as is found in Karen Richman’s work (Richman, 2002, 2005, 2008).   Intersectionality is another approach that addresses the multiple, multi-sited and interlayered realities and social inequalities of migration as a gendered experience (Lutz, 1997; Hirsch, 1999; Anderson, 2000; Parreñas 2001; 2005; Yeates, 2005).  By examining the ways in which gender, race and nation intersect in migration contexts, a number of studies map new forms of marginality as well as new forms of agency.  The application of intersectionality in migration studies brings up the need to rearticulate and re-emphasize intersectionality’s meaning beyond an additive understanding of marginalities and identities (as in “double-disadvantage”, “multiple jeopardy”, “triple oppression”, etc.). Building on the 1990’s scholarship from Black Women’s Studies, researchers deploying the various definitions of intersectionality often cite Crenshaw’s (1991) definition of interlocking systems of oppression, Collins’ (1990) conceptualization of interwoven patterns of inequality as a “matrix of domination” (Collins, 1990), Shields’s (2008) framework of “mutually constitutive relations among social identities” and Yuval-Davis’ (2006) “ways multiple identities converge to create and exacerbate women’s subordination’. These formulations, however, especially when they are separated from their original context, tend to overemphasize the “mutually constituting” character of social identities while downplaying the locality and location of intersectionality.  For an analysis of family as a “site of intersectionality”, see Collins (1998).  In other words, intersectionality is attributed to the character of identities themselves (e.g., ethnicity and gender identity seen as essentially intersecting and reinforcing each other), forgetting that intersectionality lies within “sites” of practice and not within identities themselves. Anna C. Korteweg (2005, 2006) points out how this reading of intersectionality can provide groundings for very problematic integration policies.  If migration is understood as a catalyst that is augmenting people’s urgency for ethnic identifications rather than a meta-site for intersectionalities, it is easy to conclude that in conditions of migration, ethic fundamentalism and female subordination reinforce each other, both of them becoming indistinguishable symptoms of immigrants’ quest for identity. Korteweg assesses how gender differences have been managed both in emancipation and immigrant integration policies in the Netherlands, and argues that policy makers seem to reinforce those perceptions of gendered practices of minority women and girls that have given rise to calls for strong forms of assimilation.  Korteweg cites as an example how new language and cultural competency requirements for new immigrants in the Netherlands are informed by the belief that gender differences are a major obstacle to immigrants’ ability to integrate into Dutch society (Korteweg, 2005). A dynamic formulation of intersectionality that avoids the trap of reinforcing perceptions of gendered ethnicity is figured by Stuart Hall. In Hall’s formulation, intersectionality explores how systems of oppression “articulate” with one another.  As Collins (1998) observes, certain ideas and practices surface repeatedly across multiple systems of oppression and serve as “focal points or privileged social locations” for these intersecting systems of oppression.  A major task for WP5 researchers is to look into the different strata of school organization, pedagogical practice, structures of feeling, ordinary interactions and school rituals for focal points that look “customary”, “normal” and “neutral” but in fact re-produce patterns of exclusion (excellence, student diligence, culturally sensitive approaches, disciplinary mechanisms, dating, counseling, etc.). In conclusion, we could say that Pessar and Mahler’s framework of gendered transnational geographies of power combined with Hall’s notion of “articulate” systems could help us delineate settings, arenas, processes and dominant discourses in intercultural schools as privileged sites of intersectionality and, with regards to these “articulate systems” investigate how “gender is racialized and race is gendered” (Glenn, 2002). This framework of gendered transnational geographies of power would be particularly useful for the study of migrant students.  Our literature review suggests that the gender imaginary of migrant children and adolescents is almost always examined within national geographies, with emphasis put, almost always, on transgenerational value conflicts between children and their parents (this emphasis could be attributed to the focus of research on second generation migrant children). One of the dynamic aspects of Mahler and Pessar’s framework of “gendered geographies of power” is that it understands gender as a multitude and multi-sited: “gender operates simultaneously on multiple spatial and social scales (e.g., the body, the family, the state)”.  Transferred to the sites and social scales of schooling, this framing of gender as a multitude could provide unique insight for the theorization of intersectionality in WP5.  Both migration studies and intercultural education studies that focus on migrant students often examine how gender values are defined by migrant parents/community, in the home, in the family, and how they are negotiated when the children come into contact with other or other’s (majority) cultures, etc. But what if gender is not that stable when it operates across different domains?  As Pessar and Mahler (2003) point out, “when gender is envisioned and practiced within and across different scales and transnational spaces, we often find examples of inconsistencies and contradictions”. In other words, the operations of gender in school settings should be understood in terms of distance or proximity, conflict or harmony, with migrant family values but in terms of inconsistence and discontinuity.  The focus of our research is not on the impact of migrants’ and ethnic minorities’ family values on the school adjustment of their children.  Rather, we want to see how gender, in relation to ethnicity, race, class, etc., is re-played and re-enacted in school settings and what impact this has on the dominant school cultures. Racializing and engendering research on migrant and ethnic students: intercultural interactions as a site of intersectionality The notion that gendered practices are symbolic markers of ethnicity is a fundamental premise in the research on immigrant children and adolescents. Whether it is girls or boys who bear the burden of renegotiating the markers of identity, whether this is a burden of identity or a process of subjectification, whether the institutional disciplining of these markers by is continuous or ruptured, such research questions frame intercultural interactions as a site of intersectionality. A number of studies adopt a comparative approach to the gendered experiences of boys and girls and examine how values and conditions in the receiving society influence parental expectations of gender-related roles. Reviewing research findings for immigrants originating from a number of sending countries, Suárez-Orozco and Qin-Hilliard (2004) note that compared with their brothers, immigrant girls tend to have many more responsibilities at home. Their own research findings show that girls are significantly more likely to report responsibilities for cooking and childcare. The same authors also report in their literature review that immigrant parents exercise much stricter control over their daughter’s activities outside the house rather than their sons’. Immigrant girls are often not allowed to go to parties, spend time with friends after school, or participate in after-school programs and other activities that immigrant boys can typically choose to do freely (Olsen, 1997; Suárez-Orozco and Qin-Hilliard, 2004).  Our literature review, however, suggests that immigrant girls are not always inconspicuous repositories of cultural continuity.  Some researchers suggest that immigrant girls are more likely than immigrant boys to act as transcultural mediators while some others suggest that immigrant girls are socialized by their parents to be bearers of tradition. Research along the first line of analysis stresses that immigrant girls are more likely than boys to develop “additive” or “hyphenated identities” and to support attempts to bridge “the two cultures” (Qin, 2006).  Waters (1997) found that Caribbean girls seemed to have more leeway in identity formation than their male counterparts, who tend to face more pressure to form a racial identity due to perceptions of discrimination and unfair treatment from the mainstream society. Similarly, Rumbaut (1996) and Olsen (1997) find that immigrant girls are more likely than boys to choose "additive" or "hyphenated identities," while Qin notes that girls are more likely to attempt to bridge “the two cultures” (Qin 2006: p.14).  The same line of research suggests that the boundaries between ethnic identities appear to be less fluid and less permeable for migrant boys than for migrant girls. Boys seem to have more difficulty in assuming bicultural competencies and making successful bicultural adjustments. There seems to be more alignment between schooling and femininity while masculinity and schooling are perceived as oppositional (Qin, 2006: p.14).  With an increasing number of researchers agreeing that cultural assimilation has negative effect on the psychological health and educational achievement of ethnic students, the combination of parental control (ethnic component) and adjustment to school climate (assimilation) comes to be perceived by educational research as a successful instance of segmented assimilation becuase it leads to academic achievement. T here is a tendency to conflate “segmented assimilation” (Zhou, 1997) with “transcultural identity” (Suárez-Orozco and Suárez-Orozco, 2001) especially within discourses of “immigrant children’s development.” This conflation is problematized from this Report’s approach of radikal interculturality because and the dynamic potential of social-cultural change and the vision of social justice is completely overshadowed by the ideal of school success.  In contrast, in research along the second line of analysis, terms such as “double standards” (Espiritu, 2001) and “keepers of the culture” (Billson, 1995) are used as critical codifications for patriarchal control of immigrant daughters’ sexuality.   In part, this divergence of findings can be attributed to the impact of literature review itself as a de-contextualizing and reifying kind of academic writing.  Because gender is not just an organizing axis of cultural values but also a register through which researchers make sense of cross-cultural interpretations, there is a tendency to organize findings on immigrant children across the gender axis while downplaying the context—or, to rearticulate terms from the previous section—the sites of intertextuality.  For example, Espiritu’s findings on the parental treatment of immigrant girls as bearers of tradition are heavily cited in literature on immigrant children and adolescents.  Focusing on the relationship between Filipino immigrant parents and their daughters in the U.S., Espiritu (2001) suggests that “the virtuous Filipina daughter”, partially grounded on the conceptualization of white women as sexually immoral, is a vehicle for racialized immigrants to assert cultural superiority over the dominant group.  Overemphasizing this finding, literature tends to sidestep the relevance of the locality of Espiritu’s research (i.e., Filipina girls in US) as well as the special focus of her inquiry (i.e., parental surveillance of children’s dating practices). A different theoretical approach and analysis of the same research data could have generated very different conclusions, for example, conclusions on the functions of dating specifically within US cultultal and social contexts.  In other words, a different approach could have shed light on rituals of heteronormativity in US society as processes of “nationalization” rather than framing Filipino gendered ethnicity as an exceptional site of immigrant cultural dynamics. An even more problematic instance of decontextualized borrowings from Espiritu’s work, is the elimination of the postcolonial politics of resistance which is paramount to the author’s textual politics.  As Espiritu explains, by exploring how Filipino immigrants characterize white families and white women, she aims “to contribute to a neglected area of research: how the "margins" imagine and construct the "mainstream" in order to assert superiority over it.”  As Espiritu argues, “this strategy is not without costs. The elevation of Filipina chastity (particularly that of young women) has the effect of reinforcing masculinist and patriarchal power in the name of a greater ideal of national/ethnic self-respect. Because the control of women is one of the principal means of asserting moral superiority, young women in immigrant families face numerous restrictions on their autonomy, mobility, and per- sonal decision making” (Espiritu, 2001: p. 417). Thus, the most political aspect of Espiritu’s construbution is neglected, i.e., that immigrant gender imaginings in the metropolis are staged against colonial co-constructions of sexualized racialized other (e.g., Asian) women as morally licentious and uncivilized.  As she reminds the reader, “[h]istorically, the sexuality of racialized women has been systematically demonized and disparaged by dominant or oppressor groups to justify and bolster nationalist movements, colonialism, and/or racism” (Espiritu, 2001: p.  416). In other words, immigrant identity is othe field of Espiritu’s research but not the hypothesis or axis of her analysis.  She studies the idealization of female chastity as repository of Filipino tradition the contemporary in order to explain the neo-colonial order of the world and the trafficking of sex desire in a postcolonial transnational context. She notes, for example, that the symbolic disowning of the Filipina "bad girl" by Filipino immgrants is staged not only against colonial imaginings of the female exotic body but also against the contemporary trafficking of sex-desire in zones of neo-colonial control such as American military bases: Cognizant of the pervasive hypersexualization of Filipina women, my respondents, especially women who grew up near military bases, were quick to denounce prostitution, to condemn sex laborers, and to declare (unasked) that they themselves did not frequent "that part of town" (Espiritu, 2001: p. 426).   The theoretical and methodological insights to draw from this discussion for WP5 research methodologies are multilevel.  The double disciplining of daughters by immigrant and ethnic minority families (daughters disciplined as racial/national subjects but also as gendered subjects) and immigrant imaginings of “female chastity” must be explored not only in relation to the immigrant politics of holding onto traditional values  It is daughters who have the primary burden of protecting and preserving values both among immigrant families and non-immigrant families. But, as Espiritu puts it, the difference is in the ways immigrant and nonimmigrant families sanction girls' sexuality. To control sexually assertive girls nonimmigrant parents rely on the gender-based good girl/bad girl dichotomy in which (Espiritu, 2001: p. 432) "good girls" are passive, threatened sexual objects while "bad girls" are active, desiring sexual agents (Tolman and Higgins: 1996, p. 433). Immigrant and ethnic minority families exercise a “double disciplining” of daughters: daughters are disciplined as racial/national subjects as well as gendered subjects. In other words, young women who disobeyed parental strictures were often branded as bad girls but also as "non-ethnic," "untraditional," "radical," "selfish," and "not caring about the family." but also against the background of historical relations of oppression and current neo-colonial economies of sex desire, patriarchy and national longings.  Context matters and, as Espiritu’s research suggests, those who can unravel the historical webs and understand the politics of gendered ethnicities are usually the ones positioned as subordinate objects of intercultural study than subjects of insubordinate historical discourse. Furthermore, like Espiritu’s study, most studies on gendered ethnicities focus on family life, parental views of children’s dating.  What we do not find in current literature is how these imaginings of gendered ethnicities are staged and restaged in school contexts. If gender operates, then we need to see this gendering of ethnicity operating in intercultural school settings and arenas. We need to see how postimperial order is opearating in and through schools and how children and adolescents, migrnant and non-migrant, construct subjectivities from positions of authority and positions of marginality. Questions that mobilize such kinds of inquiry are not usually asked in educational reaserch.  The questions that have come to dominate the field are, Why do immigrant girls outperform boys in education settings and have higher educational and future aspirations?, Why do girls manage to negotiate the conflicting demands of different cultures and boys do not?, How does “segmented accommodation” enhance school performace?, Why do ethnic boys develop repugnant masculinity?  The two theories that usually inform these questins are Ogbu’s theory of oppositional identity (Fordham & Ogbu, 1986; Ogbu, 1991) and Suarez-Orozco’s theory of social mirroring (Suarez-Orozco, 2004).  Below we examine some examples of recent research that tease the limits of these theories.  The authors reviewed below examine how constructions of gender identity intersect with (rupture or enhance) processes of racialization.  Their focus is on gendered negotiations and racialized practices rather than individuals’ psychological responses to structural inequalities. Lopez (2002, 2003) examines the race–gender gap in education among the children of the Caribbean immigrants (the largest new immigrant group in New York City), placing the intersection of race and gender in high school settings at the center of her analysis.  Although both young men and young women had concrete experiences of gendered racialization—men stigmatized as hoodlums, women discredited as sexually promiscuous ‘mamasitas’ and welfare queens—the latter reported fewer problems with teachers at school. Ogbu’s theory of oppositional identity turns out to be limited not only because it cannot explain this gender variation but also because it is based on a modernist notion of subjectivity which localizes the origins of racialization (including processes of oppositional identity formation) in the individual psyche (e.g., the immigrant youth dismissing schooling, which they perceive as connected to mainstream culture).  Lopez’s research centers on how institutional practices and classroom pedagogy contribute to or interrupt oppressive racializ(ing) and gender(ing) processes in high school settings.  In her fieldwork she finds that “the same so-called ‘oppositional’ behaviour” from young women is not sanctioned “as harshly” as that of young men and that both men and women teachers are generally more lenient towards young women who transgress school rules, are late to class, and miss homework, than they are towards young men (Lopez, 2003: p. 75).  In a similar study, Lopez (2002) finds that seemingly gender neutral practices such authoritative teaching and guard patrolling are actually informally directed toward young men, further racializing those from racially stigmatized groups and increasing their alienation from school.  Gillborn (1990) argues that the ‘myth of an Afro-Caribbean challenge to authority’ (for example, a particular way of walking common amongst African-Caribbean boys in the school) is produced in as much as it is also productive of institutional disciplinarity: “In the day-to-day life of the school almost any display of Afro-Caribbean ethnicity was deemed inappropriate and was controlled, either officially (in the case of non-uniform dress) or informally (in the case of speech or the style of walking noted above)” (Gillborn, 1990, p. 29). Very similar to Lopez’s are also the research questions and data analysis of Qin-Hilliard (2003).  Qin-Hilliard’s research shows that immigrant minority girls do better in school and are more academically oriented than immigrant minority boys, especially towards the later years of school, because they may be protected from risk factors like harsh school environment by a supportive network of teachers, peers and parents while boys are more likely to be negatively influenced by their friends.  This is a case where Suarez-Orozco’s theory of social mirroring turns out to have a limited applicability in explaining the interaction of processes of racialization and genderization. If parents and teachers have the same academic expectations from boys and girls, how do we explain the fact that girls do well and boys do not? In Qin-Hilliard’s study, the strict parental control of girls is framed as part of the “protective network of supportive relations” as well as part of “a form of social capital” which can be instrumental in promoting educational outcomes of immigrant girls.  Boys, Qin-Hilliard notes, even though they are exposed to and assimilate into the “prevalent culture” (which is often “that of the inner city”) they were deficient in supportive networks and have low school expectations and low academic achievement. How do we reconcile Qin-Hilliard’s findings with the view that “segmented assimilation” is a condition for successful school performance?  If boys preserve their ethnic ties by constructing their gender identities on the basis of ethic identity and, at the same time, establish bridges to the receiving society’s culture by becoming assimilated to prominent youth culture, why doesn’t this count as a form of “segmented assimilation”?  It seems that not any kind of ethnic culture and not anyt kind of acquired culture (preservation and assimilation being the two poles of segmented assimilation) would count as preferred components of a successful form of “segmented assimilation”. A comparative analysis of research findings suggests that “segmented assimilation” is a condition for school success only when it is normalized in accordance with dominant school culture.  As Qin-Hilliard argues, For many immigrant students today, daily exposure and assimilation into urban school and neighborhood environments may lead to downward social mobility. For these students, ethnicity—that is maintaining native culture and language—may play a protective role, shielding them from the negative influences of today’s urban America. In regard to their education, immigrant girls appear to benefit from this shield of ethnicity more than their male counterparts (Qin-Hilliard, 2003: p. 106). Qin-Hilliard suggests that for immigrant boys, as in the case of minority boys, the construction of a masculine identity --“acting cool and tough” (Qin-Hilliard, 2003: p. 105)— is also likely to be in conflict with the school agenda: For immigrant minority boys, their construction of a gender identity was closely linked to their racial and ethnic identity. To be respected among their peers, immigrant minority boys often had to present and emphasize their masculinity at school by acting cool and tough. As a result, teachers, mostly female, may have been likely to perceive immigrant minority boys as having more behavioral problems than girls and likely to view them as more threatening and dangerous than immigrant girls, which may have led them to punish boys more severely. This had a potentially negative impact on their development (Qin-Hilliard, 2003: p. 105). In a more recent study that focuses on Chinese immigrant adolescents, Qin reports that compared to girls’, boys’ formation of gender identity faces more “peer pressure” which is channeled into downplaying education and emphasizing nonacademic activities like sports (Qin 2009). Similar studies attribute ethnic minority boys’ hyper-masculinity to their reaction to experiences of racism and the development of a bitter awareness that structural inequalities and discrimination are obstacles that cannot be overcome. Qin, instead, attributes hyper-masculinity to conflicting cultural expectations experienced by Chinese boys over the construction of gender and academic identities. Caught between, on the one hand, parental anxiety over their “become wild” and pressure to become ‘dragons’ of academic success and, on the other hand, anxiety not to be perceived as a “nerd” (and experiences of bullying when perceived as such), ethic Chinese boys negotiate tensions by responding to peer expectations.  This cultural conflict does not pre-exist. In a national Chinese context, gender identities and academic identities would not be characterized by culturally conflicting codes and values. Instead, the development of gender identity and national identity, academic identity and national identity, would be mutually supportive than antagonistic.). Chinese Students become ethic Chinese students because they reside in the interstices of migration. Similar to Qin’s intersectional approach is Prieur’s analysis of Muslim or Southeast Asian youth’s “gender remix” in Norway (Prieur, 2002).  The term “gender remix” denotes a much more dynamic kind of intercultural process than Qin’s notion of “negotiation” (since the latter ultimately means succumbing to the most powerful kind of pressure).  Prieur argues that immigrant youth gender constructions cannot be understood solely in the light of cultural influence, as if on a scale running from conformity to parents’ culture to conformity to Norwegian culture. There is something really new in the making – new combinations and new creations – reflecting the particular social situation of the young people of immigrant origin (Prieur, 2002: p. 53). Prieur uses the notion of “gender remix” to explain the making of the hyper-masculine, aggressive masculinities of immigrant youth from Muslim or Southeast Asian countries.  Against the reading of aggressive immigrant masculinities as a form of gendered auto-ethnicization, Prieur argues that the major sources for this remix are youth entertainment cultures, subcultures and peer group cultural innovations: The ideas about honor and respect are probably less influenced by the norms and values of the immigrant boys’ grandparents’ villages than by movies, hip-hop and rap music, by a commercial derivation of black American culture (Prieur, 2002: p. 71). Territoriality, honor, friendship, physical toughness and the idealization of the male body are identified as common traits among these subcultures and the immigrant youth culture of hypermasculinity.  Of course, one might argue why migrant male youth acquire these and not other traits, since subcultural identifications aim to differentiation from dominant culture and other peer groups and not to the development of hypermasculinity as such.  Although Prieur adopts a cultural studies approach to explain the production and fluidity of gender remix but does not dispose of notions of structural inequality when it comes to explaining this remix’s accent on bodily practices. He argues that subcultural values and practices that compose the immigrant youth culture of hyper-masculinity are not arbitrary but rather constitute a form of reaction to social and economic marginalization.  Desai’s (1999) research on “bad Bengali boys” in London (Desai, 1999) and Bourgois’ research on Puerto Rican crack dealers in New York (Bourgois, 1996) are cited as similar cases. The school as an institution comprises of a network of power structures and microphysics of power exercised on teachers and students, but also researchers: I have started research in the school as of this week. It's quite a shock for me. I feel rather depressed. First of all, the feeling of there being no private space/time/thoughts in the context of the school. Everyone, and especially the children, is under a continuous gaze, as well as expectation to perform, deliver, answer questions etc. It is a kind of colonization. Also, even though the majority of the children are Albanians, this is somehow erased in the school context. The fact that they have a non-Greek background is not discussed, they speak only Greek and if some reference to something Albanian slips out during class, it is usually in a derogatory fashion, primarily by the kids themselves. So, at the moment, I am experiencing a kind of suffocation and disorientation. Of course, the paradox is that the teachers, who I believe, and see, to be dedicated to the children's 'success' need to make them 'good enough' for the Greek system, so in a way, even while they are aware that the Albanian aspect of their identities is not included in the school culture, this to some extent is also a premise for them to become successful students. It's somehow like wearing a straightjacket. (Alexandra Zavos, Fieldwork Diary) As I am about to leave from school, Mr. Neophytos, the Gym teacher who has been assigned the “check and control” on the Arab boys rushes to catch up with me, and starts yelling at me: “Why do you mess up with their lives and their fights? With this research you are doing you create a lot of problems. You keep asking who did this and whose fault ithey think it is, and this way you turn them against each other. Don’t ask them anything, never again. Ask me, only me.  These are different from the Cypriots. They do not understand.  To avoid problems in the future, don’t mess up with them. Let them fight. As you see, they are fighting with each other, not with Cypriots.”  (PM Fieldnotes, Dianellion Gymnasium Larnaca, May 20, 2009) According to Althusser’s analysis, the school is one of the Ideological Apparatuses of the State, the function of which is not to transmit, in some kind of disinterested and rational fashion, knowledge, considered neutral and objective, but indeed to establish and regulate normative dimensions about social relations, identity, personal and collective goals. The role of the school in reproducing and normalizing social inequalities and discrimination based on class, race and gender has been studied at large. In addition, it is also interesting to consider these normative dimensions not only in relation to social and cultural relations, but also as they affect the organization of time and space, the body, and personal relations. It is important to pose the question, whether or not, there is resistance, transgression or subversion of these norms by teachers and students. More specifically, we want to examine how gendered and processes of subjectification are reiterated and re-signified in school settings. How do we study gender and race in intercultural school contexts as “acts” (both as performative ways of hailing teachers and students into subject positions of submission but also as positionalities of agency)?  In most of the research findings discussed in our literature review, the authors speak of racialized spaces, gendered geographies, processes of racialization and gendered practices.  When it comes to “measuring” something, in qualitative or quantitative ways, researchers end up coding values and measuring attitudes.  For example, interviewees are presented with possible future scenarios and they are asked to position themselves or they are presented with statements and they are asked to indicate whether they agree or disagree.  Another approach is to prompt interviewees to narrate their own and their significant others’ experiences of “othering” and then their narratives are analyzed with regards to how interviewees position themselves in relation to their perceived notions of stereotyping, e.g., do immigrant minority students embrace disown (verbally or symbolically), associate themselves with or de-associate themselves from the “bad Filipina girl”, the “welfare queens”, “nerds”, male gangs, and so on. What we are suggesting here is that there seems to be a discrepancy between the theorization of gender as practice and its codification as attitudes, values, beliefs. This part focuses on some kinds of research which reckon with the problematic of studying the performativity of gender and ethnicity.  The theoretical framework of these studies is organized around Butler’s definition of the performative: ‘that discursive practice that enacts or produces that which it names’ (Butler, 1993: p. 13), something which produces that which it names, that which enacts retroactively its own referent. According to Butler, at the heart of becoming a subject is the ambivalence of mastery and submission, which, paradoxically, take place simultaneously—not in separate acts, but together in the same moment: The more a practice is mastered, the more fully subjection is achieved. Submission and mastery take place simultaneously, and it is this paradoxical simultaneity that constitutes the ambivalence of subjection. Where one might expect submission to consist in a yielding to an externally imposed dominant order, and to be marked by a loss of control and mastery, it is paradoxically marked by mastery itself… the lived simultaneity of submission as mastery, and mastery as submission, is the condition of possibility for the subject itself (Butler, 1995: pp. 45–46). The focus on the performative implicates a fundamental shift in the conceptualization of education, ethnicity and gender. The latter are not seen as axes of identity but rather as acts of subjectivity (not acts performed by an already established subject but acts which re-enact the subjectivity of the one to whom they are attributed). The shift from narratives to discourses and from attitudes and values to acts implicates a more fundamental shift: from the sociocultural construction of identity to the discursive production of subjectivity. . In other words, we do not talk about identities of students and teachers but about subjectivities of students and teachers. Here we cite here two examples of research in multicultural schools that elucidate this methodological shift from identity to subjectivity. The first example is from Deborah Youdell’s analysis of events and discourses related to Multicultural Day at Plains High as “a collective performative interpellation” (Youdell, 2006: p. 522).  In the school’s acceptance of the Arabic students’ donation of an Arabic Food stall, the school constitutes ‘Arabic’ as a legitimate axis of minority cultural difference and subjectivates the Arabic subject as a good student. And in donating the stall and participating in Multicultural Day, this good-Arabic-student-subject takes up this subjecthood. In doing this, just as the school cedes the good-Arabic-student-subject, so this subject cedes the authority of the school institution by which she/he is subjectivated.  And the students gain the rights of the student (to invite guests) but also subjection to teacher authority (to have their guests ejected). The stall, the food it sells, and so the students and others who staff it, are named (by the students?) ‘Arabic’ (Youdell, 2006: p. 522). In a context which she describes as “a playful skirmish” than a “battle”, Lebanese and Turkish students (who have contesting performative claims over the national paternity of the stall) organize and are staff together for the Arabic Food stall (the name Arab is, according to the author, both “given and taken”)’. The following event constitutes the departure point for Youdell’s deployment of a complex terrain of interrelated performatives though which subjecthood, albeit subjectivated and subjugated, is effected. A while later, the Deputy Principal ejects another Arabic boy, also on a BMX, who has spent the afternoon at the stall. The Deputy Principal says to him ‘You were going to light up on the premises—now leave’. The boy cups an unlit cigarette in his hand. One of the students from the stall asks: ‘Sir, what if I personally vouch for him?’. The Deputy Principal does not respond to this offer and directs the boy away. The Deputy Principal watches me watching (Youdell, 2006: p. 520). The focus on “a collective performative interpellation” rather than on identity development of minority students, the cultural conflicts they experience, or even the gendered “geographies” they negotiate allows the researcher to show the ambiguity or aporia of racializing practices and institutional racism. In constituting ‘Arabic’ as a legitimate axis of minority cultural difference (thus projecting a multicultural politics of tolerance and presumably combating islamophobic exclusion) the school subjectivates the Arabic subject as a good student. The student, on the other hand, takes up this subjecthood but, in doing so, he also cedes the authority of the school and its institutional force to subjectivate and subjugate the Arab students.  As Youdell puts it, “the students gain the rights of the student (to invite guests) but also subjection to teacher authority to have their guests ejected” (Youdell 2006: p. 522).  Youdell attributes the same kind of performative ambivalence to school securitization processes. The moment the Arab/Islamist threatens to burst out of the confines of service and the White, male, senior teacher stands in the quad in front of the stall, walkie-talkie in hand, the ‘Arabic’ students gain public recognition as legitimate and the subjectivation opens up the opportunity for self constitution. However, as Youdell adds, noting the subversive performative’s limited capacity to break from context and historicity, their self-constitution under the aegis of this legitimacy “threatens to slide back into injury and the constraint of the Savage Arab/Islamist threat” (Youdell, 2006: p. 523).  In another study, Youdell (2003) elicits this performative ambiguity of hegemonic discourses in regards to subcultural bodily practices (e.g., the male Black sub-cultural ‘walk’). Youdell argues that bodily acts performed as citations of subcultural status in order to challenge White school hegemony, have the potential to recoup the male Black youth as a ‘student-child’ which is being disciplined as an undesirable learner. Comparing Youdell’s analysis of racialization as subjection to Qin’s analysis of immigrant minority youth targeted by school disciplinary practices, we could say that both explicate the productive aspects of raced and gendered educational inequality and exclusion. One crucial difference, though, is that in bringing out the discursive nature of institutional arrangements and student practices Youdell is also bringing out their contingent nature. In other words, she suggests that within a context of performative politics, institutional mechanisms are also discursively mediated and, as such, they are not tools of control “acting on” students but rather subjectivating processes though which minority students’ discursive agency, albeit precarious and amenable to processes of disciplining control, is produced.   The second example is cited from Davies (2006).  Davies’ analysis of scenes of subjectification in intercultural school contexts elucidates the relevance of Butler's analysis of performativity for the analysis of disobedient citations of gender and ethnic in school settings. Davies focuses on the interaction of teachers with primary school students to illustrate the complex simultaneous processes of recognition on the part of the students, how they take-up and subvert power and how they disavowal dependency and freedom from the power of the dominant other to grant particular kinds of recognition.  Davies argues that this disavowal of dependency takes place through the reiteration and repetition of the discourses through which students are subjected to disciplinary control. In one of those scenes cited by Davies, we watch two boys, who had been involved in a playground fight two days ago, walking down the corridor past the teacher who had intervened in their fight. They speak pleasantly to her, and while followed by their own teacher who looks angry because they have just been very disruptive in her gym session, they keep walking down the corridor, embracing each other and singing to each other (not provocatively, but loud enough for the teacher to hear), “We are the naughty boys …” (Davies, 2006: pp.165–166). Analyzing the performative aspects of this scene, Davies suggests that the two boys “subvert, for the moment, the category of naughty boy, asserting themselves as powerful, and as independent of the teacher’s controlling gaze.”  Davies emphasizes that the boys do not escape the dominating force of the category “naughty boys” and their positioning within it but, this does not mean that the ‘naughty boys’ are engaged in a powerless form of mimesis. Instead something unintended can take place while the dominant discourse is put “at play”. The boys, Davies argues, submit to the teacher’s definition of them as naughty, “but they do not, apparently, submit to what the teacher regards as the appropriate emotion of shame, or the appropriate desire to reform”: The definition of naughtiness is prior to them—it is outside of themselves, it is imposed on them and they both take it up, wilfully, and at the same time subvert the relations of power in which the teacher’s use of the naughty boy category, intended to rein in their power (Davies, 2006: pp.165–166). The two examples cited from Youdell and Davies show that in order to study how students and teachers are constituted and reconstituted as racialized and gendered subjects in the context of intercultural interactions researchers must be able to go beyond narratives and witness, in situ, those critical moments of reiteration.  More importantly, in order to understand how the process of reiteration creates the possibilities for the constituting forces to be reworked, the researcher must become familiar first with those dominant discursive processes that interpellate both teachers and students to the reign of subjectification and further, be to identify, beyond preconceived notions of educational structures, the uniqueness of those intersectional positionalities where from discursive processes are set in motion again and resignification becomes possible. How we avoid cultural essentialism without disposing all together the reflexivity of cultural interpretation?  How can we avert the critical gaze from the racial object/migrant to the racial subject without uprooting racism from its social and cultural context and presenting the racist subject as a self-determined agent? Rather than choosing between these two ends, our research methodology has tried to sustain the tension between two different tasks: on the one hand, placing culture on stage, analyzing it as a play of semiotics; on the other hand, averting the gaze from the “other” student to the structures, codes and subjectification processes of racialization.  There are two preconditions that such an approach should meet in order not to collapse into a disengaged formalist analysis: first, the asymmetrical power relations of the inter-cultural encounter must be acknowledged; second, while engaged in the interpretation of cultural interactions, researchers must recognize that they are already implicated themselves in relations of power. Our main goal is to shift from an essentialist understanding of cultural identities to an analysis of intercultural interactions, and from raciological framings of others to a critical analysis of racial thinking.  We want to explore how regimes of gender, race and nationalism intersect with opearations of exclusion related to migrant and minority status and whether intercultural interactions in schools create possibilities for the performative destabilization of gender norms and ethnic boundaries.  Finally, we want to reframe the study of the intercultural condition in ways that takes the burden of identity away from migrant and national/ethnic minority students, and render visible the implication of educational institutions and school actors in the mediation of ethnic and gender borders and stereotypes about “culture”.  This goal will be pursued with regards to three interacting fields of research: First, at the level of national context, to explore (a) national level policies and measures for the integration of migrant students and the promotion of an inclusive multicultural environment for majorities and ethnic minorities and (b) the relation between multicultural educational agendas and national politics.   Second, at the school level, to explore (a) educational institutions’ responses to integration policies and the institutionalization and state regulation of intercultural education, (b) administrators’ and teachers’ understandings of intercultural education and how these understandings negotiate national anxiety and racial thinking on otherness and (c) how processes of racialization and ethicization overlap/interweave with “ordinary” school arrangements, rituals and pedagogy. Third, at the level of cultural politics and performativity, to produce thick descriptions of interactions in multicultural school settings and school arenas and to explore whether there are moments of intercultural agency where agents can re-iterate perfiarmances of gender and ethnicity in ways that naturalize conceptions of gender and ethnic borders and destabilize orders of exclusion. We are particularly interested in understanding the gender dimensions of cultural misrecognition and racialization and exploring whether intercultural settings and culturally hybrid interfaces are hospitable or inimical to students’ renegotiation of gender norms. To explore how the implementation of measures for migrant students implicates “states of exception” which sometimes limit the opportunities for intercultural interaction and the challenge of gender norms but some other times create possibilities for multicultural schools to operate more autonomously and evade forms of governmentality exercised by the state. To reclaim the fragility of intercultural relations as a condition for agonistic democracy in multicultural schools. To record how (a) ethnicity is “gendered” and (b) gender is “ethicized” in schools and to explore how the multicultural or monocultural profiles of schools and communities relate to the performative re-enactment of national, ethnic, gender identities in different school settings and school arenas. To examine how intercultural interaction is organized around axes of gendered ethnicity, migrant/non-migrant and national majority/national minority status (selection of events) To explore how students (all) and teachers’ use of concepts such as culture, cultural difference, cultural deficit, otherness, race, immigration, “we/them” is troubled when they are encouraged to provide thick descriptions of specific events of conflict and processes of racialization and cultural hybridization. To explore how the transnational experience of both migrant and non-migrant, national minority and national minority students (a) influences their understanding of culture, cultural difference and gender norms and (b) inspires the performative (in Butler’s sense) iteration (and destabilization) of gendered ethnic performances of identity (in other words, how students “play gender” in order to challenge ethnic borders and “play ethnicity” to challenge gender norms. To engage teachers and school administrators in a critical discussion of intercultural education in ways that destabilize essentialist understanding of culture. To reframe intercultural dialogue in terms of critical pedagogy.  This means, to enable students, in Freire’s terms, to recognize themselves as “being with the world and with others” rather than “being in the world”, to understand that limit situations are socially constructed rather than culturally inevitable and that ethnic conflict, bullying and other forms violence are not inevitable effects of personal psychological deficit and racist attitudes but rather related to global injustice. Critical ethnography constitutes the backbone of this work package’s research methodology.  We will start with participatory observation and non-structured interviews and multi-media data will be used to produce codifications which, in turn, will be used to elicit the re-narrativization, thick description and critical analysis of events of intercultural interaction (e.g., events of conflict, racist bullying, cultural mediation/translation, transculturation) and institutional frameworks (e.g., how is the admission and placement of migrant students regulated in the specific school/classroom).  In distantiating itself from naturalistic inquiry, this latter part of our research attempts an intervention in the research field. It will create opportunities for reflection, for both researchers and subjects, and encourage critical reflection on ethnic and racial boundaries. The gaze on the ethic other will be displaced by critical interventions and migrant and ethnic minority students will reflect critically on processes of both racialization and dynamic transformations in intercultural contexts. “Becoming an insider” is considered an essential condition for an ethnographer who to aims to study a community’s culture.  In our research in multicultural schools, however, we do not study diverse communities but terrains of social and cultural interaction.  We do not study culture/s but the mediation of cultural change.  This implicates a methodological shift from traditional ethnography and a challenge to learn how to juggle two seemingly antinomic tasks, becoming an insider but, also, un-becoming an insider.  Giving up one’s otherness as a researcher and becoming an “insider” implicates the risk of seeing everything as all too familiar, all too meaningful, and perceiving as sign of cultural commensurability what might actually be the product of a structural exclusion.  Ethnography’s reliance on interpretation often raises the following question: Are ethnographers recording or inventing otherness? Lila Abu-Lighod (1991) captures the geist of this problematic when she describes culture as “the essential tool for making other.” As researchers observe structures of meaning, account for cultural difference and come up with hypotheses of cultural meaning for their “why” questions, they simultaneously help construct culture as a discrete entity and privilege cultural difference and cultural coherence. Abu-Lughod provides some suggestions which seem to counter this tendency for producing coherence (inherent in cultural research in general and research like ours which is already biased towards recording interactions between culturally different ‘others’).  Researchers in intercultural contacts zones should look for “contradictions and misunderstandings, strategies interests, and improvisations, and the play of shifting and competing statements with practical implications” (Hannerz, 1996: p. 31). Another way to subvert connotations of homogeneity, coherence and timelessness is to refuse to tell stories about particular individuals in time and in place: “As real people are portrayed agonizing over decisions, enduring tragedies and losses, trying to make themselves look good, suffering humiliations, or finding moments of happiness, a sense of recognition and familiarity can replace that of distance” (ibid., p. 32). Survey Surveys will be prepared in order to record the multicultural compositions of schools, their genealogies with regards to their shift from homogeneous to diverse, multicultural policies and measures implemented and critical events and public debates taking place with regards to multicultural schools.  Based the findings of these surveys we will decide which schools we will select for our fieldwork. In order to collect student narratives, researchers will engage in intensive interaction in selected schools where they will witness, record and codify critical events. They will also produce thick description of the ways in which National Policies / Measures are implemented in the particular school/classrooms. Observation Before conducting interviews the researchers must establish rapport with the class/school where the case study will be contacted.  The researchers’ access and mobility across a range of school setting and arenas in vital, for this reason the research steps and the scale of the research can be modified. Observation aims to the localization of the particular—scene, picture, setting, arrangement, site, arena, performative act—that will work as a catalyst for triggering students’ and teachers’ responses. Observation also aims to locating different settings and arenas of intercultural interaction in order to attend and document student interactions in these multiple settings, as well as phrase questions accordingly. Semi-structured interviews In the context of these interviews we will encourage students to describe/narrate critical events that took place in the past, events which are part of the collective memory of the class or a group of the class (e.g., migrant student can narrate its first day at that school, a non-migrant student can narrate a “fight” that took place in the playground; what we aim to get here are not reliable data/objective descriptions but instead thick descriptions which are layered by meanings which the participants bring to the narration of the event). Semi-structured interviews will be conducted with teachers and other school personnel responsible for migrant and ethnic students (translators, counselors, welfare advisors, teachers of second language and remedial classes, etc.) in order to record their understandings of intercultural education, what/whom they frame as “problem”, “culture”, “cultural difference” and “intercultural education”. Focus groups will work on various levels: (a) Student focus groups analyze the codifications produced from data collected though participatory ethnography and interviews. Our purpose at this level is to produce and not simply to collect data.  The interactions between students are vital and must be encouraged.  Each student comment/response/pause/silence can be framed as a topic for further analysis. (b) Student focus groups analyze codifications/vignettes.  This activity’s aims are informed mostly by critical pedagogy and action research. Our aim is not just to elicit and record views but to promote critical reflection by presenting to them contradictions, discontinuities and silences from their own discourse. The students will be presented with specific questions: E.g., “what went wrong in this event…” or “if this event (pointing to a specific codification) was narrated by M (male) student and not a F (female) student, a M (migrant) and a NM (non migrant) student, how would the story be presented? This third phase, particularly with children of younger ages, can take the form of a workshop which will give them the chance to talk about their emotions, their dreams, their friends.  Photo eliciting or drawing eliciting can be particularly useful for dealing with problems of language barriers. Data analysis and interpretation will be developed through critical discourse analysis of interviews and focus group data; reflexive analysis of fieldwork diary and personal research notes; and, if visual data is recorded, analysis of visual representations as well. Based on theoretical frameworks, research questions and a comparative analysis pf preliminary coding, the partners decided during the second thematic workshop (Athens, November 25 2009) on the major axes and codes to be used for analysis.  Two major axes of analysis were decided, a thematic axis (vertical) and an axis of politicization (horizontal). The major axes and codes of analysis can be seen in the diagram at the end of the page. Findings will be organized across the following categories: (a) school: school ethos, school as an institution, genealogy of multicultural composition (data from field notes: reports on participatory observation and self-reflection entries), (b) teachers and other school personnel: perceptions of school, understandings of culture, use of raciologies or elimination of raciologies, color blind or not, vision of intercultural education (interviews), (c) students: narratives, interactions, ethnic clustering and ‘mixings’, social dynamics (data from participatory ethnography and interviews, sociograms), (d) engagement of students in reflective analysis (mixed focus groups, SCITs, etc.) The term “multicultural schools” is associated in the minds of “policy stakeholders” (Ministry, teachers, parents and researchers) with particular schools (e.g., Phaneromeni in Nicosia, Ayios Antonios in Limassol, Sixth Elementary School in Paphos and Dianellion in Larnaca).  To the general pubic, these schools have been associated with “educational problems” which ensue from the enrolment of foreign students.  “Problematic schools” have also become ethicized, each one associated with a specific nationality of incoming students.  Phaneromeni (Nicosia) and Sixth Elementary School (Paphos) were among the first schools to be associated with ethnic Greek Pontian enrolment since the largest groups of migrant ethnic Greek Pontians in the mid 90’s had settled in the old city of Nicosia and the margins of the touristic area of Paphos; Ayios Antonios school had been ethicized as a “Turkish” because of Roma and Turkish Cypriots had started to settle in the nearby Turkish quarter since 2001; Dianellion, an inner-city school in Larnaca, had been associated (in an ethicized-and-gendered way) with “scarves” because of the increased enrolment of Arab students.  The reference to these schools as “multicultural” is rather euphemistic since these schools are usually demarcated as “problematic”, as opposed to “clean schools” (see, for example, the use of the term “clean school” in Codification B).  Their ethnic composition renders them ideal targets for fieldwork.  However, the attractiveness of these schools to “hankers of multiculturalism” (researchers, pilot programs, intervention initiatives) has also increased the presence of outsiders in these schools and the feeling, more prevalent among administrators, teachers and other school personnel, that they are under surveillance. Gaining Access As stated to us by the principal of Ayios Antonios, who found rather objectionable the idea of having a researcher in his school (though not explicitly denying access to us), “we feel like we have become a zoo; being watched, never at ease”.  In the case of the high schools we had approached as possible sites of research, the crucial question raised by principals, in an investigative tone, was, “what exactly are you searching for?”  When describing the nature of our research, its goal and research questions, we encountered either a worrying inquiry (“Are you also going to get in regular classrooms?”) or a reply marked by a tone of relief (“So, you are just interested in allóglossi” (allóglossi as explained in the section on national context is used as a metonymy for migrants).  The reluctance of principals to accommodate researchers in the school premises and give them permission to observe classroom sessions, was intensified rather than relieved when we mentioned that we were interested in interactions among students, including interactions between migrants and native students. “But we do not have problems of racism in our school,” was the usual answer.  This ‘mis-understanding’ was further intensified in some cases when we mentioned the dimension of gender and stated that we were interested in which ways intercultural relations and ethic borders were gendered.  In one case, the school principal assumed that by bringing in the question of gender, we indicated that our research would implicate talking to students about sex education something which, he thought, would turn the school upside down and bring herds of angry parents to his doorstep the next day. The schools Schools were selected on the basis of the following criteria: considerable percentage of migrant students (with the exception of the Technical School) different ‘ethnic profiles’ of the multicultural outset combination of old and new multicultural schools (some schools had significant numbers of migrants since the early ‘90s but some others only very recently began to have migrant/refugee enrolments and thus have not been mapped yet as multicultural schools) school principal and teachers positive to the idea of hosting GEMIC researchers intervention programs such as EPZ and/or TGSOL implemented in the school representativeness of different school levels (primary and secondary) The following schools were selected for participatory ethnography: Nicosia Phaneromeni (Elementary School and Gymnasium) Phaneromeni, located in the old city on Nicosia (within the Venetian walls), very close to the Green Line (Buffer Zone), houses three different schools: elementary school (first floor), Gymnasium (second floor) and a kindergarten/Preschool (a little annex at the back of the school, almost like a niche). Phaneromeni is one of the most historical schools of Cyprus. It was founded in 1895 by the Archbishop of Cyprus Makarios the First and for a long period operated as a girls gymnasium. The percentage of migrants varies: 100% in kindergarten, 90% in elementary and 80% in high school level.  Most students are ethnic Greek Pontians (from Georgia and Russia) and Eastern Europeans. The Gymnasiun does not foreground its multicultural composition in its website (Greek national and Greek Orthodox markers are quite prominent).  Its list of valedictorians though (know also as the flag holders –simeofóri ke parastátes- in school national parades) and central school council comprise mainly of migrant students. In her welcoming address on the Gymnasium’s website, the Principal emphasizes the school’s mission as a “zone of educational priority” and the aim of cultivating among the students the sense of joy, learning, creativity and success, as well the development of critical thinking and social skills “in a multicultural school that promotes understanding, cooperation, friendship and acceptance of otherness”. Archbishop Makarios Technical School: Located at the outskirts of Nicosia, in a suburban area, one of the two Technical Schools of Nicosia, this school has about 30 migrant studnets. The principal and the teachers consider this number obsolete compared to another group of “others”, that is, the “special education unit” for children with disabilities (the school takes great pride in achieving the inclusion of these students).  When asked about migrant students, most teachers were under the impression that there were only two to three migrant students attending their school and all teachers stated that these students are “well received”. In our interviews with migrant students, we found out that the worst experiences of racism and discrimination take place during the Gymnasium years but they are narrativized by students later, i.e., when they are in Lyceum or Technical School. LarnaCa Participatory ethnography in Larnaca during the first phase (participatory observation) was originally conducted in two gymnasiums, Dianellion (an inner-city school) and Phaneromeni (located between the fringe of the urban center and the old Turkish quarter of Larnaca). During the second and third phase (interviews and focus groups) we focused on Phaneromeni because this school has the highest percentage of Arab refugee/asylum seeker children. Most of them from Iraq and they are self-identified as Palestinian.  Almost all Arab girls wear the scarf.  Most parents of these children have refugee or asylum seeker status and most of those on Asylum seeker visas do not work.  Asylum seekers receive welfare benefits.  During phase three, we conducted critical analysis of codification in focus groups at another school in Larnaca, the Vergina Lyceum.  This school was not originally included in our research but after conducting interviews with Arab students in Phaneromeni and realizing that many of these students were not considering to continue school after their graduation from gymnasium, we realized that it would add another dimension to our research to examine how older Arab students (16-18 years old) would comment on the scenarios of racial acts codified in the codifications/vignettes. The availability of an Arab speaking translator and the enthusiastic assistance by the principle were two other factors for extending Phase III to this school. Dianellion Gymnasium The school was built in 1961 and originally operated as an orphanage (1961) and later as a professional school (1962). In the year 1977-78 it was upgraded to a Technical School, a new academic track of Gymnasium was added, and the two tracks operated in parallel at the same premises until 2006 when the technical school moved to a separate new building.  This is the last year of this school’s operation. Nothing in the official website of the school speaks of the presence of migrant/refugee students even though the “combating of social exclusion” is framed as the school’s yearly special aim (the aims emphasized on the school’s webpage are the official special school long aims designated by the Ministry of education for the school year 2009-2010: “Combating social exclusion through education in the context of a democratic and humanistic school” and “Cultivation of a culture of peaceful co-living, mutual respect and cooperation between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots, aiming to the termination of the occupation and the reunification of our country and our people”.  It is important to note that foregrounding of these new aims has displaced the aim of “Intercultural Education” which was designated by the Ministry as the Special Aim for the year 2008-2009.  Although racialization and social exclusion intersect in ways that intensify exclusion, especially in multicultural schools, “Special Year-Long Educational Aims” are often defined in ways that obscure the nature of exclusion.  As the aim of combating social exlusion succeeds the aim of promoting intercultural dialogue, schools start searching for new strategies and designing special events.  This lack of intersectionality in policy discloses the racial aspects of social exclusion but also exempts issues of migrant student integration from issues of national politics. Intercultural education is considered to be something exceptional, therapeutic rather than political, which tackles issues related to migrants students, whereas aims related to democracy, peace and sharing of political power are considered to be universal (and paradoxixally, irrelevant to issues of migrants and other Others). Phaneromeni Gymnasium Phaneromeni Gymnasium in Larnaca takes its name afetr the Church of Panayia Phaneromeni (Mary Virgin) which is located 500 meters from the school.  The school includes an old neoclassic building and a modern building.  The Gymnasium operates since 1980, with high enrolments of Greek Cypriot refugees from the city of Larnaca and from villages south west of the city of Larnaca.  Its location on Okullar Street (which in Turkish means “the road of schools”) is the only marker that bears witness to its previous identity as Turkish Cypriot Elementary school (until 1974).  The school has a high enrolment of Arab students, many of them attending school under the status of “auditor”.  The school has been included in the TGFOL pilot program since the onset of the program (2007-8) and provides also special Greek language sessions with an Arab-Greek translator.  This multicultural outset of the school is not featured in any way on its website. Rather, Faneromeni, like Dianellion, foregrounds the special year-long aims and its strong Greek Orthodox identity. Limassol 1st Elementary School of Germasogia (Christakeion) The school was built in 1970 originally as a small 4-teacher school. As Germasogia grew into a suburb and a busy tourist-business area, the school also developped into a modern urban school.  In his address the Principal makes a reference to the “particular emphasis put on the interculturality of the school unit”.  School celebrations and rituals, as featured on the website of the school, revolve around Greek National Holidays, Christmas and Cypriot Folklore and Arts.  Multiculturalism, featured as a central theme in every aspect of the school’s life during the year 2007-2008, has now eclipsed from school celebrations and special school projects. Between 50% and 60% of students are migrants, most of them from Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, UK, Russia and Georgia (ethnic Greek Pontians).  The school also has small number of Greek Roma who are seen as a “different” group and difficult to integrate.  About 40% of migrant students are also from ethnically mixed families. PAPHOS During the first phase Research in Paphos was conducted at two schools, Gymnasium of Ayios Theodoros and Gymnasium of Ayia Paraskevi (Yeroskipou). Both of these schools are new and are located in residential middle class areas at the outer fringes of the city of Paphos.  They have considerable percentages migrant students (20-30%) but none of them has a specific ethnic profile of its multicultural outset (they are known as schools with “allóglossi”).  Research during phases II and III focused only on the second school.  Both schools seem to have embraced the 2009-2010 special year aim of “Reconciliation” (the particular aim’s announcement triggered negative reactionfrom the teacher unions and was debated for compromising national identity and sidestepping goals of national resistance against the on-going Turkish invasion).  During the school year 2009-2010 the school of Ayios Theodoros held a special day on “Learning, Accepting, Living together” (under the aegis of the special aim of “Combating Social Exclusion”.  Activities included cooking of ethic food (with the participation of ethnic students), essay writing on the topic “Roxana’s first day at her new school” (“Roxana” is framed as an Eastern European girl’s name).   Ayia Paraskevi: Teachers identify four groups of “others”: Pontians, British, Polish and Bulgarians. The school implements, since September of 2009, a TGSOL program. Besides the teaching of the Greek language, the teachers did not mention any other programs or activities related to migrant students. Teachers also mentioned dropouts of migrant students but no official data on dropout rates were available. Research tools and research steps Phase I included participatory observation and informal interviews. This phase was conducted during the pediod March - June of 2009. Researchers prepared daily journal entries on their school experiences. Phase II focused on interviews with students and teachers and took place during the period October 2009 - February 2010.  Phase III included analysis/critical discussion of Codifications in focus groups (Gymnasium) and development of sociograms (Elementary School).  Focus group discussions with Lyceum students were conducted in December 2009 (Vergina Lyceum) and sociograms and focus groups discussion in other schools were conducted during the period March-April 2010. Interviews with teachers A total of 42 interviews were conducted with teachers and other school personnel: 3 interviews with school principals, 3 with vice-principals, 3 with translators (Russian and Arabic), 2 with TGSOL teachers, 3 with EPZ school coordinators and 28 with teachers. The interviews were semi structured and focused on the following themes: (a) migration and migration policy (prompt: reference to a recent “Broom Operation”, carried out by the Immigration Department and the Police in old city of Nicosia which let to arrest and deportations of many migrants), (b) impact of migration on school, their own schools’ policies, (c) Intercultural Education (definition and aims), (d) gender variation in intercultural interactions and school policies and (e) comments on Codifications A and B (cited below). Codification A: The CD Story The following event took place at the end of the school year 2008-2009 (in June) in a 6th Grade Class of an Elementary School. It was recorded by a researcher.   It is a custom for graduating students to have a party at the last school day.  In this school, the students played music of their preference, danced and enjoyed themselves. All students had brought their favourite music cds and the teacher (f) played the cds and the kids danced.  Ahmet had also brought a cd with Arabic music and he gave it to the teacher to play.  Some other student (m) intervenes and says, “What did you bring, you kilintzir”? The teacher played the cd and all the Arab kids were excited, as if they did not expect that the teacher would play the particular cd. Prompts: Any comments…  What do you think is going on here? How would define the problem? What do you think Ahmet thought of what happened? What do you think the teacher thought when Ahmet handed the cd to her? What do you think the other Arab kids thought of what happened? Eurydice (Greek name for girl), described the event to her mother. What do you think was the response of her mother? What do you think about the way the teacher handled this situation? Codification B: Clean Schools A researcher in a Greek Cypriot public school has in informal conversation with the school teachers. Researcher: Are all school like this? Are there so many kids from other countries in all Cypriot schools? Teacher: No, there are also clean schools which do not have foreign [xéni] students, such as the Saint Sophia School. Interviews with students A total of 45 interviews were condacted with students.  Interviews were conducted in Greek and in Arabic (synchronous translation with the help of an Arab-Greek translator).  Interviews with students focused on itineraries of migrations, passages from one level of education to another, experiences with regards to the learning of the Greek language and gendered experiences. Sociograms Detailed sociograms were developed for five classrooms in Christakeio Elementary School (UCINET software was used). All classroom children were asked to indicate three classmates (positive or negative preference) in the following scenarios: Positive Dynamics: Which three classmates would you prefer to spend time with during the break? Which three classmates would you prefer to work with in class for a group math assignment? Which three classmates would you prefer to go to the movies together? Which three classmates would you be excited if they came to you birthday party? Negative Dynamics: There classmates are absent but their absence does not make a difference for the rest of the class. Which are these three? Three classmates are often reprimanded by the teacher and are most likely to be expelled. Who are these three? Student Focus Groups Focus group discussions were carried out as follows: Phaneromeni Larnaca: all refugee Muslim girls; Phaneromeni Nicosia: all migrant boys; Christakeio Limassol: mixed group; Vergina Lyceum: homogeneous (one with Greek Cypriots and one with Arab refugees) and one mixed.  The discussion focused on eliciting “thick descriptions” of codifications and critical exchanges.  Some examples of the codifications used are cited below. Codification C: The story of Halil, Ahmet and Tarek, Part I (takes place is the parking lot) The following story takes plac ein a Gymnasium in Limassol at the last week of February 2010. This Gymnasium has a large group of Arab refugee students. The time is 7.10 am (the bell rung 10 minutes ago and classes have already started). The only adult who is watching this scene is a researcher, Mantalena Tsouka.      Mantalena arrives at school after the bell rung, she is parking her car and as soon as she gets out she sees a group of about 12 Palestinian boys arguing in the Parking. She gets closer to see what’s going on. She does not understand what they saying but it is obvious to her that there is a lot of tension. Halil, whose nose is bleeding, is holding a mobile telephone and is talking to someone. Mantalena asks another child, Tarek, who speaks Greek and has been her translator, to tell her what is going on. Tarek explains to Mantalena that Ahmet, another boy, bit up Tarek with his fists and with a stone because Halil was laughing at him. The fight started in the classroom of Halil and Ahmet but it was taken outside. Other Palestinian boys from other classrooms were notified about this event though sms messages and came. Tarek explains to Mantalena that now Halil is calling his dad and asking him to come to school to beat up Ahmet. A few minutes later Mantalena sees the father of Halil arriving. She is very worried and rushes to the Principal’s office to report what’s happening. Codification D: The story of Halil, Ahmet and Tarek (takes place is the parking) At noon, as Mantalena is about to leaving from school, she comes across in the parking lot with Mr. Ioannis, the male teacher, who is responsible for the Arab boys approaches her and starts helling at her: “Why do you mess up with their lives and their fights? he yells at her. With this research you are doing you create a lot of problems. You keep asking who did this and whose fault is it, and this way you turn them against each other. Don’t ask them anything, never again. Ask only me.  These are different from the Cypriots. They do not understand.  To avoid problems in the future, don’t mess up with them. Let them fight! As you see, they are fighting with each other, not with Cypriots. Greece: The Case-study: ‘Kerameikos’ Primary School of Athens  The school has been renamed in the report in order to protect the anonymity of the participants. The ‘Kerameikos’ Primary School, located in the inner city area of Athens, has been chosen as the main site of the fieldwork. The particular school was selected for fieldwork for a number of reasons: - The student population comprises a majority of migrant students, mostly Albanians. In this sense, student culture in the school is not predominantly ‘Greek’ but mixed. - The school has accepted, on a temporary basis, a proportionately large number of refugee students. - The school is located in a downgraded inner city area of Athens, where two contradictory tendencies intersect: urban regeneration and municipal abandonment. - The school has launched a campaign to demand that educational authorities construct a new school building; it is assumed that this campaign organized by teachers, parents and students together represents a site of more intensified intercultural interactions. The school has approximately 100 students, although numbers fluctuate since part of the student population is not permanently resident in the area, and therefore, often relocates or is absent for long periods. Of the total number of students, 1/5 are Greeks, 1/5 are Afghan refugees, and the rest are Albanians, Chinese and Eastern Europeans, with Albanians actually outnumbering all other national groups. The percentage of boys and girls is approximately half, although the arrival of 17 Afghan boys from the Hostel of the Medecins du Monde, just before Xmas 2009, changed the gender dynamics of the school. There are 13 teachers and one principal, all of whom hold permanent positions at the school. The school is located in a downgraded area of the city center, where nowadays mostly migrants, refugees and homeless people reside, while at the same time it is also part of a larger – informal – urban regeneration scheme, involving the refurbishment of old apartments and warehouses into lofts, as well as the development of new uses mostly in relation to the spreading entertainment industry. In the vicinity of the school we find an old, but recently (for the 2004 Olympics) redecorated, public Square, where ten years ago large numbers of Kurdish refugee families had sought shelter setting up a makeshift outdoor camp for six months. Today, the square is mostly used by migrants living or working in the surrounding area, as well as by the urban drug trade. The specific street on which the school is located, presents an uncommon arrangement since it has attracted a large number of cultural institutions and foundations that sit side by side with dilapidated and collapsed houses and empty lots. The school itself is housed in an old building that was originally used as a storehouse of the Ministry of Culture and later, already 20 years ago, turned into a school by adding iron bars everywhere. The building, unsuitable for public educational use, is in very bad condition and cannot fulfil the needs of the students. An empty lot on the opposite side of the street had been acquired by the School Buildings Organization in order to construct a new school, but plans have remained on paper for a number of years. During 2009, the school community, including teachers, students and parents, began active mobilizations to demand a commitment on the part of the Ministry of Education that the new school will indeed be built. However, the teachers had serious doubts about the success of their efforts, since they estimated that the Ministry would much rather close down the school altogether, than take on the expense of a new school in a neighbourhood with mostly migrant students. It was further assumed that the trend towards urban regeneration would affect the school negatively: rather than contributing to the growth and liveliness of the neighborhood, the new uses would eventually destroy existing social ties kept up in part through the presence of the school itself. Closing down the school will also affect the uses and image of the neighborhood and the Square. Follow-up discussions with the teachers have confirmed their initial fears; the Ministry decided to close down the school in two years’ time. The mobilizations on behalf of the school community represented a significant occasion for the invigoration or initiation of social relations between the different residents of the neighborhood, Greeks and migrants, who found themselves drawn to a common cause. Initial discussions with teachers indicated that such actions presented possibilities for extending the work and influence of the school beyond its locked doors, engaging different social actors in constructing a new common ground.  In this sense, social problems, such as urban degradation and lack of resources, can also be seen as catalysts for new interactions. Nevertheless, as I will argue further in my analysis, such collaborative initiatives that foster relations of recognition and solidarity, coexist with racialized notions of ‘otherness’ and difference, where, often, the least integrated social group, e.g. refugees, become the ‘other’ in relation to which this newly-founded communal sense is established. Gaining  access Access to the school could only be obtained informally, through the researcher’s personal connections. Formal access would have had to be obtained through application to the Pedagogical Institute of the Ministry of Education. Even though the relevant research application was prepared, the researcher was advised by other researchers, as well as teachers, to forgo official procedure since her application would most likely be rejected, or, it would take many months, even up to a whole year, before it was processed. As one teacher, head of the Cultural Division for Primary Education, indicated, “when fellow teachers, friends of ours, want to carry out a research project in schools, we try to accommodate them informally, because the Pedagogical Institute creates too may problems for them.” The researcher decided to follow this advice, and contacted a female teacher friend of hers, with whom she had previously engaged in anti-racist activism together, to explore the possibility of doing fieldwork in her school. The teacher worked at the ‘Kerameikos’ Primary School of Athens, where she taught 6th grade. She was willing to accommodate the researcher’s request, and, after consulting with the school principal, set up a timeframe for the fieldwork. Nevertheless, even though the road seemed open, the researcher soon found out that she still had to obtain formal permission from the school principal. A formal application, signed by the scientific coordinator of the research project and the university, was submitted requesting permission to access the school and explaining the purpose and scope of the research. Even though the school principal received the letter one month in advance of the planned start of fieldwork, upon the researcher’s arrival at the school, he required that she resubmit her letter of application, as well as have a private chat with him in his office to verify her credentials. This undue formality in an otherwise very informally run school, one indeed where the teacher friend commanded authority among colleagues and principal, was interpreted as an exercise of rank on his part, meant to compel the researcher’s compliance as well as ascertain her correct approach to school and educational politics. In other words, the school principal wanted to make sure that the researcher knew he was running things, and that her research would not frame him or his school in a compromising way. Given the above constraints, the researcher’s previous relationship to the teacher, as well as her informally tolerated presence in the school presented particular challenges for carrying out the research. The particularities of the specific school setting notwithstanding, it is important to consider questions of access and the regulation of research in education in relation to the ideological premises guiding educational politics and to assumptions about childhood, accountability and safety. Often, concern about children’s educational safety and achievement represent displaced anxieties about what is perceived as the disintegration of national identity and social order. One of the arguments put forth in this analysis is that educational politics and research in Greece are governed by a longstanding preoccupation with issues of national identity: the safegurading and fortification of ‘Greekness’ against perceived internal and external enemies (Dragonas and Frangoudaki 1997). The politics of education have been historically and contemporaneously defined by ideological struggles to determine the hegemonic content and meaning of Greekness. Ideological wars over the identity of the Greek nation and people have been fought on the battlegrounds of education and language (Fragoudaki 2001). Given the special gravity of education in the Greek socio-cultural context, research on migration and multiculturalism in the field of education assumes a particular salience, not only in relation to the challenges for the educational system, but also with respect to Greek cultural politics at large, since it is in relation to constructions and negotiations of the ‘foreign’ that notions of national identity are elaborated. Research tools and research steps Fieldwork Fieldwork consisted of participant observation in the 6th grade classroom, as well as the whole school community during break-time, including students in the yard and teachers in the teachers’ office. Fieldwork lasted from March 2009 to June 2009. A detailed fieldwork diary was kept by the researcher recording: mundane and exceptional incidents during school; informal discussions with teachers and students; general observations about the school, the neighborhood, teaching; other events relevant to the research, such as school festivals, extracurricular activities, anti-racist events; and, the researcher’s own feelings and experiences at school. Interviews A total of eleven teacher interviews were conducted including: interviews with the school principal, 1st to 6th grade teachers, physical education teacher, English teacher, French teacher, special education teacher. Interviews with teachers followed a semi-structured format and lasted approximately two hours each. For lack of space, they were conducted in various classrooms, or the principal’s office, whatever happened to be empty at the appointed date. Besides the teachers, the researcher interviewed the social worker at the NGO ‘Medecins du Monde’, responsible for the group of Afghan refugee families whose children joined the school after mid-term, and the Afghan interpreter who assisted during the interview with the Afghan student. A total of twenty interviews were conducted with all the students of the 6th grade. In the case of an Afghan refugee boy in class an Afghan interpreter was invited to translate between the interviewer and the interviewee. All other interviews were conducted in Greek. Interviews with the students followed a semi-structured format and lasted approximately 1,5 hours each. They were all conducted in one corner of the school basement, in arrangement with the special education teacher, who also worked there. Each student interview was followed by a future projection drawing exercise, during which students were asked to draw how they imagine themselves in 20 years time, how their mother imagines them, and how their father imagines them. The purpose of this last task was to elicit students’, and their parents’, imagined images and expectations about the future in a non-verbal medium that would allow affective elements of their personal / family context to emerge less mediated by rationalizations of ‘proper’ responses. All interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed in Greek. Sociogram A sociogram of the 6th grade was elicited based on two questions: Which one of your classmates would you choose to prepare for a difficult exam with? Which one of your classmates would you choose to go on holiday with? The first question was meant to explore group dynamics between students based on scholastic priorities. The second question was meant to explore group dynamics between students based on leisure and friendship priorities. Group Sessions Several informal discussions with students in class took place addressing the topics of: gender and sexuality, relations with foreigners, class and school conflicts. A formal focus group session was organized with the help of the SCIT (Synallactic Collective Image Technique) methodology. The students were instructed to produce drawings of their feelings from school and give them a title. Subsequently they were asked to vote one among all the drawings. The chosen drawing was posted on the blackboard and the students were encouraged to recall an incident or event of the school year, associated with the drawing, give it a title and note down their feelings about the recorded event. Afterwards, each student read aloud his/her remembered event and a discussion ensued based on the elicited memories and feelings. The purpose of this task was to allow students, as a group, to access underlying thoughts and feelings linked to their school experience, and to initiate a collective discussion about this experience based on affective as well as cognitive information. Importantly, the format of the discussion facilitated the participation and input from all students and not just the more vocal ones. The school The national case study will be on a unique secondary school in Skopje – Cvetan Dimov. This secondary school is located in the multicultural part of the city, and it is a school where students from different ethnic groups learn together, something which renders this school a unique place for research on intercultural relations and negotiations of gender, ethnic and other identities. The particular school was the first mixed secondary school in Skopje for girls and boys (though now there are more boys in the school than girls) and is located in the ethnically mixed neighborhood of Skopje, with ethnic Albanians being the dominant group. Teaching takes place in two shifts and in two different languages correspondingly, Macedonian and Albanian, which are the languages of the two dominant majorities in the locality of Cvetan Dimov. However in both language shifts there are mixed ethnic classes. The “multicultural” outset of this school is quite different from the outset encountered in the Greek and Cypriot context. Whereas in the case of Greece and Cyprus multicultural schools adopt the same (i.e., national) curriculum and implement that in mixed classrooms (with migrant students offered separate supplementary courses in Greek as a second/foreign language), in this case Albanian and Macedonian classes operate in separate time slots (in morning and afternoon shifts) but within the premises of the same school.  Albanian students are taught Macedonian language but Macedonian students are not taught Albanian. Within the same shift there are also two different tracks, gymnasium and economic courses.   The school Cvetan Dimov was opened in 1925/26year as the first Trade Academy in Macedonia. There is an interesting story and interpretation of this beginning stated in the history section on the school’s web page: The need for a school of business, historically, is intertwined with the history and politics of Macedonia in the framework of Yugoslavia before the 2nd world war. The foundation of the first Trading academy in Skopje was an important event, more so over the anti peoples politics and regime of ex Yugoslavia which were against every line of enlightenment and education of the nationally and socially oppressed Macedonian people…The foundation of the Business Academy was reflection of the need for exploitation and research of national resources of Macedonia from the government.   After the occupation of Macedonia from Bulgaria in 1941 The Trade Academy became a 5 year Trade Gymnasium.  In 1945 the Gymnasium was named Cvetan Dimov. Important year in the history of this school is the school year 1952/53 when the school transformed from male gymnasiums to a mixed gender school, the first of this kind in Skopje. These are lines that show importance of this transformation for the identity of the school: This educational institution becomes symbol of equality among sexes with the renaming to boy-girl gymnasium. The young enthusiastic spirit which was felt from all present during the opening celebration , confirm the avant-garde and visionary educational and above all nurturing of young people, as a result of a cosmopolitan “spiritus mundi” well-kept in our institution. From then on the school passed through different changes and had its peaks as the best trade school in the country. Today Cvetan Dimov is an economic - legal and business school, as well as a gymnasium. The school is famous for its ethnic and cultural diversity. This is an important image that people from the school want to encourage: “we have to modestly acknowledge that this school is on the right track of democracy and equality, vision of all men of reason and dedicated workers in the educational process, of all grown man responsible for the proper development of young individual” (Cvetan Dimov, 2004). But the public image of the school is not that bright in the media coverage. For example, one title from a national TV station from 2007 says: “Fights, quarrel and knives are part of school life in the secondary school Cvetan Dimov” (A1, 2007). The public image of the school is mostly related to violent incidents, stories of students carrying guns at school and as a school with ethnically mixed population, mostly Albanian, which is perceived as unsafe environment for development. The school’s location also supports this image. It is situated on Bul. Dzon Kenedi (John Kennedy), street publicly known as a street of armed incidents of Albanian drug dealers. This is how the assistant director describes his attitude towards the school when he started to work: Four years ago I got a job for the first time, as a teacher for economic subjects, and on the first day my thought was: “O my God, where am I going?” To a school that has reputation for bad things and so on and even if I had a chance to work at another place, I luckily started here. First time you see it as a school, if you listen to the stereotypes and prejudices, it sheds bad light on the school. First its location, people say that there is crime, and is this true or not is other thing. It is located on a very busy street (Fieldnotes from fieldwork in Cvetan Dimov). Cvetan Dimov is a big school with 1800 students and 128 employees which study and work in two language shifts, one in Macedonian language of instruction and one in Albanian Language of Instruction. The demographic composition of the school by gender and ethnicity in the two direstions (Gymnasium and Vocational Education) are presented in the Tables 1 and Table 2 of the Macedonian Report.  Over the last few years, the rating of the school has been declining.  The school attributes this to the fact that it is mostly low grade student who enroll.  The increased enrollment of students from near by rural communities renders the school less attractive in the eyes of “urban citizens”.  Researchers chose the school as a unique school, one of few where students from different ethnic backgrounds study together, especially Albanian and Macedonian students, since they mostly study in separate language schools and live parallel lives. One of the researchers had previous experience with this particular school in the context of one action project and one research program. Her knowledge of some of the school issues and school context provided the research group with initial insight into some aspects of the school’s life and interactions. After a few visits and once communication with one class teacher was established, researchers decided to focus on her class, because the composition of the class featured ethnic diversity and reflected more or less the image of the school in a nutshell. This was a Third Year class during the school year 2008-9, with 26 students, and a Fourth year clas during 2009-10, with 21 students  (5 students had not passed the year). The class comprised the following ethnic mix: 8 Albanian, 5 Macedonian, 2 Roma and 7 Bosnian students. Researchers observed only the Macedonian language shift because of language barriers, but also because students from different ethnicities are more present in the Macedonian language shift rather than in the Albanian language shift which is quite homogeneous. Gaining access The national policy for carrying out research in schools is under the authority of the Ministry of Education. First, institutions or researches apply for permission based on a list of documents that are required for application. The procedure in our case was not very long and lasted about two weeks. Then, the director of the school is another authority who needs to give his/her consent for the implementation of the research. Besides the Director of the school, there are other authorities that have regulative power over the school and which one has to negotiate in order to gain access to school for purposes of research: the local government and the School Board. In the case of GEMIC research, the Director accepted the permission from the Ministry and did not ask for other administrative procedures or documents. Research tools and research steps As in the case of Cyprus, the Macedonian research team had to obtain official permission from the Ministry of Education and the school Director for conducting site-based research in the school. The original informant was a 3rd grade who functioned as a contact person with other teachers, administration, students etc. During the first phase, the researchers conducted participatory observation in spaces of interethnic interaction and connection as well as spaces demarcated and separated by ethnic difference and conflict. During the second phase, researchers had informal interviews with students on the themes of friendship and romance and recorded stories on relationships between young people from different ethnic and religious background as well as stories on conflicts between students (some of these stories were later used as codifications and researchers prompted students to offer “thick descriptions” of these stories).  During the third phase, the researchers conducted semi-structured interviews and organized focus groups in order to explore in more depth power relations among students and between students and teachers, as well as networks of power with regards to school hierarchies. The research consisted of three phases: (a) participatory observation on classroom events and interactions and informal interviews on experiences, (b) production of codifications based on data collected in phase a and semi-structured interviews and (c) critical discussion of stories elicited in phases a and b, with focus on gender, power, identity, relations between students and teachers and negotiations of borders and identities. In order to map the researchers’ insights on the setting and draw connections between these and major research questions and concepts, a list of indicators was prepared.  This was an open list of indicators which mapped relations in regards to points of gathering, as well as modifications of relations with regards to ethnically separated as wells as dynamic and ethnically diverse settings.  Researchers were particularly interested in processes of identity formation and power relations, thus they focused on stories about violence and conflict, experiences of closeness/intimacy, friendship, love and solidarity.   Phase I Researchers started with participatory observation on school life and social interactions in the school yard, entrance hall and other hallways. The observation enabled researchers to locate different settings and arenas of intercultural interaction in the multiple settings in/around the school. Researchers wrote substantial descriptive field notes about visits and observations, notes about interactions and informal interviews, and their own self-reflections about certain feelings, events, moments. During this phase a workshop was carried out on friendship –the class teacher introduced the researchers to the class and gave them the stage for about 30 minutes. The researchers talked to the students about the research and the topics of their interest. They focused on the friendship, had a whole class discussion on friendship and asked students to write what friendship means to them, keeping in minding questions such as “is friendship possible among girls and boys” and “what should the best friend be like”. At this phase focus groups held non-structured discussions about relations in the school and the classroom concerning ethnicity and gender, relationships of friendship and love as well as experiences of conflict and violence. Researchers also had informal interviews with particular students and teachers, asking them to describe what they thought were memorable events of violence and closeness, friendship, love and solidarity. Phase II This involved reflection on all the data collected during Phase I and production of codifications that encapsulated in the narrative format of little vignettes the most interesting events and insights researchers had during Phase I. Eleven codification were developed and the most representative ones were used at Phase III to elicit thick descriptions from students and engage them in reflective discussion. Phase III Participatory observation was continued with specific focus on one classroom and in-depth interviews were carried out with students in order to elicit critical reflections on the stories developed in Phase II. Critical Ethnography in Cvetan Dimov included self-ethnography by the researchers. One of the strengths of the research was that the two researchers had the opportunity to go to the school together most of the times. They had the chance to talk to each other, write separate field notes and compare them, something which enriched the “thickness” of the descriptions and introduced multiperspectivity to the production of data and their interpretation. The language barrier presented a major difficulty. Both researchers were Macedonian speaking, with no or very little knowledge of Albanian which is one of the two major languages in the school (especially among students). Researchers felt this barrier mostly in attempting to establish rapport with Albanian students. This was further complicated due to the gender and ethnic identity of the researchers. Researchers made interviews with Albanian boys but did not have any opportunities to talk to Albanian girls. Researchers’ insight The research in not objective, in a positivist sense, but is rather marked by the researchers’ subjective position. The Researchers’ own experiences, expectations, ethnic and cultural background shape both the data and the interpretation.  Team ethnography, however, can mediate the impact of one-sidedness since it provided the researchers with opportunities for comparing their findings and realizing how the researchers’ positionalities, their selections of prompts, the ways they elicited narratives and their interpretations were also part of the thick descriptions to be produced.  To some extent, the researched were also participating in intercultural interaction and not just witnessing the others’ interactions. Thus the researchers were also caught a the research experience which elicited on their behalf reflections on intercultural dynamics and challenged them with the experiential reality of borders, on both sides, othering and being other-ed. Intercultural education in Cyprus has been construed as a necessary tool to help “us” deal with “them” appropriately.  The term “migrant students” has never been used as a policy frame in education.  Instead, the term used systematically over the last years is “alloglossi” (i.e., those speaking an other [álli] language [glóssa]).  According to statistics by the Ministry of Education and Culture (MOEC), for the school year 2008-2009 the number of allóglossi enrolled in public schools amounted to 8158 students: 939 in Kindergarten/Preschool, 4605 in Elementary Schools, 1651 in Gymnasiums, 783 in Lyceums, and 180 in Technical Schools.  Speech by the Minister of MOEC in a Press Conference for the presentation of the Ministry’s policy on alloglossi and the Guide for the Reception of Alloglossi Studens and their Parents. 2 Septemebr 2009.  It is not clarified if alloglossi is used in this context as a demographic category, i.e., all students whose mother tongue is other than Greek or as a technical term, i.e., those who do not speak Geek and those who are currently enrolled in language sessions but have not yet mastered adequately the Greek Language.  From 2001, the year MOEC acknowledged that the “phenomenon” of multiculturalism is affecting the schools and announced a first series of measures, to 2008, the year “intercultural education” was designated as a Special Year-long School Aim, the discourse on intercultural education has remained focused on “their” alien Otherness.  The framing of foreign students as allóglossi (and allóglossi as the major problem faced by multicultural schools) has come to regulate and to rationalize both the definition and identification of multicultural schools’ needs and the Ministry’s response.   References to the facticity of social change (“becoming multicultural”) have often been used to iterate statements on Cyprus’ Greek Orthodox tradition and identity: Cyprus, besides its serious political problem, finds itself today in the whirlwind of socioeconomic developments.  The Cypriot society, which until recently was a relatively homogeneous society with Greek Orthodox population, has been experiencing during the last decade the consequences of mass influx of alien workers and Greek-Pontioi expatriates from the previous USSR (Ministry of Education, Memorandum, November 3 2001). Furthermore, the double referencing of the new arriving foreign students to “mass influxes” of aliens (alien workers and Greek Pontians) and their deficits (e.g., not speaking the Greek Language; claiming Greekness without being Greek) have marked the schools’ “becoming multicultural” with undertones of securitization.  The tension between intercultural education, as education’s promise to receive the other, and public schools’ commitment to governmentality takes a legalistic turn in 2004.  As stated in the opening lines of a Directive sent to Elementary School Heads, “[b]ecause of the continuously increasing number of Turkish Cypriots, Gypsy children and children of aliens in the elementary schools of Cyprus, an issue has come up with regards to those children whose parents are residing illegally in our island”.  Director of Elementary Education to the heads of elementary school. 12 August 2004. Memorandum entitled “Inbtercultural Education.”  The Directive cites two separate Opinions on the issue, issued by the General Attorney’s Office, which clarify that (a) the right to education applies to migrants, legal or illegal, and thus schools cannot deny admission to children even if the legality of their residence is not established (General Attorney’s Office Opinion, 6.8.2002), but (b) these students also subject to the rules and guidelines on schools (General Attorney’s Office, Opinion, 7.2.2003).  On the basis of these Opinions, the Director asks school Principals to admit but also to obtain the maximum possible information on these children (birth certificate, number and copy of passport, country of origin) and their parents (name and last name, home address and work address, number and copy of passport, country of origin) so that we [Ministry] can inform accordingly any government office addressed to us (Directive, 12.8.2004).   The assignment of national duties of surveillance to schools and the securitization of foreign admissions becomes more clear in a follow-up directive (carbon copied to the Head of the Migration Office), which states explicitly that schools are obliged to report to the Migration Office information on any alien students admitted and their parents, so that “it can be checked whether these reside illegally” in the Republic of Cyprus.  Director of Elementary Education, Director of Secondary Education and Director of Technical Education to heads of all schools, Memo entitled “Alien student enrolment in public and private schools of Elementary and Secondary Education.” 2 November, 2004. a  A third directive follows a month later, also carbon copied to the Head of the Migration Office,  Director of Elementary Education, Director of Secondary Education and Director of Technical Education to heads of all schools, Memo entitled “Alien student enrolment in public and private schools of Elementary and Secondary Education.” 2 December, 2004. which states that children of EU nationals and mixed marriages (i.e., with one Cypriot parent) are to be exempted from the previous directive.  The specific tactic of alien student securitization will be repealed only after reported as racist in several ECRI reports and condemned by the Commissioner of Administration.  This also marks a shift in policies on migrant student reception, from suspicion and surveillance to more productive kinds of control.  With the number of foreign students increasing and with Cyprus’ EU accession setting off new kinds of mobilities from both new and old EU members (Poland, Romania, Bulgaria, UK), the emphasis is placed on the integration of students.  The teaching of Greek to non Greek speaking students is framed as the main focus of Multicultural Education and measures such the free offer of afternoon Greek language courses (for both parents and students) and the allowance of extra teaching hours to schools with large numbers of foreign students are implemented on a more systematic basis.  It is important to note though that these measures are primarily framed as measures for “social inclusion” and that extra expenditures for the teaching Greek are rationalized as a pre-emptive measure for the avoidance of future problems of functional illiteracy in schools and school drop-outs.  At the same time the provision of free Greek language is cited as a measure for intercultural education in both Annual Reports on Education and many progress reports submitted by the government to the Commission in accordance with new laws on equality and anti-discrimination, the Ministerial Council decides to discontinue the offer of free language courses to Asulum seekers (non-European, non-white; the most precarious group of migrants and by proxy the most vulnerable to racism and xenophobia). This measure [Multicultural Education] aims at the smooth integration of foreign-language speaking children into the educational system of Cyprus and not at their absorption. The objective of the education offered is to provide enhanced and diversified programmes for learning the Greek language to children of repatriated and immigrant families for effective communication and smooth integration in society and to protect them against all forms of racial discrimination and social exclusion tendencies. The Life Long Education Centers cover this need by offering afternoon lessons (Social Inclusion Report, 2006: pp. 24-25). The assumption that some of these students will stay for ever in Cyprus and thus must be integrated carries along an inferential pluralisation of others: those “others” who have quasi-citizen status (and thus must learn Greek in order to become like Greek Cypriot students and be compatible to the providers, provisions and conditions of the Greek Cypriot school system) and those Other “others”.  If the ethnic Greek Pontians, the Polish, the Romanians, the Bulgarians, and so on, are those expected to stay, who are those Other “others” and what is intercultural education supposed to do for them?  Influenced by shifts and transmutations in discourses and politics of national security, migration and border control, economic development (or economic crisis), labor market (protection or flexibility) and social welfare (protecting the socially vulnerable groups or protecting the tax-payers’ money from false/fake beneficiaries), the definition of these Other “others” continues to shift: illegal migrants, Roma, Turkish Cypriots, Kurds, Arabs.  These do not constitute a distinct category of students but an abstract supplement of “excessive otherness” which always infiltrates the efforts for integration and provides alibi for the negation to address racism and to rethink migration as a dynamic and continuous process.  Even when the policy frame for the target school population shifts from “allodapí”” (alien) to “allóglossi”, the presence of migrants in schools will continue to produce mixed responses of rational action for the treatment of ensuing didactic and school organization/management needs but also fear, relapse to racial thinking, exclusion and stigmatization of those who do not fit the profile of the ‘benign’ other.  This excessive otherness marks, for example, the term “Aravophoni” (the term used in schools for Arabic speaking students).  Whereas, officially, no additional educational policies and practices are applied with regards to the enrollment of these students other than the measures already implemented for “alloglossi”, their construction as “Aravophonoi” has come to participate in the institutionalization of Arabophobia as a legitimate kind of efficient  school organization, i.e., a governmentality. Framed as a prognosis for the problem of allóglossi, intercultural education has focused on the teaching of Greek.  This measure is characterized (and often rendered ineffective) by a certain paradox.  Greek is taught as a Foreign/Other Language by teachers (ordinary classroom teachers, in Elementary schools, and Greek Philologists in Secondary Education) who are not qualified teachers of Greek as a Foreign/ Other Language.  Some teacher workshops on TGSOL have been offered over the last two years, but these are very short and ad hoc, voluntary, occasional rather than systematic, and their content is very general (covering a long range of issues, from principles of intercultural education, to workshops on attitudes, to issues of diglossia among native speakers of the Greek Cypriot Dialect and examples of bilingual education).  Textbooks and other teaching material for the teaching of the Greek language are ample and available.  However, most of these are oriented to the needs of Greek Diaspora students and it is left to the instructor’s judgment to decide which ones to use.   Along with the emphasis on teaching of the Greek language, intercultural education has also become framed as a policy of “social inclusion” for disadvantaged children.  Towards this direction, MOEC has adopted the policy of Educational Priority Zones (EPZs).  This policy aims to the “reduction of inequalities for students attending schools in disadvantaged areas with a large proportion of immigrants.”  As stated in the 2006 Social Inclusion NAP, “the EPZs promote the qualitative democratization of educational opportunities and pedagogical conditions of success for all children.”  EPZs have been operating in three cities, covering a total of seventeen schools.  GEMIC research was implemented in three EPZ schools: Phaneromeni Elementary School and Phaneromeni Gymnasium in Nicosia and Phaneromeni Gymnasiun in Larnaca. Whereas in 2001 the Ministry’s use of the term “multicultural” was very cautious, almost reticent, by the year 2008 the use of the term became so generous that multiculturalism came to cover every ethnic other, every inter-cultural encounter, every migration which the Republic of Cyprus was willing to accommodate within its national narrative.  The National Strategy Plan for the European Year of Intercultural Dialogue 2008, submitted in response to the Restricted Call for Proposals by the Culture Unit of the Directorate General for Education and Culture of the Commission, “was composed bearing in mind the specific features of the Cypriot Society which bestow to it multicultural characteristics” (Action Plan by the National Coordination Body of Cyprus, September 14 2007).  Among these social features, the National Strategy cites: The existence of the constitutionally recognized communities and religious groups (Greek Cypriots, Turkish Cypriots, Armenians, Maronites, Latins), the contact with the English culture during the period of British Rule and because of the presence of British bases on the island, the migration experience of Cypriots themselves, and the reception of foreign migrants in our days, tourism, bordering with Middle East and the repercussions of relevant political events such as the reception and hospitality of refugees from Lebanon, many young people studying in universities abroad, Cyprus EU accession. During the last few years, Cypriot society experiences an utterly new reality, mostly in the school environment.  This is a translation of the Greek version which is posted on the website of the Ministry of Education and Culture (http://www.moec.gov.cy/2008_diapolitismikos_dialogos/pdf/sxedio_drasis_2008pdf.pdf).  The text of the National Strategy as posted on the official EU website of the “European Year of Intercultural Dialogue” is quite different, narrativizing the last hundred year of Cyprus’s multicultural becoming (without any reference to structural aspects such as marginality and racism) and foregrounding a hospitable national (Cypriot) profile: The Cypriots are familiar with living with people of other cultures not only because of the tourist character of the country but also on account of the immigration of many locals to more economically developed countries in the past. Being neighbours with the Arabs and giving shelter to the refugees who left Lebanon during the civil war and the several crises in their country gave the locals the chance to know some aspects of the Arab culture. During the last decade the presence on the island of immigrants from Easter European and Asian countries is greatly noticed. These immigrants work in hotels and restaurants, as sanitary employees and domestic assistants and in many other occupations (available online: www.interculturaldialogue2008.eu/fileadmin/downloads/documents/133-nationalcampaigns/national_strategy/strategy_cyprus.doc). The first two first goals listed in the National Strategy are: All the people of Cyprus, local and immigrants should realize the importance of intercultural dialogue in their everyday life and be willing to participate in it positively. The immigrants should get familiar with the basic characteristics of the local culture whereas the natives should get to know the characteristics of the different immigrant groups. In this way they will be able to understand, tolerate and cooperate with each other. National Strategy on intercultural Education, Official English Version (available online: www.interculturaldialogue2008.eu). These two goals embody the dominant understanding of intercultural education as it has been developing across the elementary schools of Cyprus during the last few years, a combination of moralizing discourse on tolerance and a child-centered approach to the discovery of cultural otherness. Without teasing out first student’s understanding of race and by re-inscribing discriminatory racism with the glorification of the other’s cultural difference, elementary schools have come to frame migrant students as representatives of national cultures.   In contrast to elementary schools, secondary schools have not embrace multiculturalism in such a celebratory manner.  During the period of 2003-2004, 1,866 non Cypriot students were enrolled in Gymnasiums and Lyceums. By 2006, this number increased to 2,052 students. Interestingly, increases in enrolment are cited as “indicators” of successful social inclusion for the years 2003, 2004, and 2006 correspondingly (Social Inclusion Report, 2006: p. 87).  To the extent enrolment of migrant students in secondary education and not quality of intercultural interaction is framed as the indicator of social inclusion, mainstreaming foreign students and keeping them in schools has become a major aim of multicultural education at the secondary level.  The subject mater oriented approach of secondary education and the fragmentation of the teaching time into slots for the teaching of different subjects with different instructors do not allow opportunities for additive or supplementary approaches to multicultural education.   In the case of secondary education schools, the instrument used for the mainstreaming of foreign students has also served to regulate and normalized processes racialization and passive exclusion.  The marginalization of migrant students in the classroom (and the school) is normalized through the educational apparatus of “auditors” (“akroatés”). New arriving migrant, refugee and asylum seeker students are admitted and placed as auditors at a grade level a year lower than their age level and are granted a year’s gratis (i.e., exemption from exams and evaluation) to learn, through immersion in a native natural language use environment, the language of instruction.  The policy of mainstreaming “different students” as “auditors” in the comprehensive classroom was originally developed as an accommodating measure for “special education students”.   Measures taken for implementation of “Intercultural Education” September 7 1999 Ministerial Decision for the promotion of Intercultural Education and the establishment of “reception classes” so that the education of repatriates (term used for Ethnic Greek Pontians) and alien students “could become more effective and participatory leading to the smooth and balanced integration of these students in the Greek [sic] educational system”. 2002-2003 MOEC Memorandum to Heads of Elementary Schools informs them that a program of Intercultural Education is in process of being prepared, Action Plan developed, promoting the smooth integration of “allóglossi” in the educational system and not their assimilation the basic aim remains the same, i.e., “the provision of modified support programs for the learning of the Greek language and the children’s smooth integration in the social whole” the protection of the freedoms and rights of all members of the Cypriot society from any kind of racist discrimination and tendencies of social exclusion. 2004 Educational Reform Report The Report also makes note of problems related with the implementation of Intercultural Education in secondary education: the teachers express worries and doubts with regard to their capacity to respond to the needs of a multicultural classroom kids of a different cultural background are at risk of lugging behind and facing many psychological problems because of ignorance for or even scorn for their cultural  specificities the teachers’ worry about the relations between native students and migrants. The Special Committee for Educational Reform makes the following proposals: expanded teaching of foreign languages, something which would contribute to the more smooth integration of allóglossi owning to the recognition of the importance of every language teaching migrant students their mother tongue in-service teacher training programmes for the teaching of Greek as a Second/Foreign Language   the promotion of the European dimension of education and, within this context, revision of textbooks with keen nationalistic character. 2007-2008 MOEC designates “Intercultural Education” as Special year long school Aim 2008-2009 1740 extra teaching hours are given to schools for the teaching of Greek (this amounts, approximately, to the work load of 58 teachers) pilot program for the intensive teaching of the Greek language implemented in 18 secondary education schools thirteen gymnasiums, four lyceums, and one technical school. Teaching hours range from 4 to 8 for different grades and in order to attend these language sessions alloglossi are exempted from the subjects of Ancient Greek, History and Religious education. Greek philologists are hired as temporary staff under one-year contract for the teaching of Greek Language. 2009-2010 MOEC announces the publication of a Guide for the reception of Alloglossi, and the preparation (in process) of a Greek Language Competence Test for the distribution of alloglossi in different language level groups and the better estimate of schools’ needs in extra teaching hours 2069 extra teaching hours (per week) are given to schools for the teaching of Greek pilot program is extended to 13 more schools. In order to be able to attend Greek langauge classes, all alloglossi enrolled in the program are exempted from Religious education and Ancient Greek but “are allowed” to enroll in the History class in those grades where final year exam in History is mandatory (they have the option of full or partial attendance).  Excessive number of class absences in History or failure in the end of year exam in the subject of History exam will not be a reason for failing the year. Until the end of the 2007-2008 school year, secondary education schools do not have any official guidelines for the reception and placement of in-coming foreign students.  During GEMIC fieldwork we found that secondary education schools abide with the informal policy of placing “allóglossi” at their age grade under the status of “auditor”. This means that these students attend class but not as regular students: they are exempted from exams and they are not given grade reports. At the end of the school year, the students take the same final exams as regular students, and if they pass the exam there are, retroactively assigned regular student status for the year and continue their enrollment, as regular students, to the next grade.  As explained to GEMIC researchers by a MOEC administrator, tackling with the problem of allóglossi in secondary education by placing them as auditors constitutes a case of a policy expansion rather than a new policy for migrant students.  The option of auditing a class with same age peers under an exceptional status was originally developed for children with special needs who were mainstreamed in regular classes according to 1999 Special Education Law 113 (1).  This option, however, when extended to migrant children, it was also modified.  This led to both expected and unexpected effects.  Unlike the case of children with special needs, whose placement under the aegis of the auditor facilitated their inclusion in the regular classroom and their advancement from grade to grade, in the case of allóglossi, to enroll as an auditor meant lenience with academic requirements but also exemption from the status of regular student: they do not take exams, they do not get grade reports, they can exceed the minimum number of school absences, their absences do not matter.  In other words, their school attendance does not count as regular enrollment.  They can move from grade to grade as long, as they remain under the status of the auditor, but they cannot move from the status of the auditor to the status of the regular student unless they pass the end of the year final exams in all mandatory subjects. Thus, whereas for a special education child, the option of auditing regular classes means emotional development and attainment of social skills within the same age peer groups, for an allóglossos attending class as akroatís, very often means coming to learn that his/her presence does not matter.   Another educational scheme very often cited in educational reports as a measure of intercultural education is the inclusion of multicultural schools ‘with problems’ in zones of educational priority (ZEP) and the inclusion of allóglossi as “auditors”. Whereas the Cypriot educational system is very centralized (central control on teacher credentials, appointment of teachers, curriculum and textbook policy, provision and financing of educational services, etc.), ZEP schools are granted certain flexibility (curriculum adjustments) and bonuses (extra teaching hours for remedial classes and TGSOL, extra funds to develop actions and to hire translators). These actions and initiatives, however, often operate ad hoc, according to exceptional guidelines which serve the logic of school control and cohesion rather than serving the needs of migrant and refugee students. To summarize, we could say that intercultural education in Cyprus has been addressed to some of the needs of the foreign students without taking into consideration the intercultural interactions that take place in schools.  The acculturation of others to the culture of the school and the “acceptance” of others are understood as spontaneous processes which will take off once the foreigners come to learn Greek and Greek Cypriots come to learn a bit about other cultures and thus also learnt how to respect people from other cultures.  Cultural and social dynamics in the Greek Cypriot School (construction of gender identities, hegemonic masculinity, processes of auto-ethnicization and hetero-ethnicization, spatial and organizational forms of racialization, intersecting exclusions but also actions and solidarities that challenge or subvert regimes of gender and ethnicism) have not been addressed as terrains of intercultural education.  Supplementing the framing of allóglossi as a target group (as carriers of deficit) , the aim of “cultivating acceptance of cultural difference” also comes to put foreign students on the spot (as carriers of a surplus of culture).   As a concluding remark, we could say that in the national context of Cyprus, the integration of migrant and refugee children has been both mitigated and regulated through internal exclusions.  The term “inclusive exclusion” is introduced by Giorgio Agamben (1998) and refers to a kind of belongingness without inclusion.  Yeğenoğlu (2005) cites as a paradigmatic example of inclusive exclusion the case of Turkish guest workers in Germany who are conditionally welcomed.  They are included in order to nourish the sovereignty of the German subject and yet kept out of the purview of general law.  In a similar fashion, measures for intercultural education have been successful in accommodating “others” but have also been productive in introducing zones of exception and new forms of governmental control: a student who is not a regular student, a class which is not really a class.   The writing of this report coincides with an important legislative initiative concerning the reformulation of the Greek Nationality Code, which will replace Immigration Law 3386/2005. The new Code (Law 3838/2010) will regulate naturalization of migrant children born and/or educated in Greece, who under certain circumstances will gain full citizenship rights. This presents a significant development in the regularization of migrant children’s, up until now, precarious legal status. Previous Greek migration policy had stipulated that all migrant children, regardless of their legal status, could obtain Greek public education and reside legally in Greece until their 18th year of age (until age 18 they are considered dependents and are covered by their parents’ residence permit); thereafter, they were excluded from the above regulation and would have to prove employment or student status in order to be granted temporary residence permit; in other words they became ‘illegal’ once more. The fierce public debate surrounding the new Nationality Code, involving representatives from all positions of the political spectrum, carried out on the web, in the media and at public events, has highlighted the issue of citizenship and national identity as a fragile and embattled ground. One of the arguments presented in favour of migrant children’s nationalization is the claim that, even though they are not of Greek origin, they partake of Greek national identity and culture by virtue of their acculturation through Greek education, a point which marks the continued national salience accorded to Greek education. Obviously, with the new legislation, the situation of (some) migrant children will be completely transformed. As Greek citizens they will have access to all the rights and obligations conferred on native Greeks. In this context, the role and importance of education in addressing issues of racism and ethno-cultural difference remains pivotal. In addition, since education is regarded as one of the main criteria for ascertaining and granting national belonging and citizenship rights, the significance of education is doubly reinforced/highlighted. In spite of the new policy measures, only a small number of migrant children will be nationalized, a situation which will produce and reinforce status and socio-economic differences between migrants, rendering them internally divided. Already, older and more established migrants / migrant communities are antagonistically positioned against newcomers and refugees. These antagonisms, as we shall see, resurface in the school context, where children of different nationalities and legal status establish new boundaries between ‘entitled insiders’ and ‘undesirable or disruptive outsiders’. Intercultural Education in Greece  Information obtained through the official website of the Ministry of Education (http://www.ypepth.gr/el_ec_page200.htm; http://www.edulll.gr/?page_id=11) and of IPODE (http://www.ipode.gr/), as well as the educational information network Aflavita (http://www.alfavita.gr/OdigosEkpaideytikou/od28_10_08_844.php). Following EU directives (Diamandopoulou 2006), the legal framework institutionalizing intercultural education in the Greek public educational system was developed in 1996 (Law 2413/96). This law specified the goals and objectives of intercultural education in very general terms as being «the organization and the function of primary and secondary schools in order to provide education to young people with educational, social and cultural specificities» (article 34), and introduced following institutional measures for their implementation: the institution of special Intercultural Schools (articles 35-37), and the foundation of the semi-autonomous Institute for the Education of Greeks in Diaspora and Intercultural Education / IPODE (articles 5-7), supervised by the Ministry of Education. The main role of IPODE, however, was oriented towards developing educational resources for Greeks abroad, rather than providing for migrant students’ needs in Greece. Also in 1996, an additional Presidential Decree established a Special Secretariat of the Ministry of Education, on Diaspora and Intercultural Education whose role was to supervise and direct all efforts, and research programs, pertaining to the implementation of measures for the promotion of intercultural education in public schools. This was superceded in 2009 by the Special Unified Secretariat of Educational Planning, Diaspora Education, Intercultural Education and Decentralization. In total, 26 intercultural schools were founded since 2006. As Gropas and Triandafyllidou point out, «out of a total of 15,174 state schools (from pre- to high school), these inter-cultural schools correspond to about 0.17% of the total. By contrast, the percentage of non Greek mother tongue pupils in Greek schools has reached the level of 9.5%» (Gropas and Triandafyllidou 2007: 12). Additionally, and in order to accommodate the growing needs of migrant (and other non-Greek speaking) students enrolled in regular public schools, a Ministerial Act in 1999, established Reception and Tutorial Classes in primary and secondary schools, expanding on and formalizing a previous measure set up in the early 1990s to address the needs of Greek repatriate students. Reception and tutorial classes became the main instrument through which migrant students were gradually incorporated into the regular school program. Intercultural Schools There are 13 primary schools, 9 gymnasiums and 4 lyceums in the whole of Greece that have been designated as ‘Intercultural Schools’. In actuality, it was existing schools with at least 45% of their student population belonging to Greek repatriates and/or immigrants that were re-named as ‘intercultural schools’. These schools implement the national curriculum adapted to the special educational, social and cultural needs of the foreign students (e.g. additional curriculum on culture and history of country of origin, smaller classes, extra language instruction for parents). One third of the intercultural schools is located in the Athens metropolitan area (3 primary schools and 4 secondary schools), while the rest is based in the Thessaloniki area, where large numbers of Greek repatriates from Southeast Europe and the former Soviet Republic were settled. Teachers employed in these schools have to undergo special training. Obviously, the 26 designated intercultural schools do not meet the needs of migrant students, the majority of whom are enrolled in regular schools in the areas where they live. Nevertheless, intercultural education has not been mainstreamed as an educational objective in regular schools, which try to address their growing needs for diversity management in informal ways. Specialized educational material produced by Intercultural Educational Research Programs (see below) has been, occasionally, used by motivated schools / teachers, but is not systematically integrated into the curriculum, and its production has now been discontinued (Gropas and Triandafyllidou 2007). Reception and Tutorial Classes Reception Classes and Tutorial Classes are organized at the level of the school unit, depending on the number of foreign and non-Greek speaking students, and provide special Greek language support in parallel to regular classes and school activities. Reception Classes (9-17 students), where Greek is taught as a second language, operate during regular school hours and students can participate in them for up to two years (in special cases three years), after which and depending on the acquired linguistic competence, they are re-instated in regular classes according to educational level and age. Tutorial Classes (3-8 students) operate in after-school hours, as extracurricular activities for students with continuing Greek language problems. Both measures represent the development of the previous, informal, system of instruction that aimed to provide teaching support to children of Greek repatriates (initially from Germany, Australia, USA and later from Southeast Europe and the former Soviet Republics). In the academic year 2002-2003, 548 reception classes and 127 support classes were organised, most of them in the Athens metropolitan area, and in Central Macedonia (Gropas and Triandafyllidou 2007). At present, however, both reception and tutorial classes have been curtailed for lack of personnel, and schools adopt the informal measure of ‘ability grouping’, enrolling migrant and refugee students who do not have an adequate command of the Greek language in lower grade classes.  This information was provided by the school teachers participating in the present study. There have been no systematic evaluations of the educational results of reception and tutorial classes. Informal discussions with teachers indicate that such classes worked as important de-congestive mechanisms, allowing regular classes with large numbers of migrant and other non-Greek speaking studnets to proceed according to the national curriculum plan in spite of language difficulties. It is also worth mentioning that there was no special training set up for teachers employed in these classes. Intercultural Education Research Programs Three large University-directed research and applied programs on intercultural education were implemented as part of the National Action Programs on Education and Professional Training (EPEAEK), supported by the European Structural Fund and national sources: Education of Muslim Minority Children, 1997-2008, University of Athens; Education of Roma Children, 1997-2004, University of Ioannina, 2006-2008, Unversity of Thessaly; Education of Greek Repatriate and Foreign Children, 1997-2008, University of Athens. The programs included three main areas of activity: research, developing teaching materials and teacher training programs. The objective of these programs was to address the longstanding educational underachievement of marginalized students belonging to the Roma population, the Muslim Minority of Thrace and the children of  Greek repatriates and foreign nationals, through targeted curricular and extracurricular interventions and specialized teacher training. The outcome of these large-scale, long-term programs needs to be evaluated for each one separately, as all three have implemeted different educational interventions, on different sets of disadvantaged student populations.  On the Education of Muslim Minority Children Program, for example, see Frangoudaki, 2008. Migrant Students Law 2910/2001 (article 40), following international conventions (UNESCO) on the rights of children, provides that all children born and/or (legally or illegally) residing in Greece, are entitled to attend all levels of compulsory Greek public education (school-years 1- 9) up until their 18th year. School principles can enroll migrant students in primary and secondary school regardless of whether they possess legal and proper documents, or not. According to data collected from schools units for school year 2006-7 by the Center for Educational Research and IPODE, about 10% of students in Nursery Schools, Primary Schools and Gymnasiums are migrants (third country nationals and Greek repatriates).  Sources: Κέντρο Εκπαιδευτικής Έρευνας (Κ.Ε.Ε.), Αποτύπωση του Εκπαιδευτικού Συστήµατος σε Επίπεδο Σχολικών Μονάδων Στατιστική απεικόνιση των σχολικών µονάδων Πρωτοβάθµιας και ∆ευτεροβάθµιας Εκπαίδευσης κατά το σχολικό έτος 2005-2006, σύµφωνα µε τα στοιχεία που καταχωρήθηκαν από τις σχολικές µονάδες της χώρας στη Βάση ∆εδοµένων της «Αποτύπωσης»; ΙΠΟΔΕ, Κατανοµή των Αλλοδαπών  και Παλιννοστούντων µαθητών στα Σχολεία (∆ηµόσια και Ιδιωτικά ),  κατά το σχολικό  έτος 2005-06 (Tables are included in the Appendix). The percentage falls considerably in the Lyceums to ca 4,6% (KEE data), or 6,8% (IPODE data). The largest migrant group in Greek schools are from Albania (76%), followed by students from the former Soviet Republics (10,5%), from Bulgaria (3,4%), and from Asia (2,2%). The majority of migrant students are located in the Athens metropolitan area (13,6% of total student population, 45% of migrant population). There is no data on gender ratio, but we assume it is about half. Nevertheless, lack of relevant data makes it difficult to assess gender-specific performances of migrant students. Already, even though these statistics cannot offer a detailed picture, it is clear that there is a significant drop-out rate among migrant children – 20%-40% higher than for Greek children – at higher levels of education (Voulalas 2007, cited in Gropas and Triandafyllidou 2007). There is also a tendency to attend technical vocational school rather than general lyceums after completing the 9 years of obligatory education (Giannitsas et al. 2008). Discussion The Greek migration regime presents a central paradox: on the one hand migrants are expected to assimilate to Greek culture and identity, on the other hand they are deprived of basic legal rights by which to ensure and establish terms of equal participation in the Greek polity (Tsitselikis 2006). In fact, it could be argued that, at the level of the social imaginary, Greek society still considers migrants a temporary presence and a state of exception. Even though recent Law 3838/10 provides for certain categories of migrants to acquire citizenship rights, there is a distinct prioritization of the naturalization of 2nd generation migrants, children and young adults, over adult migrants (Christopoulos 2010), thereby institutionalizing, in spite of the stated liberalization of citizenship, multiple levels of inclusion and exclusion. Greek educational politics are not exempt from this dilemma: on the one hand, and in harmonization with EU directives, educational policies and official discourses are articulated in terms of equality, tolerance, integration and multiculturalism. On the other hand, in effect, educational practices often institutionalize discrimination and legitimize national supremacy. Very broadly speaking the tendency in education is towards promoting informal segregation, at school and classroom levels, between Greek and migrant students, while at the same time, expecting migrant students to assimilate to the dominant national culture (Gropas and Triandafyllidou 2007). In response to internal and external pressures manifesting more acutely in the 1990s, Greece proceeded to ‘modernize’ its public educational system through large-scale reforms (Laws 2525/97 and 2640/98). Regarding the need to address the growing diversity in schools, intercultural objectives were introduced, either through the institution of separate school units (Intercultural Schools), or through support structures in the regular school (Reception and Tutorial Classes). While the policy discourse on intercultural education reflected politically correct positions on multicultural difference  E.g. see statement of purpose of IPODE: Accordingly, Intercultural Education as an educational orientation does not have an assimilationist nature but constitutes an ‘opening’ of the learning process that should permeate all educational levels and objects of study and is based on the appreciation of different experiences and diversities as a source of knowledge and personal development (my emphasis, my translation). , none of the above measures, in effect, attempted to mainstream intercultural objectives in the national curriculum. The new policy framework was developed in order to provide equal learning opportunities for students belonging to parts of the population that were hitherto marginalized or downgraded. However, the initial priorities were formulated in relation to the needs of Greece’s minority populations (Muslim minority in Thrace, the Roma population) and Greek repatriates, rather than migrants. It can therefore be reasonably assumed that, while taking into consideration cultural and linguistic differences of the above mentioned populations, the underlying objective of this intercultural intervention - properly couched in terms of diversity, tolerance and integration - was to produce more successfully assimilated ‘Greek’ subjects. Ethnic minority and repatriated children with non-Greek linguistic backgrounds were taught Greek as a foreign language. Knowledge of native languages other than Greek was not considered necessary. (The Law provides that native languages can be taught if enough parents request this, but, so far, this measure has not been implemented. In fact, in some cases such as the Muslim minority in Thrace, the possibility of introducing the native language, Turkish, was deemed not only unnecessary but also nationally endangering, since it could lead to the ‘Turkishization’ of the minority.) The entrance of large numbers of migrant students in public schools, though, has rendered these measures inadequate, or obsolete, for addressing the challenges and needs arising from the un-repressible socio-cultural heterogeneity of the population of Greece. So far, migrant students in Greek schools are taught only the Greek language, in some cases as a second language until they establish a level of competence that allows them to fully participate in the Greek curriculum. There are no provisions to introduce migrants’ native languages into the school program, and where such initiatives have been organized by parents and teachers informally, they have been discouraged or discontinued by the educational authorities.  The 132nd Primary School of Athens in Kypseli is a telling example: After nine successful years of implementing, with the cooperation of teachers and parents, language and cultural projects for migrant and Greek students and their parents, such as Greek language classes for migrant parents, foreign language classes (Albanian, Russian and Bulgarian) for migrant students, and various other socio-cultural interventions, such as substituting the Christian Orhtodox morning prayer with a poem, the school principal, who was at the heart of the initiative, was demoted and forcibly removed by the ministry of education and the work of the school was interrupted. A solidarity movement developed, but the school projects were, nevertheless, closed down. Today, after successful campaigning, and the recent changes in government priorities, the school principal was acquitted of the charges brought against her, and the school has resumed its innovative intercultural work. Nevertheless, such initiatives remain exceptional and are localized at the level of progressive school units/principals (http://www.132grava.net/; Varnava-Skoura 2010) At the level of social practices, we observe the de facto segregation of public schools through the selective placement of Greek and migrant students in different school districts with a smaller or larger migrant population. In other words, Greek parents, as well as educational authorities, prefer to enroll Greek children in all-Greek rather than mixed schools, or, which amounts to the same effect, send them to private schools, which are, for socio-economic reasons, inaccessible to migrant families. Having thus ensured an informally enforced racialized and classed apartheid, Greek society and the Greek state can continue to evoke discourses of multiculturalism, while at the same time securing the reproduction of Greek socio-cultural supremacy. In this version of nationalist ‘multiculturalism’, ‘Greekness’ (as racialized identity and cultural superiority) remains unassailable and unchallenged, and migration is framed as a ‘state of exception’. One of the many aspects of this informal educational apartheid relates to teachers’ dilemmas: on the one hand, they are keen to be seen as non- discriminating between Greek and migrant students. “We don’t separate them, we treat them the same”, is a common statement implying that they try not to alienate or treat migrant students with prejudice. On the other hand, migrant students are structurally disadvantaged in the Greek educational system, not least because the cultural context in which teachers and students interact is monolithically Greek. Since migrant students are systemically discriminated against, teachers’ practices of non-discrimination cannot be limited to «not separating them», but must challenge the ethno-racist underpinnings of the educational system, if they do not want to collude with its workings. By pretending social inequalities do not exist in the space of the school or in their classroom they are denying and disqualifying migrant students’ experience of discrimination. 2nd Generation migrants: What kind of future? Research on the social trajectories of 2nd generation migrants draws attention to a number of issues pertaining to the spread of (racist and ethnicized) violence and criminality (Papandreou 2009). While noting the ongoing criminalization and penalization of migrants (especially men) both in the media, as well as in the practices of the police and public prosecution that have cemented the stereotype of the ‘criminal migrant’ in public opinion (Karydis 1996), it is still interesting to consider two emerging tendencies. On the one hand there is a rise in youth criminality among 2nd generation migrants. According to police and court records, a statistically significant number of offences are associated to ‘mendicancy’, followed by theft and drug related offences. The overrepresentation of young male Albanian migrants in statistical data about young offenders does not indicate a higher criminal predisposition among Albanians, as public opinion holds, but is linked on the one hand to the overall larger number of Albanian migrants in Greece, as well as to the age and gender distribution of migrants, with young males comprising a significant percent of the total Albanian population in Greece (Karydis 2004). While the available data and research is not sufficient to draw any firm conclusions about the development of a ‘criminal career’ among 2nd generation migrants, certain hypotheses based on other European experiences are formulated. The lack of viable opportunities for upward social mobility and for successful integration in the host country, in spite of equalization of legal status and rights, what Balibar (2003) has called ‘internal social apartheid’, could be one contributing factor blending marginalization with crime in their personal trajectories. At the same time the encounter with prejudice in the dominant culture contributes to the internalization of shame and alienation, leading to further – self-imposed – marginalization. The second tendency recorded in the research concerns the development of particular macho versions of masculinity, and of neo-traditional attitudes towards gender and family relations (Papandreou 2009). These performances of aggressive and authoritarian masculinity are organized both in reaction to a sense of emasculation young migrants experience through their contact with Greek racism, and as a wish to differentiate themselves from, what they consider, feminized liberal Greek masculinities. The school context is a particularly significant environment in which to observe the gendered and sexualized re-construction of national identities, where performances of masculinity and femininity, as well as their surveillance, become marks of national pride or subjection. It is interesting to note, however, that these masculinities are not unknown to Greek culture, since they are also associated with working class identities (Giannakopoulos 2005). One of the questions, then, that arises is how these social practices - the performance of feminine and masculine migrant and Greek identities - and their representations, enter into school discourses in relation to issues of (racialised and gendered) violence.  Moreover, if migrant students identify themselves as ethnic subjects (e.g. as ‘Albanians’) not so much in relation to their country of origin but in reaction to the dominant Greek culture, doesn’t intercultural education, through its reification of ‘culture’, and the projection of difference onto the ‘other’ (only migrants are different and, in contrast, Greeks are all same), contribute towards cementing constructions of identity as static and innate, rather than problematize such essentialist, and racialised assumptions?          (developed by Ana Blazheva) Macedonia is a complex multi-ethnic society with wide ethnic and cultural diversity. Like the rest of the Balkan countries different ethnic, religious, cultural identities are in continuous tension being in juxtaposition for centuries. Diversity can be and in many cases is strong integrative strength which can enrich and enable significant interactions, experiences and processes, although recent history and present day show that ethnic and religious plurality can be as well, or even more destabilizing than integrating factor in the society. Since the independence in 1991 the country has faced a lot of social, political and economic challenges related to process of transition. However, one of the biggest challenges was overcoming the inter-ethnic conflict in 2001 which ended with international mediation and ratification of the Ohrid Framework Agreement. The agreement initiated contracted changes of the constitution, laws, new territorial division and local government structure and organization.   As a result the new preamble of the constitution defines that Macedonia is established as a national state of the Macedonian people, in which full equality as citizens and permanent co-existence with the Macedonian people is provided for Albanians, Turks, Vlachs, Romanies and other nationalities living in the Republic of Macedonia. Therefore, politically and explicitly confirmed the multi-ethnic character of the Macedonian’s society and the need for its preservation and representation in the public life, and affirmed non discrimination, which in particular refers mostly to employment in public administration and public enterprises. Furthermore the agreement brought up the question of education and the use of languages. The agreement addresses education and the use of languages in manner that in primary and secondary education, instruction will be provided in the students' native languages, (OFA – article 6.1) and that Macedonian language and any other language spoken by at least 20 percent of the population is also an official language, as set forth herein used in accordance with specific law (OFA – article 6.5). This is also specified in the constitution: Members of the nationalities have the right to instruction in their language in primary and secondary education, as determined by law. In schools where education is carried out in the language of a nationality, the Macedonian language is also studied” (Article 48). The agreement was signed as a base for stability of inter-ethnic relations and beginning of the process of decentralization, new phase of democratization of the country. The language of war ended with the promise of democracy although bind in with fear and disbelief. And these events, experiences and emotions, the lack of security and need for it, gave new meaning to the sense of belonging, and new strength of the attachments within the ethnic communities. Along these lines the attachments to the specific community (may) go ahead and widen the distance of/from the other, empower mistrust and fix the gaze only as far as  the stereotypes making relation to the other/s intensified with anxiety and ambivalence. On the other side self-identification needs to be stable and confirmed, and can be as well glorious and triumphal in the narratives and manipulations of the archly political players.   Education faces many changes and challenges. Some are reflection of broader processes, changes and tensions, some emerge from local contexts, and they all make schools unique stage of continuous struggle and negotiation among public and private lives. Schools face new ambitious and fast introduced national reforms, political influences, as well as reflections of global changes and processes, media, changes in subjectivity and different discourses of childhood and youth.  Large educational reforms were made in both primary and secondary education towards modernization of education. Primary education is going trough reform from 8 to 9 year education and oriented more towards developmental goals and democratization of education. The reform in the secondary education is directed towards redefining curriculum, giving more choices and alternatives, reshaping vocational education and introduction of new form of national graduate examination. Although there have been efforts for the reform of the educational system from a traditional to a modern and democratic one, there is still a long way to go for building a solid structure of democratic values. Teachers, students and parents often confuse democracy with collision of values and/or anarchy. Democracy did not bring security, freedom and emancipation. Instead, it brought regimes of visual surveillance and physical securitization for the “protection” of students, along with more brutal violence, lower expectations and avoidance of responsibilities.  The new law and the process of decentralization brought a lot of tension between local governments and the Ministry of education with regards to the reform of duties, responsibilities, power and funding. Media often report about education, portraying it as an arena of scandals and politicization and a source of continuous marginalization. Policies A national policy for using languages of ethnic minorities in schools is inscribed in the law for primary and secondary education according to which both primary and secondary education students of ethnic minorities which follow instruction on the language other than Macedonian have the right to write in the adequate alphabet, also school documentation and the name of the school to be written in the language of instruction beside Macedonian language. The textbooks are published in the language of instruction, and the author of the textbook commits to translate and publish to other languages of instruction other than Macedonian.  (Law for primary education articles: 9, 14, 100, 104, 119 & Law for secondary education articles: 4, 32, 84) Further documents and procedures which take care for the multicultural context and inter-ethnic relations can be found in the documents of the Bureau for development of education. For example, in the methodology for evaluation of textbooks for primary and secondary school textbooks is appointed that textbooks should contain words and phrases expressing humiliation towards communities or personalities and attention should be paid to illustrations which should be respectful and in the direction of understanding and trust towards others. Other credentials consider giving respect to values of other cultures by inciting interest for understanding each others’ traditions, religion and symbols. In “The National Program for Development of Education 2005-2015” there is a statement where the Ministry of education declares responsibility to create education with focus on the individual, his development and development of his individual and cultural identity, defined in the ambience of multicultural environment situated in the global national and international context.  The latest reform in primary education, promoted by the Bureau for Development of Education in 2007, is the Ninth Grade Education.  This includes the extension of obligatory primary education until grade nine and the comprehensive change of the curricula of all subjects from first to ninth grade. One of the principles of the reform is “Principle of understanding and multiculturalism”, according to which content, methods and activities should promote the values of tolerance and respect of differences and enable the acquisition of knowledge and skills for the understanding and respect for others. According to this principle, ‘living together’ requires respect towards culture, language and traditions of all communities, as well as students’ consciousness about their own cultural background and knowledge of their cultural heritage and cultures of others. Schools are expected to promote both of these two goals. Secondary education reform does not include an intercultural perspective in school policies or in the curriculum. It is left out to the schools to manage intercultural issues.  State secondary schools are, with reference to the language of instruction, mostly Macedonian or Albanian, with some cases of classes in Turkish language and some special programs in other foreign languages such as French. Macedonian and Albanian students live parallel lives.  Most schools where both Albanian and Macedonian are designated languages of instruction have separate language shifts and some are physically separated in different schools. Continuous ethnic tensions and incidents in these schools become regularly politicized in daily political battles between the government and the oppositional parties. Young people become manipulated through fear and by teachers and parents. There are a few examples of developing intercultural educational practices. One of these examples is the long time project of bilingual (Macedonian/Albanian) kindergartens. Based on the same model, an experimental program for bilingual education was implemented in one rural primary school during the school year 2009-2010. The latest development was provoked by a government decision to render mandatory the study of the Macedonian language for those students who study in other languages from grade one instead of grade four as it was until now. Albanian political parties, non-governmental organizations and parents boycotted the decision and public debate was triggered again on issues of interethnic tensions.  Until now, students who study in Macedonian language do not have the option to learn the languages of other minorities in the community.  With the 2008 law for secondary education rendering secondary education mandatory and defining sanctions for parents if their children do not attend school, the issue of Roma enrolment in secondary education becomes a hot one.  Although more and more Roma children enroll and finish secondary education, Roma youth continues to face problems in finding jobs.  At the same time, continuous acts of discrimination and stigmatization put down the self-expectations of students from marginalized groups. Research findings from the three different national studies show that intercultural policies and measures and practices developed at the school or classroom level in the three national contexts are interrelated primarily with the constitutional framing of the republic and secondarily with the officially declared principles and goals of intercultural education.  In the case of Macedonia, society multi-ethnic character and ethnic groups’ right language rights are constitutionally established.  Ethnic/minority rights, however, are not always translated into individual rights (since there are no mechanisms for that, not developed yet).  The right to education in native language is a collective and not an individual right.  Macedonian language is the only official state language and ethnic groups have right to use their language as official (e.g., as the medium of instruction in schools) only in communities where they comprise 20% of the population in the local community. Therefore Albanian language is official in those communities where 20% of the population is Albanian.  At the high school level, multicultural education means, primarily, provision of education in multiple ethnic and language forms, either in separate (ethnic) schools or in separate tracks or shifts within the same school (as in the case of Cvetan Dimov).  In the case of Greece, where the monolingual character of the Nation state establishes Greek as the only official language and as the only language of instruction in all public schools, the linguistic variety of the multicultural classroom is dealt with the teaching of Greek to non-Greek speaking migrants and refugees and the provisional linking of integration with the learning of Greek. Furthermore, as Zavos notes in the Greek National WP5 Report, with recent changes in migration and citizenship law stipulating proof of language competence as a fundamental requirement for granting citizenship rights to adult migrants long-term residents in Greece, “language emerges as a terrain where cultural, political and legal priorities or dispositifs converge and intersect with subjective performances.” In the case of the Republic of Cyprus, which is not a nation-state, the constitutional equality of Greek and Turkish and the allocation of cultural and educational control to the two nationalities, creates similar conditions with Macedonia.  However, with this constitutional provision suspended since 1963, with ethnic conflict in the 60’s and the Turkish invasion in 1974 leading to the de facto ethnic division of Cyprus and with the Republic of Cyprus becoming a de jure Greek Cypriot Republic, Greek becomes also the only language of language of instruction in public schools in the south side of the divide.  In other words, whereas Cyprus could have had a multiethnic language school system like that of Macedonia, it has a system almost identical to that of Greece.  A similar caveat, however, seems to apply to the multi-ethnic multilingual policy of Macedonia.  The nationalities right to education in their native language is not translated to individual’s right to education in their native language because ethnic schools or ethnic shifts are diverse within (in Cvetan Dimov, for example, Albanian students attend the Macedonian shift or Bosnian students attend the Albanian shift).  In this case, the monolingual character of instruction is even more normative and exclusionary for ethnic minorities than for refugees and migrants in Greek of Greek Cypriot schools.  The minority students’ option to enroll in ethnic schools (individual choice) and the nationalities right for ethnic continuity through schools (collective right) provide a national, a legal and an educational alibi for monolingual schools (and tracts and shifts within the same school) to discourage or even prohibit the use of any other language in the classroom.  Eventually, minority students like refugee and migrant students are burdened with the responsibility, the difficulty and the disadvantage of mastering the language of instruction in an educational environment which was not originally designed to facilitate, in parallel with the learning of content specific matter, the learning of the language of instruction as a second or other language. PART TWO: ANALYSIS OF EMPIRICAL DATA (Greece and Cyprus only) Zavos reports that for teachers of Kerameikos, the concept of cultural difference is abstract and linked to the discourse of political correctness. This is reflected in the repeated evocation that they do not ‘separate’ or discriminate between children from different backgrounds, but, rather, treat children the same, or, as same. The kids are all the same to me.  However, we forget where these kids come from.  They also have their culture, they have their religion.  They have their civilization, they have their customs, and they come in here, too suddenly in a way, to integrate.  This is not that easy (Interview with Pluto). At the same time, however, it is also evident that teachers engage in a continuous effort to come to terms with, make sense of and negotiate ethno-cultural difference, and, in particular, forge connections, often drawing on notions of a common cultural-historical heritage (‘we were all part of the Ottoman Empire’), or on notions of a common class identity (‘we too were once poor’), or common experiences of migration (‘Greeks were also poor migrants once’). Zavos remarks that such attempts to establish similarity through identification with class or cultural background, simultaneously also perform a cultural politics of separation. ‘Closeness’ is modeled on the basis of geographical and territorial proximity, and is established at the cost of erasing differences, or relegating differences to a developmental narrative of culture and history (we, Greeks and Albanians, are alike, but we, Greeks, are at a more advanced stage of social development). Unbridgeable difference, on the other hand, is projected further afield, to those who come from afar, either in geographical terms (Asia, China), or in terms of social position/identity (war refugees). Thus, the integratable migrant is construed as the migrant who can be treated as same, modeled on the basis of national stereotype (Greeks were once poor migrants, so we can understand the experiences of current poor migrants). Integration means that the migrant can become a quasi-insider and thus be smoothly assimilated. Zavos notes that the construction of different kinds of migrants, variously, as ‘other’, ‘quasi-insider’, or ‘grateful subject’ is linked to the production of the idealized self-image of the nation and the projection of its fulfillment in the future. Statements of the kind ‘all kids are the same to me’, ‘we do not discriminate’, etc. are also prevalent in interviews with Cypriot teachers.  What is identified by the Greek Report as a discourse of ‘political correctness’, in the Cypriot Report is identified as a ‘European correctness’, a multicultural ethos ensuing from Cyprus’s EU accession, and a change of mindset required by global mobilities and reconstruction of local societies.  ‘Cypriots are racists’, ‘we are racists’, the Cypriot teachers state uninhibitedly, and attribute racist attitudes to Cyprus’ being until recently, traditional, a small and culturally homogeneous place, with a small population. Teachers, however, also state that Cypriots’ ‘closed mindedness’ now has to and, eventually, will change. Cypriots will learn to accept others: “This thing is still at its beginning stages, that is Cypriots have not get used yet to living with foreigners” (Interview with MC, Technical School, Nicosia).   All teachers agree that migrants provide cheap labour. They do the jobs the Cypriots would never do; they are the “blood donors of the Cypriot economy”.  The discourses of multicultural ethos and economic rationality, however, do not tame or absorb raciological discourses: I think in general there is racism even tough we pretend to be, let’s say, comfortable, liberal, that we accept to have some kind of communication and equality with everyone, and so on …I think many people have a racist attitude, and I think that it bothers that, for example, in Eleftheria square, at the center of the capital, from its start to the very far end, as far as you can see, most people walking around are foreigners, and, to get more specific and not to use these generalities ‘it bothers’ and so on, many times I catch myself to be bothered that I do not see any Cypriots walking there and wherever I go I see that foreign element, which is not bad, it just bothers me, it is not the presence of foreigners that bothers me, sometimes it is even nice to go somewhere and see something from various cultures, but it bothers me to see them not respecting some things, some rules we have in our country. It may sound silly or very insignificant what I am going to say, but it bothers me there, in Eleftheria square, at the benches, all these foreigners sitting there… If they don’t take care of their appearance, it is their right to dress the way they want …  pathetic…It just bothers me when I see that dirt around them, eating pumpkin seeds and spitting the shells, I do not know if I become racist in regards to this matter but I cannot…it bothers me to see this thing. As long as you are in this place, I want you to respect some things…a Cypriot could have done this…but they [foreigners] are in groups, they are together and you see them, the way they sit, there is no … but even if we bracket the way they sit, still, the gestures they make, they may be eating something and--notice this!—the they may be eating seeds and throwing down the shells When they eat pumpkin seeds they spit the shells out , this bothers me, and I think it is from these little things we start and move on. (Interview with Greek Philology Teacher, Technical School, Nicosia) The same teacher, commenting on the impact of migration on her school, says: I think there has not been any, judging from the students in my class, there in no discrimination on grounds of someone being a foreigner, e.g.,. not taking him into consideration in the sense that students would say, “He’ s an alien (allodapós) Ma’am and we are not listening to his opinion”; it depends on the persons. In my own class I see that the migrant [f] student  Because the gender of referents such as student, teacher, migrant is not preserved in the English translation, gender is indicated in brackers as (f) and (m). is treated by the rest as a member of the class, normally. She herself cannot participate in the lesson and the students know that she is foreigner and does not understand some things, e, does not know the meaning of some things, but later on, during the break, when I see her together with her female fellow students and her male fellow students, normally, there is no problem. Now, I do not know if in some other schools there is much more fanaticism and there is that kind of conflicts. (Interview with Greek Philology Teacher, Technical School, Nicosia) The positive impact of intercultural education is understood as “contact” with “a foreign presence [that] has entered the classroom.” This “contact” is supposed to have a spontaneous effect on native students: … the mere fact that they find themselves next to these people might help them later on, when they come out and much more easily will meet in their leisure time, the time they leave school and will go to the center where it is easier to see the allodapí [aliens], I believe in this first contact and this first communication …  (Interview with Greek Philology Teacher, Technical School Nicosia) The speaker is exceptional in her uninhibited tainting of migrant others as uncivilized and, at the same time, her upfront admission of being racist.  Despite its exceptionality, the statement is paradigmatic of some patterns of speech in interviews with teachers in Cypriot schools.  Most teachers state upfrontly at the beginning of the interview “we are racist” or “Cypriots are racist” or “there is racism”. This is usually accompanied by two other gestures. The upfront-ness of speech, fashioned like parhesia, exonerates the speaker and allows her/him to proceed with any kind of stereotyping discourse. Racism is stated only to be placed at the beginning of an evolutionary process: racism will be overcome as Cypriots come to learn, unavoidably, how to live with others.  Only one teacher dismantles, in a quite sarcastic way, this statement of being racist and its performative emptying of seriousness by locating racism at the beginning of an evolutionary process of self-change. He states: “We are racists without having knowledge of what racism is” (Interview with Socrates, Design Teacher, Technical School Nicosia). The discourse used by the Greek Philology Teacher is paradigmatic of a certain philosophy on principles of migration policy, one that echoes the Kantian hypothetical imperative on hospitality: I receive you are long as you respect the rules of the ‘house’ and me as its master.  In the case of Cyprus, conditional hospitality is projected as a balance of percentages (maximum ceiling on migrants), an exclusion of some kinds (some ethnicities are accepted and some are framed as malignant for school balance, i.e., school order), a disbanding of ethnic clicks (who often speak their language amongst themselves). The principal of a school where migrants exceed 50%, states that that migrants are well integrated in his school. Staff members describe the school as a “mosaic” and a “paradise” for migrants: “Here they find love, understanding, acceptance, not just by teachers. In our way, we also push the other children to embrace them.” Balance is framed at the same time as an achievement and as a condition of fragility, for the school will not be able to operate “if they exceed 60%”.  In the same school, staff contrasts the successful integration of other migrants in the past to the problematic, new arriving Roma migrants from Greece, to whom they refer other times as “kilintziri ” (decadent, abject, the lowest of the low) and other times, rather euphemistically, as “seasonal” or “wonderers”. Comparisons between ‘old’ and ‘new’ migrants are also made in Gymnasiums with relatively low rates of migrant enrolment (between 20 and 30 %). Teachers in these schools make critical comments about the “clicks” that Pontians used to form in the past and state that now they are pleased to see that migrants and natives “interact together”. Still, they make negative remarks about the “new ones”, i.e., the “Turkish Cypriots” and those “who gather together and talk to each other “in their language.”  In Gymnasiums with Arab enrolments (about 10%), there is a sense among both teachers and Cypriot students that the conditionality of hospitality has already been breached and that something has already been violated: Biology T: In order to have multiculturalism you first need to have culture. These are kilintziri. Philology T: If they had our level, we would not have problems, but their level is very low, they do not understand anything and their mentality is backward. Unfortunately, they have started to have a negative influence on us, something that has to stop. Biology T: You know what we have become?  Araboeuropeans.  Especially in schools … Instead of us assimilating them, they are assimilating us. It is us who pretty soon will need integration. They eat us. They are more than us, now. Researcher: How many non-Greek speakers do you have? 35? Biology T: - Ee, one in every ten. Is this ‘a few’? We are only 370. (PM Fieldnotes, Phaneromeni Gymnasium, Larnaca) The responses of teachers are very different in the Phaneromeni Gymnasium and the Phaneromeni Elementary School in Nicosia.  These two schools came to be framed early on as the paradigmatic “multicultural schools” in Cyprus (the percentage of migrants today is 85%).  Teachers from these schools do not adopt any positions on the conditionality of hospitality.  They make no critical comments about inassimilable ones, no ethnic comparisons between eastern Europeans and Arab “others”, no contestations over the difference (or no difference) between Turks and Turkish Cypriots, no derogatory comments on cultures and mentalities. Any comparisons made are rather sociological. One teacher in Phaneromeni Gymnasium compares the old migrants (with traditional values, strong family ties and solid belief in the value of education) to the new migrants. She talks about “a moving world,” an “opportunistic” one, a world without a solid family background (many kids come from single parent families and some kids live with grandparents as parents might be already elsewhere else trying to prepare the family’s way to a new start). Teachers talk of intercultural policies in their school as of a long ago established institutional rationality.  Especially in the Gymnasium, teachers speak with nostalgia about the previous state (and status) of the school.  They talk of the exodus of the Greek Cypriots and the overall decline of the number of students.  Many teachers speak of the acceptance and love offered to migrants and only a very few complain about disciplinary problems.  All teachers, however, speak about a decline of academic standards.  Both in the case of the Elementary School and the Gymnasium, the school is framed as a hospitable place that accepts others but not as a place for learning. It is as if the school was a heterotopia: neither a utopia, nor a dystopia; just an exceptional, other place, outside the polis and outside the terrain of educational politics.  There is only one person who expresses a different, unconditional and non-deterministic view on the cultural politics of migration with regards to his school, tthe Principal of the Elementary School. He argues that as migrant groups will be changing, the kind of marriage that takes place among migrants will also keep changing, in a dynamic way: for example, the marriage that will take place this decade in this school will definitely not exist in 50-60 years from now. It will be a kind of melting pot that will create a new culture. That culture will be something new. We have faced the same phenomena, as a Cypriot society, with the creation of the refugee camps. The framing of hospitality and acceptance as conditional is also prevalent in Zavos’ interviews with Greek teachers, mostly with regards to Albanians, since they are the ones considered to have higher cultural affinity with Greeks and also to have integrated most (and perhaps, also the ones whose difference must be delineated on new grounds). Zavos reports that lack of language acquisition by parents is seen by teachers as a sign of unwillingness to integrate and become part of Greek society, and it is negatively valued. The criticism that ‘they only learn what they need for getting on with their work, they do not make an effort for something more’, implies that they are expected to be interested in Greece not only for economic but for socio-cultural reasons as well. This unfulfilled expectation and subsequent complaint by Greek teachers of Albanian parents’ lack of interest in Greek culture, points to the underlying affective terms of a relationship, which is mainly conceived in terms of economic rationalization and/or exploitation, and to the fundamental ambivalence that structures the relationship between Greeks and migrants. Seen as ‘others’, on the one hand, but also expected to become ‘like Greeks’, on the other. Even though they are mainly perceived as cheap labour by Greek society, (Albanian) migrants are also expected, at the same time, to be willing to take in Greek social and cultural norms, to become quasi-insiders, or at least familiar with Greek identity, thereby performing subjection to the higher Greek culture, but also love and gratitude. Their relationship to Greece is expected to be an affective one and not just opportunistic calculation of survival and profit We opened up the doors, we offer them whatever we can but their parents must also say, «Now you know, we are offered hospitality, here.  We came here, to stay in Greece?  Are we coming here, there are laws, there are responsibilities, there are rights, there are duties”, and they should also help, getting integrated (Interview with Pluto). Albanians are considered to be bound by the conditionality of hospitality to behave towards other migrants in ways Greek nationals are not expected to do.  As Zavos comments, whereas Greeks are considered justified to abandon the neighborhood of Kerameikos, the exodus of Albanians is seen as a less ordinary practice that attests to the extreme degradation of the area. In fact, Albanian parents are not considered entitled to complain about the presence of other migrants in their neighborhood, since they themselves were also once in the position of the outsider or abject foreigner. Even though they are now considered more or less integrated, they can’t lay claim to national cultural belonging as proper Greeks can. Seen as inferior or quasi-Greek subjects, who have been granted entrance into the national realm, they are expected to perform a submissive rather than assertive subjectivity; they should be thankful for what they have, rather than demand a better quality of life, especially when Greeks themselves cannot secure this: “They cannot complain; that’s too much.  Even us, we were like this, yesterday.” The same also holds true for Albanian children’s negative reactions to other migrants or Asian refugees. Albanian children’s intolerance or racism is not justified, or tolerated. It is even seen as a sign of impudence. In Greek territory, they are not recognized as having the right to be intolerant of others; they are expected to identify with others’ plight and position, as they are both foreigners and poor migrants. Intolerance is an aspect of being Greek, rightfully belonging and ruling the national territory. This Albanian tells me, “The refugee, Ma’am, the refugee”.  I say, “I do not understand you well, what are you, aren’t you a refugee?  How can you say this all the time?” It drives me crazy  It happened to me before, many years ago, a friend teacher of mine told me, the Albanian defies this  little boy from Iran, mistake, Afghanistan, and tells him, “You came to our country to act like a ? I will kick you out.”  It drives me crazy… (Interview with Machdi). A significant difference that cuts across the cultural politics of migration in Greece and Cyprus is the construction of migrants and alien others with regards to the future of the nation. Zavos notes that the construction of different kinds of migrants in Greece, variously, as ‘other’, ‘quasi-insider’, or ‘grateful subject’ is linked to the production of the idealized self-image of the nation and the projection of its fulfillment in the future: We had and still had many students from Albania, but these you know have been integrated in some way. Several of these kids have been born here, speak the Greek language […] have Greek friends. Our problems are with the other aliens, most of them from Asia […] kids who came from Afghanistan (Interview with Pluto). A Zavos notes, Migrant children are considered to have a place in the idealized self-image of the nation to the extent the nation is projected as a hierarchical socioeconomic system and education as its synchronizer. Based on the abstract universal ideal of equality and rights, all children are entitled to knowledge. Knowledge is distinguished from scientific or professional qualification, in order to allow for migrant children, who are assumed more than likely to fail such qualifications, to still partake of the benefits of education; they can become enlightened, cultured and discerning hairdressers or plumbers. Here, the perhaps protective disposition of the teacher, to provide a rationale for the value of education even if it does not return the investment in terms of achieving higher socio-economic status, also fixes migrant students, as second tier citizens, in positions of lower status, and in working class occupations. We all have to try and we all have a right to improve our life, to open up what I call light, little windowpanes on our head … we don’t have to become all of us scientists … You may be a plumber and still know how to love poetry, literature … We talk about it many times and I tell them … «you might not become, not reach, change your mind, Ioanna, you can become a hairstylist…” […] it is not necessary to get a university degree … I believe they will make it (Interview with Erato). In the case of Cyprus, a national state and yet not a nation state, teachers refer to “Greekness” as a benchmark rather than as the dialectic of the nation.  National identification is projected in the quest for a “balance”. Beliefs in the inevitability of migration and Cypriots’ mind change are cut across by fears of some inevitable destruction of balance: ‘We already have more than what this place can take’: I am not a racist. I am in favor of Intercultural Education but I consider very important the presence of a measure in what we do.  It was a grand mistake of Vasiliou who did not  say, as Malt did, that we will receive migrants because we are not racists, but up to a point. We have to receipt that number which we will be able to fully accept so that problems don’t take place and we do not lose our Greekness.  It is logical that interaction will occur from the contact of civilizations, but, essentially, it is them who learn things from us […] Grand mistake that we did not put a limit (PM Fieldnotes, Dianellion Gymnasium Larnaca) A common theme in interviews with Greek and Cypriot teachers is the interviewees’ reference to “common” experiences of migration.  The perception that Albanian parents live frugally in Greece in order to build a dream home in Albania is likened by Kerameikos teachers to earlier practices of Greek-American migrants who returned to Greece with lots of money to show off their success. Implicitly, however, such practices are also criticized by the teachers as lacking in taste and being somehow excessive or unreasonable. Drawing this parallel is assumed to establish a sense of commonality and acceptance between the Greek teachers and their migrant students. Implicit, however, in this identification, as Zavos comments, is also an understanding of migration as only negative, and prompted by the desire to overcome the hardships experienced in the country of origin. Migration as a force of positive social change in receiving countries is not even a possibility. Thus migration is framed as a one-way process that affects only migrants and not the receiving societies, which are assumed to offer a higher quality of life and a more advanced socio-cultural milieu. Whereas teachers in the Greek case study make references to a collective memory of Greek migration and allude to commonalities and identifications with migrants, teachers in the Cypriot study make references to personal experiences of migration, mostly as students in UK and the USA, in order to establish that they know of multicultural societies and how to live with others.  While alluding to a common experience of “being foreigner”, teachers also make comparisons between English and American universities’ admission and academic policies for international students and measures for migrants in Cypriot schools. The parallel they draw is that, if they had to learn English first, before they could take a regular academic classes, migrant students should also have to enrolled in “reception classes” first and become integrated in the regular classroom only after they learn Greek.  There is one teacher, however, who dismantles the logic of such comparisons.  With reference to Cypriots’ studies abroad, he comments: “We did not learn anything, we came back and we are so willing to strike others on the head.” As he explains, we met all these people … in New York, in London … and basically we did not meet them well, we said, this is black, that is red, I will stay here in Astoria where they also speak Greek and they have Greek street labels and feel safe, secure, like in my mother’s belly. We were uneducated when we went there; we were logs when we came back. (Interview with Socrates, Technical School Nicosia) The cultural interest in migrant/ethnic minority students is problematic from a gender perspective not only because its normative framing reproduces patriarchal thinking but also because its elucidation in school settings—the feminization of the “diligent student”, gossip between teachers in staff rooms, prompts and questions posed by researchers, culturally sensitive school practices, teachers’ tips on how to handle disruptive or unmotivated migrant/minority students, culturalist interpretations of school violence—reproduces preconceived notions about gender and heteronormativity.  As shown in the analysis of data from the three WP5 partners, teachers, students (native and migrant, national majorities and ethnic minorities) and sometimes even researchers, acquire, organize, exhibit and utilize knowledge about “others” in ways that preserve gender regimes. Zavos reports that general opinion among the teachers holds that girls, whether of Greek or foreign origin, are more mature, more competent, more well behaved and better students. Girls are understood to create fewer problems in the classroom, or outside during fieldtrips, are more quiet, less aggressive, more tidy, more assiduous. In fact, both girls and boys, in terms of the social roles they perform, appear to conform to culturally dominant in Greece gender stereotypes, according to which, for example, girls are more in charge of cleaning up, order and subsistence, whereas boys are indifferent to such requirements and expect others, teachers or girls, to take care of chores.   Such discourses surrounding feminized school performance distract attention from more meaningful structural analyses situated within economic and cultural contexts, such as the sentimentalized diligent (girl) child has come to represent a new neo-liberal subject (Burman, 2005). Girls are more competent, they seem to handle better their everydayness as students, at every level … The boys, I don’t know, in my own class there is a deficit with regards to boys… Whereas girls are more smart and more mature […] Let’s say, at the excursion …The boys got up and went to play waiting for others to clean up … the girls did not do that (Interview with Nano). There are a variety of reasons why this is seen to be the case, most of which, however, invoke naturally determined qualities for boys and girls. Gender roles, and the performance of femininity and masculinity, are seen as a manifestation of innate and essential biological attributes: Nefeli: E, girls, are, to some extent, by nature like this, more assiduous. Eleni: Look, it is generally believed that are more mature than boys, always, and the boys that have learning difficulties are usually boys, you know that. Stella: When the majority of kids in my class are girls, the class is perfect …When it’s the opposite, the majority 12 boys, the minority 4 girls, the class is falling apart. Moreover, girls and boys are assumed to connect better to teachers of the opposite sex, reproducing heteronormative stereotypes and expectations about gender relations and sexuality. Fears about older boys, especially darker skinned and socially more marginalized foreign boys, such as Gypsies or Afghan refugees, making sexual advances to girls are another common theme in teacher’s representations of sexualized gender relations in school. As Zavos remarks, homosociality and homosexuality are completely submerged in teachers’ understandings of children’s sexual behavior in school, in spite of the fact that sociality among same sex children is quite developed and zealously guarded. Machdi: … at some point they complained: “Ma’am, they pull up our skirt” and did things like that. AZ: And them (boys), what about them? Did you tell them, “Don’t do it? What?” Machdi: E, we explained to them, we called the social worker here, we told here this thing, that this “Cannot go on”… Look, there are some girls who are being looked at, intensely. They look at them intensely because they are boys, boys in the age of falling in love and doing … Did you understand? AZ: Yes. Machdi: And so things are a bit dangerous, from this respect … Even before, when we had Roma kids (“Tsigganákia”) like this, who were older, again we had the same problem. They should be in Elementary schools, kids of fourteen and fifteen years old… Clear cut demarcations of gender roles between girls and boys, separation of spaces and activities along gender lines and the performance of appropriate and clearly legible femininity and masculinity, are seen by teachers as important issues for children of Elementary school age: AZ: Do you ever hear boys talking to girls dismissively, in the context of games, let’s say? Podosfairistis: Not dismissively, they just tease them that they are not that good in playing… “Why do you have the girls play [soccer] with us, since they do not know? ” I try to convince them that “They have to play so that they can learn, and you will help them learn” E, at the beginning they do it, but as soon as the girls make some mistake, they start having fun of them, but not dismissively …They want to play their game and they want to play the way they [boys] want to play Eleni: … I just see that girls are looking at me with admiration, like a model even with regards to how I dress, that I have a nice body, they notice these kind of things more.  With regards to the boys, the older ones, what seems to affect them might be the whole appearance, becoming for them a blueprint of femininity. AZ: What about the boys, what kind of perception do they have of women? … Eleni: I cannot know of that but in general, you see that boys are starting to … the way they look is kind of sneaky. AZ: Do you mean there’s a more sexual dimension to how they see girls? Eleni: Yes, of course. The girls of both 5th and 6th grade are pushing each other, touching each other during break, these are not accidental. They are beginning to explore. However, gender relations and the social position of women and girls are also seen as culturally, and not only biologically, determined social roles that carry particular ideological and moral implications. For example, Albanian girls are considered more sophisticated than Albanian boys. This is attributed on the one hand to the backwardness of Albanian families, where masculine roles are considered to be more traditional and less refined. Machdi: Girls have a better level, yes, they are more advanced. Boys are a little bit further back, maybe, I do not know, they imitate their father … I do not consider these people to be ‘behind’. In their manners, their way of thinking, remind me of Greece of ’40, ’50, our own Greece, old times when it was in the villages. Gender differences are also attributed to the predominance of women’s role and power in the family, which is seen to be more ‘matriarchal’. This is culturally referenced back to the way of life of Arvanites’ families in Greece. Arvanites are ethnic populations of Albanian origin, speaking an older idiom of the Albanian language, who had settled in what is now Greek territory during the Ottoman empire. Such a comparison establishes a ‘natural’, historical link between present day Albanian migrants and older ethnic Albanian populations, thus naturalizing and appropriating Albanian migrants into the Greek cultural establishment. Nano: I have the impression that the Albanian families are a bit matriarchal, like are own Arvanitikes […] the girls hardly talk about their father [pause]. They talk about the mother and the mother’s problems.  They talk, let’s say, all little girls talk about the job of their mother, they do not talk about the father and his job […] my own experience from Methana, where I come from, this was happening, families were strictly matriarchal, yes, it was the grandmother, the mother…. AZ: Doesn’t this subvert a bit the image about the Albanians, that they are very traditional and that the men lock in the wives and beat them? Nano: This is just for looks, this beating The coincidence that girls of certain foreign populations do not attend the school, such as for example Afghan refugee girls, is attributed to this group’s cultural backwardness and possibly also moral inferiority.  In fact, the social worker who was responsible for introducing the Afghan refugee children to the school, and whom I interviewed separately, clarified that there were no young girls amont the children of this particular group of refugees, and the older ones were distributed to the neighbourhood highschools. Nevertheless, she too referred to the position of Afghan women in the family as being oppressed and dominated by male relatives, often physically abusive towards their wives, but also, at the same time, dominating in relation to children, who were expected to work in order to support their older mothers. Again, this image carries echoes of traditional rural Greek family relations. This is contrasted to the higher cultural value attached to liberal western egalitarian gender norms, which Greece is also assumed to aspire to, in spite of the fact that sexism and gender discrimination in the Greek educational system has been exposed to be rampant. Interestingly, accounts of this cultural backwardness are often articulated in vague terms, not as hard facts but rather as general impressions, which both reflects such notions as part of culturally available western discursive repertoires, and imbues them with a sense of mystery. Zavos also reports that gender relations between Greek and Albanian girls and Afghan boys are seen by teachers as bearing particular sexual threats, and make Afghan boys a liability for the school, which is open to criticism by parents on account of not offering enough moral and physical protection for girls. Here, culturally attributed gender roles, such as an assumed aggressive and predatory masculinity, are invested with sexual implications that codify specific cultural identities and practices as not only inferior but also dangerous. Machdi: Boys, the older in particular, two of 14 and 15years old. They are men… «Where do you place these, in a school with first and second graders? They have other needs.” And then, this is a people who have learnt to marry early, with the woman being suppressed. AZ: Yes Machdi: And if he finds a girl when he goes downstairs, to the toilets, what do we do then? Apart from the reproduction of dominant discourses of western cultural superiority, here we also see a displacement of the older stereotype of the dangerous, possibly criminal, Albanian migrant, with the sexually threatening and innately violent Afghan refugee, or unfamiliar Asian migrant (people from ‘those countries’). Albanian migrants, on the other hand, largely considered to have been ‘Hellenized’, do not stand out any longer and are seen as ‘our’ more backward and traditional Greek relatives. In fact, Albanian families themselves assume a ‘Hellenized’, proprietary and superior subjectivity, as established and successfully integrated families, as insiders now, in relation to other, more recent, migrant groups, whom they consider, along with Greeks, as imposing on Greek socio-economic resources. The ‘other’ of migration is no longer the Albanian migrant, but the Afghan refugee or the Asian migrant. Ana Blazheve reports that researchers in Cvetan Dimov noted from their first participatory observations masculine performances of hardness, aggressiveness, confrontation, and hierarchical power relationships which were also racialized and/or ethnicized (Connell, 2000, according to Phoenix, 2004). Boys often played sports and other physical games and appeared more aggressive and loud. They seemed freer in moving in school space but also free to look at girls and free to use bandying words and phrases towards girls or other boys. On the other hand, researchers noted that girls were mostly together, walking arm under arm, two or three together, quieter, taking care and managing looks. Most of the girls wear make up and often spend time looking in the small mirrors and correcting the make up. They all look dressed up in fashionable clothes, mostly tight jeans and blouses. In contrast to them, there are other girls (mostly Albanian) who look very modest and girls who wear scarves, who don’t wear make up or tight clothes. Hanging out with same sex peers (most dominant pattern) is enacted differently in girly and boyish way. Girls “meet each other, say hello and kiss, and walk in pairs or three, arm under arm” (Field notes_AB_2).  Boys do not hold hands: In front of the entrance from both sides there is a lawn. There was a group of boys on the right side lawn. One of the boys “rides” other one, one spitting, one  laying on the grass, they shouted out aloud” (Fieldnotes_AB_1). Although basic feminine and masculine stereotypes were obvious (and dominant), researchers also recorded examples that show attempts to transcend gender behavior norms. Performative transgressions of gender norms are often combined with crossing ethnic borders and socializing with peers from other ethnicities. Researchers note the case of a “rebel girl” whose performance transgressed from the dominant feminine appearance.  She dyed her hair black, wore black nail polish and put only strong black make up, wearing also mostly black clothes, jeans and t-shirts. She was using more masculine performatives, openly acting/active up in an aggressive and tough manner.  For example, one time she entered the classroom during the break, made her way fast and furiously to her girlfriend’s table, hit her hard on it, and asked her to go with her. This girl is Macedonian but does not deem threatened by other ethnicities. In fact, she has friends from different national groups. Transcending gender stereotypes is also enacted as transgressing good female student rules. She doesn’t care for learning and misses a lot of classes which has brought her to a situation where she had to face multiple threats for expulsion. Missing class, running away from school, even being expelled is construed as opening up that space wherein she “makes friends”. Blazheva reports that in the school context ethnicized masculinity is framed as problematic particularly with reference to the Muslim minority. Muslim masculinity is mostly associated with aggressiveness, both because of representations of global terrorism and fundamentalism, and because of recent Balkan wars and conflicts.  Muslim boys have been identified as under-achievers and problematic students, suffering high rates of school exclusion and low rates of post-16 progression (Archer, 2003).  According to Phoenix (2004), it is difficult for boys to negotiate the imperatives of these masculinities and position themselves in ways they would seem to respond to the demands of masculinities while still getting some schoolwork done and without being cussed too much by other boys.  Researchers in Cvetan Dimov record two cases of boys who negotiated in different ways imperatives of aggressive masculinity with academic performance.  The first case is an Albanian boy who quietly gets on with his schoolwork and makes clear that academic achievement is a high priority for him.  Whereas research points out that such boys are likely to face trouble and to be considered effeminate by other boys, this particular boy seemed well accepted by other boys.  He was usually sitting quiet, listening and participating in class, though left out from the jokes and other boyish activities.   This Albanian boy stood out from the typical masculine, as well as typical ethnic stereotype. He was not one of the popular boys, but he was accepted and looked at as somehow privileged to be involved in learning, and his quietness and dedication were acknowledged as something worthy. The second case is a Bosnian boy was also treated as a good student and participated in lessons.  His strategic negotiation of masculinity and academic achievement was more playful than in the first case.  Being already a popular guy, and also perceived as being ‘lucky’ to know the language of instruction well (better than Albanian boys), he was not bullied for “being smart” and trying to “have the right answers”. In a school where knowledge is rarely expected, this boy’s good academic performance was construed as compatible with imperatives of masculinity because it was attributed to natural smartness and luck rather than to effort. Research in Cvetan Dimov has also confirms that school as institution and social environment is involved in the preservation of heteronormativity as the standard for legitimate and prescriptive social and sexual relations. Along the school’s conservative tradition, sex and sexuality continue to be construed as taboos, with heteronormativity being reinstated as a dominant discourse since it is the only discourse available to talk about sex. In interviews with teachers, only one teacher felt free to talk about sexuality and the way students talk or, more accurately, how students feel ashamed to talk about sex and sexuality. This economy of shame/talk can be also noticed in the ways students interact. Boys and girls stay at distance, or touch aggressively or more in a shy manner rather than in brave and open communication. The search for someone to marry is the dominant theme in students’ stories on relationships. Many students, actually, find their partner from the school and marry quickly afterwards. There are also stories of girls quitting school to get married. Boys talk about love relationships that lead to marriage, as well as girls who wish to become wives and mothers. Discourses of sexuality were only indirectly traced in discussions with teachers: AT: They cannot talk about these things at home, not for sex. Sexual education is very interesting to them. Girls feel ashamed. Researcher: Do they have sex education in school? AT: They may have some lecture, but we are always with the sex issues here.   Researcher: They speak openly about this?        AT: Boys say: don’t talk about it now, in front of girls. Well. I say girls give birth don't they? And you what? Isn’t it all this conversation about women?  Their vocabulary is vulgar, they don’t know how to express themselves in any other way. And they want us to tell them stories, they want to know what is sperm. They take biology classes but maybe this is not enough for them, from a scientific point of view. We usually discuss issues related to AIDS and then we start to talk how, what, and so on. They want you to tell them stories, not just basic stuff like colors, how you can mix them, yellow red, blue…, they want stories. (Interview with Art teacher) Researchers in Cvetan Dimov also report on the importance of new technologies and their emerging role as tools for the transformations of traditional gender roles and relations. A number of girls and boys are hooked on mobile phones and listen to music with earphones. But researchers noticed that there are large numbers of the students who don’t have these gadgets. It is obvious that there are class differences among students both in the way they dress and possession of various technology gadgets. Most of these young people didn’t talk about internet use or other virtual worlds and identities. Gender analysis from the Cypriot team focuses only on data from three Gymnasiums, with emphasis on gender normativity in culturalist school discourse and intersections of gender and ethnic orders. Three common threats cut across findings from interviews with teachers in Cypriot schools and findings from interviews with teachers in Greek schools. Teachers believe: (a) that gender does not matter with regards to intercultural relations, with the exception of Muslims (uncivilized) and Pontians (patriarchal), (b) that migrant girls are better students than migrant boys because girls are “by nature” more diligent, and (c) that gender differences should not matter and do not matter with regards to how teachers treat students.  This gender blindness, fashioned by teachers as a commitment to the principle of gender equality, is contradicted by findings on a sharp genderization of intercultural school discourses and school policies.  Furthermore, unlike the submerged discourses of sexuality in Kerameikos and Cvetan Dimov—talk of predatory masculine sexuality and at-risk girl innocence, in Kerameikos, and traditional taboo constraints interlaying with an outspoken demand for ‘sex talk’, in Cvetan Dimov—field work in Cypriot Gymnasiums records an explicit and aggressive presence of sexualized and sexualizing discourses, used by teachers, student counselors, boys and girls (migrant and non-migrant). On the first visit to a Gymnasium that hosts many Arab refugees and Cypriots mostly from rural and/or low socioeconomic backgrounds, researchers were directed to talk to the school counselor who is responsible for student relations and, by default, has been assigned the task of handling issues of migrant/refugee students. He insists that nowadays violence in schools is feminized and has to do with family environment and not with being migrant or not migrant,  He cites the example of a girl from another high school who came there and bit up one of their students because the latter stole her boyfriend (four girls involved were an English-Cypriot, a Pontian, another foreign girl and a cypriot). and to back his theory he cites the example of a school fight that involved physical violence between a Pontian girl and a British-Cypriot girl.  Trying to expand the understanding of “counseling issues”, the researchers ask whether there have cases of teen pregnancies, girl dropouts, abortions, etc. He replies that they do not have such problems in their school even though kids are sexually active. Asked to clarify, he states in an ostentatious fashion: “Are you under the impression that the only sex our students do is orthodox sex”?  Knowing about kids’ sex life, sexing the kids, stimulating talk about kids’ and their family members’ personal lives are kinds of discourse that come to establish a sense of cultural intimacy, from the teachers’ perspective between them and the migrant/refugee kids.  This intimacy is misconstrued as a kind of intercultural motivated attempt for proximity and an indicator of acceptance of others.   The paradox is that such a voracious sexualizing discourse is often coupled with a selective commitment of cultural care to the protection of the scarf-ed Muslim girls and the disciplining of the Muslim boys. In one Gymnasium, for example, “responsibilities” for Muslim boys and girls have been demarcated and assigned to separate leaders, a female translator (employed by the school on an hourly basis under the EPZs scheme) for the girls and a Greek Cypriot staff member (physical education teacher) for the boys. The translator mediates between families and school, creates around her a spaces of cultural safety for Arab kids but often constitutes a source of fear for them since she is the one to often ‘transfer’ to parents complaints about their kids’ misbehavior. The male teacher is also deemed to create cultural safety for boys (making arrangements for them to play football). He is the one to adjudicate amongst them in cases of disputes and reserves the right to punish or reward. In another school, in order to deal with disciplinary problems with a group of allóglossi, the teacher separates the group into two gender separate wings and often addresses herself only to only the girls’ wing.  In another school, the gender order is redeployed as the organizing pattern of the afterschool activity center. Girls on the right, doing homework, playing guitar and singing, nesting affectionately or gossiping in couches, keeping themselves busy with crafts; boys on the left, playing billiards. The two orders are divided by an invisible line where two unisex service points operate on the basis of one-to-one interactions between educators and kids: a homework help station and a chess table.  The leading figure, inspiring paternal love to girls and fear to boys (the latter is re-enacted occasionally through events of verbal defiance-and-discipline), is considered essential by all personnel (most of them women). “If there is not a male figure to fear, how are you going to inspire respect in these boys”, comments one of the assistants.  He himself believes that without control and pre-emptive strictness, “those boys” will one day evolve into criminals. (a) (Inter) cultural interest and gender normativity The first student to enter the classroom is a smiling, tall girl.  “This is Ayşe,” Igor explains to me.  I am so happy to have Igor as my guide.  He is the ‘school contact’. He knows everything that happens … Ayşe starts talking. She tells me she is from Turkey and that her mother just yesterday came from Turkey. “My mother, Ma’am, separated from my father, and for this reason she did not come to stay with us”.  She shows me a photo of her mother. “A, bravo, says the teacher, good thing you remembered to bring me a photo of your mother to see” (I wondered whether there were other times the teacher asked children to bring photos of their mother to show her).  She is looking at that as if it is shows something she had never seen before, as if it was a super-real photo.  The photo shows her mother holding a baby.  She is not wearing scarf.  The teacher comments, “But she is not wearing that thing on her head, A?” Ayşe explains that her mother was wearing it in Turkey, is not allowed to go around without that, but yesterday, as soon as she arrived in Cyprus, she took it off. “We also used to wear.  There, we do not go to school. Our parents don’t let us.  We only go to elementary school.  After that, it is not right for girls to go”. And we do not remove the hair on upper lip. We do not go to the hair parlor. Only when we become 16 we remove hair on upper lip.  Marriage and afterword a hair parlor.”  When she grows up she wants to open her own hair parlor. Igor and Hercules keep getting out and coming back.  I have never met a Turkish Cypriot (F) before. “We only wear long clothes,” she says. “Mm,” says Igor, “the sister of Ayşe is very pretty.” “Are you are fond of her, my Igor?” “No Mm, what are you talking about? Don’t you know? Me marrying a Muslim (F) [“mousoulmána”]? Oh my…. [Α mana mou]...» “Me neither, not a Christian” [“oúte egó Christianó”], says Ayşe.  “Ma’am, these say they do not eat pork and her brother everyday eats souvlaki  In Cyprus souvlaki (kebab) is made with pork (unless one has a special request, i.e., chicken, which is more expensive). and gyros”. “Ee,. souvlaki … ok, I’m not eating that every day”.  “Yes …your brother everyday”.  “It’s different for him, re.  He is a man, if he gets a bit off track maybe Allah will forgive him more easily.”  She tells me about her father, that he is very strict.  Ayşe is the one who cooks home.  Her sister is writing a book on the history of Turkey.  “It is very difficult there in Turkey. Here it is nice.”  “Have you been to the occupied areas?” I ask her.  “Only twice, Ma’am,” she replies in a low tone.  As if she was ashamed … she did not want to speak about her visit.  “Where did you go?”  “Around here, in Nicosia …”  “Why are you here with these kids in a Grade 1 class if you are a third grader?  How come you have class together?  “I have religious education with Father [“Páter”] now in Γ1.1”. “I came to watch the religious education class there the other day… that’s why I did not see you.” “Yes Ma’am, both of us leave [when the rest have religious education class], my sister and I ...”.  I asked her whether there is cami (mosque) close to their place and whether they go there often. She tells me there are two cami close by in the neighborhood but they do not go.  “We sit in the house and pray”. I did not know that women do not go to cami!!!!!!  Many times, if she did not explain something to me in Greek, she would say that in Turkish and Igor would translate to me. (KC Fieldnotes, Phaneromeni Gymnasium Nicosia, 9.5.2009) The ‘thick description’ of Ayşe remains ethnocentric in its syllogistic assumption of analogies.  It is assumed that the cultural equivalent of going to church is going to the cami; mobility across the Green line [going to the “occupied areas”] is assumed to be embarrassing for Ayşe and her family in the same way it is embarrassing, from the viewpoint of patriotic ethnos, for a Greek Cypriot, when in fact Ayşe and her family have more mobility in the ‘north’ and ‘via’ the north (for example, they fly in and out Ercan Airport).  Of particular interest to the analysis below will be the gendered description of Ayşe by the Greek Cypriot ethnographer rather than the Muslim or Turkish order of gender exemplified in Ayşe’s talk. The cultural interest in Ayşe is both voyeuristic, in its quest for pleasure, and policing, in its quest for power (knowledge about the other’s norms is often manifested as a right to evaluate the sincerity of the other’s commitment to cultural norms).  As voyeuristic, almost bordering pornography, this interest wants to know about others’ bodies: about norms and rules regulating the care of bodies, thresholds and prohibitions, rituals of passage. As a policing practice, this interest remains gendered in a way that serves the patriarchal normative system: it is Orhan’s (Ayşe’s brother) and not Ayşe’s eating habits which are often scrutinized by Greek Cypriot kids; it is her father’s strictness and not her mother’s power to separate him that Ayşe evokes in an attempt to reclaim their (culture’s or family’s) seriousness. The cultural interest in the scarf, though rendered inoperative in the opening scene of this session, keeps surfacing in our fieldwork.  The wearing of the scarf by Muslim girls, mostly daughters of refugees and asylum seekers, in Greek Cypriot schools has never been questioned officially by school authorities, the polity or the public as a sign of Muslim insurgency, as assault against secularism or as violation of human rights.  Many Muslim girls (but not all of them) wear the scarf.  There are some girls who at some point during the period of our fieldwork stopped wearing it. Those who wear scarf also wear the regular school uniform or jeans (always long sleeves).  Racist slurs, however, about girls wearing the scarf and derogatory comments questioning the authenticity of the scarf as a statement of adherence to cultural/religious identity resistance and self-ethnicization are constantly emerging, almost always claiming that ambiguous in-between status between denotative statement (serious, bearing racist meaning) and performative speech act (just a joke, no harm meant). The following conversation takes place between the researcher and a group of Greek Cypriot boys during the break. Researcher: I ‘ve been told you have many foreign students in your school. Student (boy): Yes, Russianfags, Pontianfags, Blackfags … Researcher: Why do you refer to them like this? S: Because they are so. Researcher: How so? S: Fine… Ma’am, as if you liked Blacks!!! Researcher: Yes I do. S: Yeah !!! (ironic tone) Researcher: First of all, they are not Black. I have not seen Blacks in your school. S: They’re Arabians [“arápies”]. Same thing… Just look at them (F) (“Μa de tes…”) They wear those scarves, like koulláes.  In Cypriot dialect koullás means scary black person with the head covered; it connotes a besieging danger. The phrase “the koullás is coming” [έρχεται ο κουλλάς] was used to scare off little kids, make tem eat their food, or make them come inside when it starts to get dark.  Koullas has male gender in the Cypriot dialect and this is the first time I see it used as a female referent (author’s note). Researcher: What is “koulláes”…? S: Look at them (F) and you will understand [“De tes … enná katalávis…”]… (PM Fieldnotes, Dianellion Gymnasium Larnaca, 6.4.2009) In this instance, the “veil” (cover) is treated not as part of the Arab girls’ attire (cover of the head) but as a synecdoche for Arab girls’ overall appearance (covered persons and persons in cover), for Arabs as a race (black and racially inferior) and for Arabs’ cultural essence (menacing and ridiculous at the same time).  The scarf is constructed as an overarching presence of otherness, a devouring Lacanian ‘real’, such a strong embodiment of cultural meaning that its ‘wink’ quality (sign) collapses into a ‘twitch’ (physicality), so strong that cultural interpretation becomes a pleonasm: “see them and you will know”.  In many other instances, however, the scarf is treated not just as a sign but as a sign so capriciously used by its bearers that its structural arbitrariness (and structural authenticity, a cultural sign and not a power tool) becomes questionable, as in the scene below. A group of Greek Cypriot girls are debating whether the foreigners are all of Turkish or Arab origin and whether there is a difference between Turks and Turkish Cypriots.  “They are settlers from the occupied areas,” argues one girl, explaining how it is possible to have Turks in Cyprus and thus in their school despite the fact that “Turks are not allowed to come from Turkey.”  Another girl argues that this is false, because most of them speak Arabic: “No girl, you are wrong, most of them it is Arabic they are speaking. The Turkish girl (“i Tourkála”) is the only one. The one in our class.”  The researcher mentions that there is a Turkishcypriot (F) in their school and perhaps this is her (in other words, she suggests that the girl in question is Turkish Cypriot and not Turk). At this point the first girl recuperates her position by pointing to clear cut national borders and ambiguous cultural hybridizations: “Ma’am, I don’t get it, what does ‘Turkish Cypriot’ (F) mean?? She is a Turk (F). Finished! [“En Tourkála siór! Etéliosen!”]  And, as if being a Turk were not enough, she is also a copyssa!!!” [spelled like this in the original, argot/cypriotized English, meaning un-original]. The researcher’s quest for clarifications elicits from the girls’ several citations of copyssa’s acts: Α: Look … what ever we do, she also does … I had a hair cut, square bangs… She went and had hers the same way. Β: I tied my hair up into a ponytail, yesterday, she pulled hers like that today. Σ: She does not wear a scarf. Α: No! Since she is a copyssa!!! Researcher: Any other negative point to add? Β: Yes!!! She hangs out with the Moldavian (F) of the class … (PM Fieldnotes, Dianellion Gymnasium Larnaca, 13.5.2009) In the interaction cited in the opening of the chapter, all participants—the teacher, the two male school peers (a Pontian and a Russian), Ayşe herself—are competing in exhibiting cultural knowledge.  Against the hypothesis that knowledge about the other’s culture will promote intercultural understanding and combat racism—a hypothesis which has come to ground most programs and actions in intercultural education—the exchange above illustrates how the interest in the other’s culture not only remains blind to forms of gender transformation and agency implicated in migration but it also reproduces the gender regime of the dominant (“receiving”) society.  This interest is patriarchal in its structural optics (interested in how other women are treated in those other men’s culture rather than interested in how women empower themselves in or across cultures) and atavistic in its cultural theory.  Race, culture and place are treated as mutually confining and defining.  For example, when teachers open up ‘little talk’ on migrant students’ lives they are always interested in how are things ‘home’ and almost never ask questions about the family’s migration itineraries or how it is to live between cultures.  In the specific interaction, neither the teacher nor the researchers ask Ayşe how her mother came to take off the scarf.  It is also interesting how Ayşe feeds their desire for the ‘other’, giving them detailed prescriptive accounts about their life in Turkey, telling them everything they want to hear, sculpting into her account all those crevices and climaxes she has diagnosed in their battering, cunning questioning.  This is not the first time Ayşe speaks as a professional insider about ‘life behind the veil’.  Her account sounds proof read, polished to be fit and fitting for the specific audience. (b) The politics of the scarf: suppressed opportunities for subversion and agency Whereas in the interviews all teachers state that Arab girls’ wearing the scarf is an unalienable cultural right and a gender difference than must be respected, wearing the scarf makes many teacher eye brows raise when it is enacted as a cultural politics. Below we cite three such examples from three schools with Arab refugee enrolments. It is late may, end of the school year. A group of Arab female students of Palestinian origin who wear the scarf refuse to participate in the typical “all class photo” at the end of the year because, as they claim, their tradition does not allow them to take photos with men. Later on the same day, a teacher (f) notices that the girls are sitting together, giggling and having a nice time while taking photos together, with the use of mobile phone cameras. She comments, while shaking her head in a disapproving way: “You little scarfed girls!!! I know all about you”. [Αa toútes i mantiloúdes … Kséro sas kalá egó!] (PM Fieldnotes, Pagkyprio Lyceum Larnaca, May 2008) The second event is narrated to the researcher by Mrs Evdokia, the translator assigned by the school to the Arab kids. She had told “her girls” that next day would be a school photos day and they should not wear colorful scarves so that they would not stand out, just black or white. Next day, in compliance with her guidelines, the girls did not put on scarves of bright colors but refused to take a photo. At first they said their parents would not let them take photos with boys for religious reasons but when given the option to take an ‘only girls’ photo they refused again, this time arguing that the boys would be making fun at them for behaving “differently”. (The school vice principal (F) said they did have a photo taken –Muslim girls only- and they even invited her to pose with them). On finishing her narrative, Mrs Evdokia bursts out: “It is their families’ fault for all these. They do not let them. They do not want them to attend Religious education or develop relations with people of other religions. That’s why they told them not to have photos.”   The third event also takes place at the end of the school year (the banner “Different Languages, Same Vision” [“Diaforetikés glosses, Koinó órama”] is finished and ready to hoist). It’s Friday and both teachers and students are loosening up as on Monday they will have the end of year school celebration.  Lessons are minimal and the day is spent on rehearsals for Monday.  In the school yard the water war has been on the whole day.  Throwing each other water and wetting up themselves is a Cypriot custom for Assumption (also known as Cataclusm [«Κατακλυσμός»].  The custom has been picked up, mdified and intensified by kids (e.g., filling up ballons with water and throughing them at each other), and eventually brought to school as water war.  Very often Assumption coincides with the last week/s of class.  Muslim girls, some with scarf and some without, are gathered since morning outside Mrs. Stella’s class (Greek as a Foreign/Other Language, hereafter cited as TGFOL).  Mina, a girl who recently stopped wearing the scarf, is also there. The last few days she has been trying on different hair styles and is happy when she receives compliments by the Researcher. Mrs. Sophia tells her that she’s very pretty. Another teacher standing close by says to Janine (a girl with scarf): -Come on Janine, it is also time for you to take off the “kouroúkla” and change [your self]. “Kouroukla” [«κουρούκλα»]: Cypriot dialect. Big head scarf which was rubbed by village women around the face and neck, especially when working in the fields. Here used to denote old fashion, old woman. A few minutes later she encourages Janine again to take off her long sleeve light jacket because “it’s too hot”.  Janine hesitates and tells her that she cannot take it off because she’s wearing a short sleeve t-shirt underneath. Mrs Stella makes the following comment then: -Repression, sickness this religion! [“Katapísi, aróstia toúti i thriskía”!) (MT Fieldnotes, Phaneromeni Gymnasium Larnaca, 29.5.2009) There are too many motivations and intentions which could be attributed to all actors involved. Instead of psychologizing the actors it is important to redirect our attention from the individuals to the structural and discursive aspects of such interaction. The petit scenes described above are taking place in the interstices of other grand school scenes, also involving performative doublings: photo scenes, stage scenes, playing scenes (water war). Through these doublings/mirrorings the school is renewing its institutional power on students by producing their consensus rather than imposing submission. At the same time, performances, which until some years ago constituted individual acts of misconduct punishable by expulsion, are becoming re-appropriated by the institution, reified (student councils with the support of parent organizations negotiate with staff councils and manage to gain ‘tolerance’ for such activities) and re-culturated from acts of deviant conduct to youth actions which are important for reviving traditional Cypriot customs and preserving Cypriot identity (water war on the Assumption’s week, bringing skewers to schools and lighting up fires for barbecue on Tsiknopempti, etc).  The cultural milieu of the Cypriot school, however, cannot enable similar re-enactments and re-significations for refugee Muslim girls’ scarf.  The only previous meanings available (“koulláes” and “kouroúkles”) are only those for other scarves and other racialized others, known by Greek Cypriots of, mostly, low-socioeconomic and/or rural background.  The recitation of these namings by Cypriot kids in an underprivileged school remains an overdetermined act of resignification: it reclaims the use of the Cypriot dialect (which is considered culturally inferior and vulgar, other to the school’s official Greek), racializes the new Muslims and inscribes them within a hierarchical order, resists the multicultural respect for otherness which has been imposed on teachers and students as another kind of “sly civility” (Bhabha, 1985).  From the perspective of the young ‘new’ Muslims (new in the sense that they neither the same to Turkish Cypriots in Cyprus or Palestinians in Iraq but rather dislocated Muslims in a Cypriot context), on the other hand, the scarf has no past in the Cypriot context, neither a dissident meaning to be reclaimed nor an oppressive use to be defied.  The girls’ re-enacting of the scarf’s importance challenges both gender order (the quiet scarfed girls are disobeying) and school order (the school ritual of posing “all” together for a photo).  Who is this “all”? These girls, like many other groups of students, even groups of Cypriot students, have never felt part of this “all”.  Throughout the year they have been the abject other: the “koulláes”, the “mantiloúdes”, the “kalikántzari”.  Throughout the year they have also been the absent other in the academic arena of learning: invisible, quiet, inconsequenstial.  They have been Mrs. Eudokia’s girls, the “Araboúes’”.  If there is something which is authentically their own, that is their marginality.  At the end of the school year, the multicultural school comes to wipe out the signs of their marginality by hailing all students to pose in front of the photographic lens for the school’s self-images of inclusion.   By not wanting to take part in the “all of us together” photo, the scarfed girls, regardless of their motives, are engaging in an act of subversion that threatens reifying school rituals.  In the school context, however, their act is readable only as female cunningness, as passive conformity with tradition and as obedience to parents (either as bad girls, or as good daughters/‘good’ fundamentalist Muslims).  And the only available culture/gender discourse that can bestow to their acts of defiance meaning and legitimacy is the multicultural discourse of identity and difference. It is a sad paradox that the very school policies which have been adopted/imposed in order to promote ‘tolerance for otherness’ are producing totalizing discourses and limiting students’, Cypriots’ and non-Cypriots, opportunities to question traditions and cultures and to feel empowered in negotiating with intercultural arenas.   Research findings from the Macedonian Report suggest that intersectionality of religion and ethnicity renders identities even more rigid, with religious and ethnic boundaries overlapping and reinforcing each other. Research findings from the Greece Report show that the construction of ‘migrant/non-migrant’ identity’ intersects with national, i.e., Greek/non-Greek’ identities, with the new young Greek Albanians (born and growing up in Greece) acknowledged as having birth rights and yet feared of mimicry and, finally, with the Afghan male dispensed to a position of intersecting multiple otherness-s: other culture, other religion, other nation, other masculinity, other psyche (with the experience of war been attributed the qualities of a cultural trait).  The fear of mimicry, as Zavos notes, drawing on Bhabha (1990; 1994) and Ahmed (2004), is fecund in that, at the same time it enervates the nation’s sense of security it also rejuvenates the nation’s imaginary quality.  As Zavos explain, the love of nation has a paradoxical grammar: “Why do we want them to love Greece, and not just use it, as we are using them? Because if they don’t love Greece and are here only for opportunistic reasons, then the Greece we idealize as the object of our love may not exist, because the investment itself, the love, may not exist, and if that does not exist then our whole being, which is based on that love, is put into question. So, we need them to love us so that we know we are lovable, but we cannot love them in return because it would make us like them, i.e. unlovable.”  Research findings from the Cypriot Report show that migrant kids’ claims of Cypriotness are particularly strong in Elementary school, with the rigidity and flexibility of ethnic borders being renegotiated in various school settings and arenas.  In secondary education, however, processes of auto-ethnicization and hetero-ethnicization become more racialized, more violent and more reactionary, with migrant students feeling that their Cypriotness is under question and their belongingness something to be earned.   Research findings from all three national studies show a gap between contemporary theories of ethnicity and teachers and students perceptions about identity and performative reenactments of ethnic boundaries.  From a poststructuralist postcolonial perspective, identity is always changing and multi-faceted, constantly evolving and ‘in process’ of ‘becoming’, as never ‘achieved’ (completed or finished), and formed through their continual construction, negotiation, contestation and assertion (Hall 1996). Ethnicity is also socially constructed and produced through interactions and across public and private discourses – it is not ‘natural’, pre-given or pre-existing. Thus, ethnic difference and race are not seen as biological, cultural or natural phenomena but as loosely bounded, ever-shifting collectivities whose membership is subject to continual re/construction and contest. The boundaries of ethnic groups which define who ‘belongs to’ and who is an outsider are also constructed and negotiable/negotiated (Archer, 2003).   Blazheve notes in her Report that in Cvetan Dimov primordial concepts of ethnic and religious identities are dominant in the overall discourse among students and teachers. The belief in the strong biological, blood ties to the group is based on a strong emotional aspect that implies, on the one hand a mystification of intraethnic relations and belongingness and, on the other hand, exclusion of others.  Asked to consider the possibility or viability of mixed love relationships, teachers responded that it is religion and not nationality that constitutes the biggest problem.  A teacher cites the example of a Turkish who married a Macedonian girl who converted to Islam, but four years later went to a church for Easter, saying that “it pulls her in, the blood pulls her and that’s it” (Focus Group 1).  For students, ethnic identity is closely related to religious identity and sometimes confused with it. “They think that if you are Albanian you must be Muslim, or if you are Macedonian you must be Christian” (Macedonian Report). According to the Kerameikos teachers’ accounts, Greek students are by now accustomed to living with migrants and don’t show any signs of racism or prejudice against their foreign schoolmates. There is no difference between them and the Albanian children who have been born in Greece. But Albanian children too feel they belong in Greece, and don’t distinguish between their country of origin and their country of birth. Birth appears to constitute, for them, a right of belonging.  Zavos observes that Greek teachers’ identification with migrant students is attempted through reference to a common class background and the experience of social mobility. Just as the teachers themselves, who grew up in poor rural families, managed though education to transcend their low status social position, so, also, migrant students are encouraged to struggle for a better life through educational achievement.  Alternatively, identification with some migrant students is sought through reference to a common historical and cultural background, one however, that the Greek society, in contrast to the societies of origin, has managed to surpass thus securing a place among the developed and progressive nations of the West. Cultural difference, as complete lack of connection or relation to the receiving country, Greece, is diagnosed in the cases of migrants or refugees from far-away countries, such as Afghanistan, or China; countries, however, whose positionality in the global hierarchy of value bears particular connotations which are projected onto their populations. Afghanistan, represented as a war-riddled, but also hard and fundamentalist country, evokes pity but is also implicitly associated with obscurantism and (masculine) violence, qualities that seem to rub off on the Afghan refugee children at school: “They came from a wholly different culture that is, no relations at all with us. Ok, with the Alban kids, there’s something, we are not that different”. Aggressive masculinity, linked to heterosexuality, is seen as an inescapable identity for Afghan boys, who are reported as disliking intensely, and feeling insulted, by performative enactments of femininity by Albanian boys in the context of the Greek carnival, where, it is common, and accepted, for men to take on female roles pejoratively. The apparent, for the teachers, burlesque element of such impersonations could not be appreciated by the Afghan boys, who felt their masculinity threatened. Gender and sexual identities are conflated. National cultures are also evaluated and compared. For example, Iran is higher in the culture value scale than Afghanistan, which for some reason is conflated with Pakistan, and Iraq, ravaged by war, stands in the middle. China, on the other hand, is associated with assertive global commerce and commands respect but also raises apprehension. As teachers point out, though, Chinese students are not attacked by their Greek-Albanian schoolmates, but, rather, tolerated. However, the meaning of this tolerance could be interpreted in terms of the ‘elephant in the room’ or the acceptance of the obvious: in other words, Chinese migrants are obviously different and apart from the rest of the students in school and from the rest of the neighborhood. Not only are they contained within separate enclaves in the city but they themselves do not initiate any mixing, which makes them culturally, and socially, inaccessible. According to interviews with teachers, discrimination against other (non-Greek) nationalities, or other migrants, or refugees, is not only a characteristic of Greek but of Albanian students as well. In fact, Greek and Albanian students team up en bloc against the unwelcome ‘others’, such as the newly arrived Afghan refugee children, whose presence in the school has caused so much destabilization for teachers and students alike. Zavos notes that teachers attempt to control or restrict students’ exhibitions of hostility or intolerance by appealing to children’s pity (the poor children who have lost their homes) or empathy (take the other’s position); they urge students to put themselves in the other’s shoes, to imagine what he has been through; but, to no avail. So, asks Zavos, what is it that makes children recalcitrant and resisting students? Regardless of the fact that the teachers themselves reproduce in their own narratives a distinct sense of discrimination against the Afghan children in school, students indeed do display certain ambivalence. On the one hand, when directly questioned, they refer to Afghan children in terms of pity and compassion (they have been through so much), but, on the other hand, in their daily interactions and when confronted with examples of conflict, they practice discrimination, the wish for segregation and fight. Zavos underlines some unspoken contradictions in these accounts: ‘Why would teachers expect their students to be more empathetic than they themselves are?’ This, she argues, is a case of cultural intimacy: they do not expect their students to be more related, what they expect is for them to perform what is the politically correct attitude, i.e. to publicly express tolerance, pity, compassion, while, as insiders, they also know and agree, that they would rather not have them amongst them at all. Albanian children’s reactions to the Afghan refugees sometimes involve derogatory comments on religious practices, and, in particular the issue of Islamic worship and the headscarf. For teachers this presents a paradox, since several Albanian families are themselves Muslim, and children often recall experiences of faith of their grandparents, but, at the same time, also prefer to dissociate themselves from any such practices. This may not be so incomprehensible if we take into account that the national religion, practiced by the mainstream and elevated to the level of political and nationalist ideology, is Orthodox Christianity which, for historical and political reasons, bears a particular antagonism to Islam. Research findings from Cyprus show a sharp gap between teachers’ understandings of ethnicity/race and their involvement in processes of ethnicization and racialization which take place in their schools.  Teachers state that Greek Cypriot children “accept difference” or “have come to accept” migrants/allóglosi, “treat them well,” “at least in the classroom.”  Teachers also comment positively on migrants’ participation in National school celebrations, e.g., singing the national anthem. Hanging out together and/or speaking “amongst themselves” in Polish, Arabic, Georgian and so on, are treated by teachers as negative phenomena and as indicators of “ethnic separation” and “ghettocization”.  Racist speech acts by Cypriots, however, are belittled, seen as unfortunate comments and individual racist attitudes which are attributed to the individual kids’ family environment: “I do not like, let’s say in my school, to see the Polish playing in one corner. And, as it shows, this thing exists, you may also have witnessed this in the yard. Or the Persians, in another corner, or the gypsies, also in another corner” (Interview with Iasonas, Christakeio Elementary Limassol).  Segregation is often attributed to the cultural or ethic character of migrants, sometimes, implicitly, even by the researchers. Commenting on a fight between boys, one of the researchers concludes: “What particularly impressed me, though, is how united the gypsies are when one of them faces a problem” (CS, Christakeio Elementary Limassol).  It is interesting that before coming to his concluding remark on gypsies, the researcher develops a quite thick description of a fight which illustrates some very interesting intersections between ethnic and peer group positionings and repositionings: Today I watched the first fight between kids who are self-defined as Cypriots and gypsies who are self-defined as “Helladites”. From what they told me, the reason for the dispute was that Nikolaos (a gypsy) talked badly to the brother of Charitonas (Cypriot).  What is strange is that within the ‘Cypriots’’ lines, there were kids (such as Benjamin) who are not from Cyprus but felt that thay had to back Charitonas.  After some wrestling, I heard Charitonas saying: “Here came the gypsies, to speak to us about our mothers.” (CS Fieldnotes, Christakeio Elementary School, 12.2.2010) The gypsy kids’ use of Standard Modern Greek (“kalamaristika”) in the Greek Cypriot school yard context (where the Cypriot dialect constitutes the normative vernacular) provides a new intercultural context where ethnicities and ethnic boundaries are redefined and renegotiated. In this context (unimaginable in the Greek school context), gypsies become identified as ethnic Greeks (“Elladites”, i.e., Greek state nationals) whereas the Greek Cypriots become both de-ethnicized and renationalized, from Greek Cypriots to Cypriots.  It is also interesting that this double zone, a war-zone and a contact-zone at the same time, the limits of Cypriotness become expandable, letting in the other Other, i.e., Benjamin (Iraqi refugee).  This “letting in” is not a capricious or opportunistic tactic.  Its possibility is conditioned both by a structure of repeatability and by a learning context that allows flexibilities of identifications.  For example, on the Polytechneio Day (Anniversary of Athens Polytechnic Revolt against the Greek Junta), four months before the fight, the class teacher talked to the class about the events and introduced concepts such as dictatorship and fascism (in a multicultural fifth grade Elementary class with so many allóglossi as the particular class, teachers are very unlikely to touch on such concepts since they consider them incomprehensible for the class).  On that occasion, Benjamin talked about his country’s experience of dictatorship regimes, and the other kids had advised him to “stay in Cyprus which provides security to him” (CS Fieldnotes, Christakeio Elementary Limassol, 17.11.2009).   Fieldwork suggests that rigid ethnic boundaries recuperate very easily, particularly in situations of crisis. An interpersonal conflict can erupt to an ethnic between ‘us’ and ‘Pontians’. The diagnosis of a Filipino student returning from a trip to Philippines can erupt into a situation of emergency, with the school put into quarantine and the claims of mutual acceptance put on hold. The example below illustrates how precarious “acceptance” can be and how tolerance for other cultures can relapse, almost atavistically, to racial abjection.  At the beginning of the school year 2009-2010 (its beginning was marked by precautions, hygiene fever, and action plans against H1N1), during the morning school assembly, the sixth graders are teasing Bogdan (a boy from Poland) that has the ‘pig flu’. They hold their noses and cover their faces when around them, telling that he is infected.  In their act (and acting) the performative display of abjection towards a stinking pig is conflated with precautionary gestures when conducting one’s contact with H1N1 carriers (CS Fieldnotes, Christakeio 23-11-09). Interestingly, this event takes place the same time that Bogdan’s teacher remarks that he has been doing significant progress in learning Greek, that he participates in class and that he is now becoming accepted by his peers.  In this case Bogdan did not seemed particularly bothered (seems to take it as some kind of joke); in other similar cases, elementary kids internalize violence, marginalization or derogatory comment as an individual problem, without attributing this to their being Roma, Pontian, Polish, etc.  In fact, even when such identifications are meant to empower them, the kids reject them claiming Cypriotness.  For example, in a TGSOL session, the students are reading a text about a group of students of various nationalities in Germany. The kids in the text introduce themselves by telling their names and the names of their countries.  The textbooks used for TGFOL in the specific schools are Μια φορά κι έναν καιρό – Ελληνικά ως ξένη γλώσσα (ΥΕΠΘ Πανεπιστήμιο Κρήτης ΟΕΔΒ Αθήνας), Μιλώ και γράφω ελληνικά στις γειτονιές του κόσμου ΟΕΔΒ Αθήνας) and Τετράδιο δραστηριοτήτων Μαργαρίτα, Βιβλίο Μαθητή/ Τετράδιο/ Καρτέλες-Παιχνίδια (ΟΕΔΒ Αθήνας). All TGFOL textbooks are available online at: www.ediamme.edc.uoc.gr/diaspora2/index.php?yliko.  Most of these teaxtbooks have been produced for Greek diaspora rather than Migrants learning Greek.  The Greek language teacher asks Georgi to speak about himself, that the original (text) and modifying the text (“My name is … and I am from …”) will function both as a sort of scaffolding and as a model of a real speech situation language use. Georgi says: “I am Georgi and I am from Cyprus.”  The teacher prompts him to rethink his sentence (and way of identifying himself): “Are you sure that you are from Cyprus?” (Georgi’s parents are from Scotland and Serbia).  Georgi frowns at the teacher’s comment (CS Fieldnotes, Christakeio Elementary School, 10.11.2009). At secondary education, processes of ethnicization, both hetero-ethnicization and auto-ethnicization become sharper, particularly among boys (derogatory ethnic comments against male migrant students are often received also as inquisitive remarks on their masculinity).  The examples below are from Phaneromeni Gymnasium in Nicosia, a school where “acceptance of difference” is considered to be, at large, a goal already achieved. Two researchers ask a group of boys whether they live close to the school: Nicholai: Two minutes’ walk!” Researcher: You are so lucky, staying in this neighborhood. Nicholai: No Ma’am, now many foreigners have come and things are a little bit bad.  Besides the Old Mill (after-school Center), my dad does not allow met go anywhere, for if anything gets stolen they always blame me because I am a Pontian, and for this reason he forbids met to go out. (KC Fieldnotes, Phaneromeni Gymnasium Nicosia) The same boy, in a different context, explains to the researcher in what way Cypriots (“You”) are different from “us”: “You Ma’am, have no brain.  Whatever happens, you call the police, ‘mommy’, ‘mommy’…Whereas us, if we fight, if we bit each other, we never call the police. Next day we talk to each other normally” (KC Fieldnotes, Phaneromeni Gymnasium Nicosia). Auto-ethnoticization sometimes implicates the citation and replication of racial discourses: Two boys rush into the remedial/support class without brings with them any books or bags. “You came like tourists today?” the teacher asks, and they laugh. The researcher asks them where they are from. Igor says, “from Russia”, and, pointing to “Andrei”, continues: “but this one is from Pakistan”. After this both of them burst into laughter. “No, Mm,” says Andrei, “me, Pontian. You did not figure this out?” “No”, says the researcher, “How could I figure this out?”  Andrei explains using as a visual aid the locker on the classroom door. “You see, our head is like this,” and shows to the semicircle part of the locker, “flat at the lower back part, while yours is not like this. Yours, looks like the lower part of the locker, it’s square-ish.” (KC Fieldnotes, Phaneromeni Gymnasium Nicosia) Andrei, speaks Russian, Georgian, Turkish and Greek. He is fifteen years old and he is still at Gymnasium grade one, stranded there as “auditor” for three years. A shocking, raw, bodily self-racialization is enacted amidst a series of other, more subtle and normalized forms of racialization that take place at school unnoticed, including the researchers’ hailing of students into ethnic self-identification. The two students parody recognition and mis-recognition and disrupt the multicultural survey which intends to inscribe them tidily into a map of origins and ethnicities.  What this event shows is that multicultural discourse is becoming institutionalized as a disciplinary form of power (survey and taxonomy) as well as a productive form of power (subjectification).  The two students are hailed into the disocurse of multiculturalism as objects of ethnic identification and subjects of cultural knowledge (they can speak of their experience as “Pontians”, “Pakistansis” and so on).  In other words, the only way for a migrant student to become a subject in its school multicultural discourse is by becoming an ethnicized subject.  Against this condition, the students are reverting to the rawness and tastelessness of an inappropriate racial discourse, one that has the power to belittle both their otherness and the power of those who normalize their institutional power under the disguise of cultural interest. Foreign kids’ resistance to hetero-ethnicization by Greek Cypriots implicates a stereotypical ethnicization of other ‘foreigners’ as dangerous and a heroizing reclaim of ethnic stereotypes.  This “reclaim” however, is most often received by Greek Cypriot as another symptom of “their identity” than a performative negotiation of ethnic stereotypic. Under the entry cited above, the researcher notes: “they take the Law in their hands.” For high school kids, claiming belongingness or contesting exclusion, is a frustrating and painful endeavor which often is misconstrued by peers and completely overstepped by teachers. A common finding in Macedonian and Cypriot fieldwork on teenage kids is that, unlike auto-ethoticization, reckoning with intersecting ethnic, racial and religious border is anti-heroic. The Macedonian study cites the case of Darko, a Macedonian youth, who claims to be Albanian, performing his transformation as conversion to Islam, as body practice and body change (fasting during the Ramadan and having circumcision this year), even as absence. A professor is reading through the class roster to check for absences: “Darko?” “Darko is not here,” the boy says, and goes on: “He is Mohamed now”. The professor asks him whether he would like to be Albanian or Muslim, and he answers that you cannot be Albanian if you are not Muslim (Field notes_ VB_11) .  The professor thinks that boy cannot make difference between Albanian and Muslim. In the eyes of the other students and teachers he is a bit crazy, demented or ‘mental’, they make fun of him and his behavior, mostly because of his claims over his identity. Blazheva notes that Darko is an extreme example of identity in process “of becoming” since his desire is to become the Other. Albanians or Muslims were never as other as they are to most of Macedonians but nevertheless for most of the people it is seen as impossible and crazy thing to want or to become Muslim or Albanian. But exactly this impossibility and the desire for this impossible position is what makes this case so extraordinary. This case shows how rigid and primordial concepts of identity clash over, but as well how strong they are within the context revealed by the stigmatizing, marginalizing and exclusion of differences and individualities that don’t fit the clearly shaped categories taken as natural and normal. Darko’s negotiation about his identity is based on the acceptance of being the crazy one, the one to be laughed at, by continuously playing the role and confirming it, as if for him it is more important to have the protection and stability by belonging to something he believes in.   The Cypriot study cites several cases of student border crossings, some deliberate and some accidental, some of them misfiring, some claiming acceptance as symptoms of madness or expressions of sacrifice and love for Cyprus as a new homeland, some belittled as noise, some picked up by teachers as signs of the other’s cultural inauthenticity and some politicized as threats against the school’s rituals of Greek national identity.  While sitting with a group of girlfriends during the break, Maram (Muslim girl) starts singing the Greek National Anthem.  She says that Mrs Lucia taught that to her in the music class. She thinks it’s a popular Greek song and sings that “when she feels bored”. She has no idea that tomorrow is the last day of school. She adds on that since they came to Cyprus her father says that she’s crazy because she wants to go out all the time (PM Fieldnotes, 1.6.2009, Dianelleio Gymnasium Larnaca).   In Phaneromeni Gymnasium, Aysa (very competent in Greek; does not wear the scarf) is the only Muslim girl to participate in the school event for the commemoration of Resistance Day (resistance to the military coup of 1974; this commemoration day was introduced recently by the left government). She recites a poem and also sings with the chorus the National anthem.  Asked about the meaning of the event, a group of Cyprit girls reply dismissively: “I did not listen.  The little Arab girl also talked, so what, how could I understand?” (MT Fieldnotes, Phaneromeni Gymnasium Larnaca, 7.12.2009).  Mohammed, a refugee Iraqi youth from the Vergina Lyceum, states upfrontly that Cyprus if his country now and he would so much wants to give his own blood for this country, e.g., serve voluntarily in the army (a legal impossibility because he’s not a national citizen). When he participates in a blood donation that takes place in his school, everybody asks him why he did that since he’s not a Cypriot.  Hatice, known to be a Turk, does not wear a scarf and this troubles her peers but even the researcher.  She explains that she’s a Turkish Cypriot, not from Turkey.  The researcher confronts her, insisting on the duality of identities: “Aren’t you a Muslim? Are you Christian?” “No, I’m a Muslim”. The researcher insists as she does not get “it”: “Then why you don’t wear the scarf?” Hatice erupts, frustrated with the other’s inability to make sense of her dis-jointed, complex, different within, political, act of ethnicization : “I told you Ma’am, I’m a Turkish Cypriot!” (PM Fieldnotes, Dianellion Gymnasium Larnaca, 14.5.2009).   Emine, a girl from Turkey, self-identified as Lucy, dressed in gothic teenage style who plays soccer with boys during the break, speaks of her experience of growing up as Alevi in a cosmopolitan secular Alevi community in Istanbul, and how her family tried to force her into a marriage with a “backwards Muslim” Turkish Cypriot when they came to Cyprus.  Her Alevi identity is unspeakable and unsignifiable to her peers and teachers, who know only how to distinguish between Turks and Turkish Cypriots (some teachers problematize even this cultural discernment, perceiving it as a political tactics that misconstrues the nature of the national problem of Cyprus, putting emphasis on ethnic conflict between Greek Cypriots and Turkish Cypriots and downplay Turks’ invasion).  In interviews with teachers from her school, Lucy is cited as an example of an unfortunate and untactful implementation of inclusion policies, since her participation in the March 25th Parade (Commemoration of Greece’s National Revolt against the Turks) stirred a “justifiable” reaction by her peers. The three case studies record various attributions of violence and perceived localities of violence. Whether violence is construed as ordinary or extraordinary, coming from outside, internal to school culture or extension of violent others, it is a common finding across the three studies that the talk on violence is relativizing violence and rendering invisible, insignificant of even unsignifiable forms of gender and racial violence. The Greek study reports on an exceptionalization and exteriorization of violence. As represented in the Kerameikos teachers’ accounts, violence is seen as something out of the ordinary that is brought to the school from the outside, by disturbing ‘others’, to disturb the multicultural ethos of the school. In Cvetan, violence is considered to be all too ordinary, part of the schools culture, with various acts of violence being overstepped as jokes.  In Cypriot schools, violence is something stirred from out-of-school factors (e.g., angry Pontian or Muslim fathers) or attributed to stereotypes of ethnic temper. Containing violence (which often means overstepping racial acts as unfortunate of ‘jokes’) is often misconstrued as  preserving school’s “balance” and not marginalizing Greek Cypriot kids.   In interviews with Kerameikos teaches, violence is seen to disrupt the status quo and the peaceful co-existence of the (regular) students, and does not belong in the school, or the educational system, or among the proper members of the school community, all of which are assumed to be not violent, or in any way producing or inciting violence themselves. Prior to the arrival of these children in the school, the school was a harmonious place, things ran smoothly, there were no conflicts between students, or teachers and students.  After the arrival of Afghans, “all this, this situation that formed this year, has demolished everything including kids themselves” (Interview with Machdi). According to teachers’ accounts, in the beginning, the Afghan refugee students were very scared, and hemmed in, possibly intimidated by their non-comprehension of the language used in school. Slowly, however, as they gained more familiarity with their surroundings and started to learn the language they revealed their aggressive side, and became a disturbance for the rest of the school. The presence of the Afghan refugee children in school has also brought up tensions and conflicts between the teachers themselves, who disagree as to whether they should, or shouldn’t accept these children in school, or refuse them shelter. In those cases, however, where teachers’ interventions against Afghan children’s participation in school have brought distress to the refugee families, teachers also feel guilt and remorse. They don’t want to see the children punished by their parents. Nevertheless, even this statement of responsibility is partially disclaimed as it is qualified by references to child abuse, which the Afghan parents are supposed to inflict upon their children. In this sense, Afghan parents’ disciplinary attempts are once more framed by the teachers in terms of the Afghan violent and inhumane culture, which the teachers have to either prevent or redress. The idealized image of a conflict-free school, where everyone has mastered the requirements and challenges of multicultural tolerance and co-existence, which is invaded by a hoard of angry and violent ‘others’ and robbed of its peace and unity, clearly does not describe a real situation given the pervasive racism all migrants have suffered in Greece. What it does accomplish, however, is a dissociation of violence from the Greek context and a clear moral distinction between assimilated/assimilable migrants and non-assimilable ‘others’. In this sense, even the racist violence that Albanian migrants suffer (as occasionally acknowledged by some teachers), is minimized and downplayed. It cannot be that bad, if they have managed to integrate and become accepted in Greek society. Those who cannot integrate, such as the Afghan refugees, must be creating the problem themselves. Violence is brought to the school by the Afghan refugee children, who are the bearers of violence on account of their violent history and culture. Having experienced war and hardship in their native country, from which they are now fleeing to the West, they are expected to reproduce the tensions and conflicts from which they have suffered. In addition, they are also assumed to be the bearers of a culture of violence and antagonism, evidenced by the fact that they often are not only violent and aggressive towards other students, but are violent amongst themselves, and do not support each other. For example, they are described as ‘telling on each other’, rather than exhibiting the usual student solidarity against teachers. Interestingly, however, the issue of violence in students’ narratives acquires more meanings and references. While they all, unanimously, refer to the Afghan refugee children as being aggressive and violent and annoying; i.e. they indicate that they feel victimized by them, some of them also, notably Albanian students, refer to Greeks, and Greek society as being violent, and disrespectful of life, dignity and human rights. This is not stated directly, but rather surreptitiously. It is message meant to be read between the lines. Unlike Kerameikos, in Cvetan Dimov violence is integrated in and integrated by the school.  The following excerpt from fieldnotes attests to the cultural relativization of violence and the institutional imperative for a new arriving’s acculturation to this: I heard gunshots coming from outside, gun riffles, I can’t tell for sure but they were fast like from machine gun, not pistol. I got scared. One of the boys stood up and went to the window. I shouted, don’t stand by the window! The professor was calmingly saying that it is nothing, probably a fire cracker. Girls from the second table got excited and though nervous, laughingly commented – wow we are going to die here, to what the professor said – it is destiny. Sit down it is nothing. They throw fire crackers – she said. Students ironically affirmed: yeah right – fire crackers… Then the professor added that it may be a wedding, you know there are a lot of weddings in this neighborhood. Girls commented that before the class there were also gunshots and got scared and went to the toilets, but then got back to the classroom. The boy set down and said to the teacher – Do not panic teacher. The teacher tried to explain to him that she is trying to soften the situation and repeated that it were probably fire crackers. (Field notes _AB_16) The public image of the school is defined through the stories of violence, as well as the stereotypes for Albanians. This is a quite usual image for public schools with bad reputation, moreover a picture that no one actually feels they need to know about because it is so well “portrayed” by the mainstream discourse of young people. Stories of youth and/or school violence are perfect media issues for raising moral panic among the concerned moralizing public, which then tries to find who is guilty while trying to wash their own hands about responsibility they alone have, blaming never-ending transition in society and the clash of values, while further stigmatizing young people for their restlessness, disobedience and disrespect towards authorities. Usually, the debate ends up with new security measures being introduced in schools, such as visual surveillance and physical security, or, if violence is localized in ethnically mixed school, the measures to be takes against violence are division in shifts or separation into different schools. Citing Foucault, Blazheva notes in their report that the deployment of violence entails both disciplinary and productive forms of power (Foucault, 1977; 1991). On the one hand, surveillance mechanisms used to control violence in schools are actually serving as control and regulation mechanisms of student behaviors, turning schools into disciplining institutions. On the other hand, young people use violence as a mechanism for gaining and (re)establishing power and discipline in their own hierarchies which constitute a reflection of the wider structural and institutional context.  Citing Bourdieu, Blazheva also argue that this double enforcement and production of power is interrelated with the institutional replication of group or class injustice, institutions of legitimacy and normalcy and systems of symbolic violence. When it comes to violence in schools it is mainly these institutions that perpetuate hegemonic masculinity and therefore face the problem they produce.  Bringing Arendt into the analysis of hegemonic masculinity, Blazeva introduces a counter-Foucault approach to power.  Arendt (1969) argues that loss of power tempts men to substitute violence for power but also that violence itself results in impotence or at some point loosing power.  In their discussions with youth at Cvetan, the researchers trace echoes of Arendt’s analysis.  Even boys whose masculinity didn’t need to be measured and negotiated through physical strength, whose position are guaranteed by looks and social skills, state that those who carry weapons in the school are actually boys who are scared to become victims of violence.  In their view, those ‘scared scary’ boys carry guns as a protection and a sign that they can strike back: K: “I want to say this. There was one guy who was slapped by an 8th grader. Although the guy had a gun he didn’t pull it out, it was only for show off, just to say that he has a gun. Nothing! He got slapped and that was it. In front of the whole school. Everybody was teasing him later that if only he had had a gun he would have killed the 8th grader, this and that. Everybody knew that he had a gun but he could not pull it out. Just for show off, so he can say I have one. Only those that are scared, they carry weapons.” (Focus group 1) Such findings suggest the research on school violence needs to examine, besides structures of social inequality and institutional mechanisms of surveillance, the affective aspects of power and vulnerability. Emotions such as shame, humiliation, and desire for inclusion are fundamental sites for discipline and control of hegemonic masculinity, and exclusion and censorship are the most effective methods of symbolic violence (Stoudt, 2006). Research findings from the Cypriot schools confirm findings from the other two national studies.  Like in Kerameikos, teachers overlook the institutional dimensions of school violence and locate its sources outside the school’s multicultural balance.  Images of deranged Muslim and Pontian fathers who ‘invade’ schools to protect their troublesome sons are frequent in teacher accounts of violence.  Fieldwork in several high schools also shows that many incidents of violence where migrants boys are involved are treated as “fights amongst themselves” which should stay “amongst themselves” because “their” way or resolving conflicts is “different”. When teachers are confronted with descriptions of events of racial violence against migrants (Codification A: Greek Cypriot boy calling Arab classmate “kilintzir”; act overstepped by teacher) either they empty these events of seriousness or they attribute Greek Cypriot students “mentality” to their family environment, a space that falls beyond the school’s authority.  This delineation of fields of authority is very much linked to the discourse of teacher professionalization: “Teachers cannot also intervene in the family and the environment where a student grows up” (Interview with Artemis, Christakeio Elementary School); “the attitude of the child is clearly racist but not his own; he must have transferred it from his home, the neighborhood, his surroundings” (Interview with Andreas, Phaneromeni Elementary School, Nicosia). A significant number of teachers argue that such events are very frequent even between Cypriot students and one should not take them “too seriously” since such name callings are part of the argot used by youth.  Structural marginality and dissymmetry of power are not considered (not only Ahmet cannot talk but he is the abject other against which Cypriot youth groups establish their cohesiveness, including the acceptable exchange of ‘insulting’ words).   What is interesting is that even those teachers who speak in the interviews about institutionalized racism, when they are asked to analyze the specific school event they revert to a neo-liberal discourse on racist attitudes and victim damage: “Maybe I would not discuss this any further because I would put Ahmet in an uncomfortable position” (Interview with Anne, Phaneromeni Elementary Nicosia).  Whether its object is the perpetrator or the victim, the individualization and psychologization of racism constitutes a sustainable response to racial violence.  When asked to evaluate the teacher’s role, all teachers turn to a retrospective evaluation of the year’s intercultural program (the event takes place at the end of the school year) and they deem that the cultivation of a spirit of acceptance and respect for other cultures should have been more systematic and more comprehensive.  This retrospective evaluation and the fetishistic turn to the recourse of “respect to other cultures” help to normalize violence and to smooth out contradictions in intercultural education (e.g., how can we reconcile the occurrence of racial violence with the self-righteous culturalist narrative of promoting and mastering acceptance).  The excerpt below  shows how “acceptance of others” and “knowledge and respect of other cultures”—the cardinal goals of intercultural education in Cyprus—have come to established a zone of educational comfort that facilitates the containment and tolerance of racial violence.  What particularly uncanny is that the person who articulates most adequately the normalization of this zone of containment and tolerance to racism is one of the leading actors in the organization of the Zones of Educational Priority (one of the Ministry’s major mechanisms for promoting the implementation of intercultural education): To be honest I would not like to be in that teacher’s position either, I wouldn’t like to have to start to explain and to preach or turn this into an issue of conflict and punishment, e.g., ‘why did you say bad words to him’ and ‘what did you tell him’, I don’t know what followed after this event.  That the teacher took the cd (a cd of Arabic music) from him (Ahmet) and played that sets an example, i.e., I appreciate your culture, what you are etc, I accept it, thus she passes her message in a very nice way, and, beyond this, I’m sure she would have many other opportunities to incorporate into her lesson other elements from his culture and other cultures and to pass step by step these messages.  In other words, our aim as, I said before, to teach them [others like Ahmet] to endure, because all of us find ourselves in that position at some point, and to get stronger, to try to teach them [Greek Cypriots] to accept the ‘different’, a lesson which cannot be achieved either through teaching or reading around lies or someone else talking to you about anti-racism or all these things… I believe that only through lived experience and this is how many of our students get this. (Interview with a ZEP Coordinator) What the policy maker (and teacher) above does not get though is that the idealization of intercultural education and the preaching of “acceptance of difference” have normalized a multicultural ethos of civility that is blind to processes of racialization, power dissymmetries, injustice and violence.  Interviews with migrant students of older ages actually record students’ quest for a politics of justice and their frustration with teachers’ implication in the normalization of violence. The comparative analysis of field data on language use in the classroom in the three national contexts shows that the normative monolingualism of instruction constitutes an ideological terrain. Zavos reports that the teachers’ approaches to the acquisition of Greek language skills by migrant students and refugees ranges between culturalist notions of language as a sign of cultural identity and functionalist notions of language as a communication tool. In addition, adopting the national language is interpreted by the teachers as willingness towards, or capacity for, integration, both by the students, but, most importantly, by their families. Even functionalist approaches, however, are invested with ideological views on communication as a one-way process: the one who has to do the communicating, who has to exhibit and practice willingness to engage in dialogue, is the foreigner, who has to communicate on the terms of the dominant cultural-linguistic communication formats. Children who do not progress in Greek language skills are assumed to not want to communicate, to resist establishing mutual interaction between teachers and host society and themselves. The attributed lack of interest in communication with the host society carries negative connotations; it is considered to indicate either general lack of motivation and aspirations for the future, or unwillingness to become part of the host culture. Gregoriou reports that in Cypriot schools, the category “allóglossos” has evolved from a supposedly neutral student descriptor (the term was introduced to replace the term “alien” [allodapós] which was deemed racial) to a racial rationality of student regulation and multicultural school organization.  In high schools schools with significant numbers of Muslim students (around 35 acroates in each school), the term Alloglossoi is used interchangeably with the term “Aravóphoni” (Arabic speaking).  “Alloglossia identifies the otherness of migrants and refugees on the basis of “lack of competence in Greek” (construed, though policies and practices of placement, inclusion in mixed class as “present absence” and exeptions from classes as linguistic incompetence) and the number of allóglossi in a school identifies the school’s multicultural “intensity” and justifies its need for extra resources.  As in the case of Greece, seemingly functionalist views on Greek language acquisition carry notions about the conditionality of migrants and refugees’ fitness for the Greek classroom.  Though teaching TGSOL in “reception classes” for a year (before integration in the regular classroom) is proposed as a solution specifically for the “language problem”, this prognosis is invested with the expectation to solve problems of racism, segregation and violence. The underlying assumption is that the implied actor (the one who causes problems) is the migrant/refugee and that troubling interactions can still be located within the other’s zone of culture and reaction. Blazeva reports that the power dynamics, identity politics but also but possibilities for transgression, empowerment, solidarity and discrimination in a normatively monolingual classroom reflect the ideological contradictions of a multi-ethnic society where the right to instruction in native language is constitutionally established and yet some languages are “more equal than others”. Cvetan Dimov is a rather typical example of the wider tension between languages spoken in the country also struggling for its recognition and identification. On the one hand, the official state language (Macedonian) is still in a process of negotiating its recognition, distinction and legitimacy in the political and historical context and perspective. On the other hand, even though with the 2001 reform Albanian was recognized as an official language, the struggle over its recognition and affirmation is an ongoing one. The Macedonian language is considered to be more privileged, but contexts like Cvetan Dimov challenge this notion and show the complexity of the negotiation processes of language ideologies, identities and power. In school settings, both languages are being disputed and both negotiated to be recognized as an indissoluble part from their ethnic identity. Power dynamics are reflected in school administration. The major figure in the school, the director of the school is Macedonian, along with it, Macedonian is still the official language in meetings and official communication while assistant directors are Albanian and their position is to make balance to assure the power structure but also balance of language ideologies. Interviews with teachers in all three national contexts show that teachers find themselves stumbling onto the aporia of teaching majorities and minorities, natives and migrants in an educational environment which was not originally designed to facilitate, in parallel with the learning of content specific matter, the learning of the language of instruction as a second language.  In the case of Greece and Cyprus, this aporia is often registered as discomfort with their professional adequacy to teach Greek as a second/other language.  Zavos also notes that the new language books for Elementary Schools (same ones used in Greek Cypriot schools as well) which were introduced a couple of years ago are considered inadequate or badly designed to meet the needs of migrant children, who require a different approach to language training based on the use of lay or common language, rather than formalized instruction in grammatical forms.  Even though the new books are designed to facilitate an integrated approach to the learning of language, to promote multiple literacies and familiarity with multiple genres, teachers find that the books focus too much on the formal characteristics of language and not its use in communicative contexts.  Even literary texts, however, lose their emotive quality when they are used as the medium for teaching Greek to migrants and refuges: They have a very difficult vocabulary, kids do not understand them, so you end up breaking down the text to little parts and focusing on translation/interpretation. So the literary essence is gone.  There is nothing left to feel, noting to experience, nothing” (Interview with Vassiliki, Greek Report).   Teachers also find that the comprehensive approach the learning of language (built into the selection of texts, the exercises, teachers’ manuals and assessment tests) is useful with regards to the Books’ ideal audience, i.e., native speakers of Greek.  This comprehensive approach, however, turns out to be disempowering for teachers when the same books are also used for the teaching of Greek as a foreign language. It does not allow a flexible differentiation of instructional aims and material, and teachers end up caught in a “continuous hunting”, which material to use, what skill to teach next.   Although the same textbooks are used in Greek Cypriot Elementary schools, Greek Cypriot teachers do not make any critical comments on these.  Gregoriou suggests that this difference can be attributed, partly, to the fact that classroom teachers feel that the responsibility for teaching Greek as a Second/Other language is passed on to remedial courses and Greek Language sessions.  Interviews with Cypriot Elementary schools teachers, however, also show that teachers’ relative contentment with the work done in the classroom is related to their sense that sustainable teaching in a multicultural school requires “a change of attitude”.  Compromising academic goals and expectations is construed sometimes by teachers as a cultural adjustment to the difference of a multicultural school.  Unlike Elementary school teacher, teachers in higher and technical education are very critical of the policy of admitting allóglossi in the class as “akroatés” (auditors) because these kids are condemned to boredom.  Their firm belief however that only separate “reception classes” would solve the language problem (plus all other problems attributed to the presence of alloglossi in their classroom), suggests that teachers are negative to the idea of a multicultural mixed language ability class.  Another contradiction in Cypriot teachers’ diagnosis and prognosis framings of “the language problem” is that the idea of “reception classes” is invoked as an insightful educational borrowing from the Greek experience, when in fact this scheme, used for Roma children, has been heavily criticized for instituting and normalizing neoracism under the ideological cover of respect for reference (Vergidis, 1995). The narrow framing of problems in a multicultural school as a “language problem” is also reflected in institutional blindness to the racialization of allόglossi and teachers’ negative reaction to migrants and refugees’ use of “their” language. Interviews with teachers in Cvetan Dimov do not register any distress with the inadequacy of teaching material or the added difficulty of having to teach minority students who do not know the language of instruction.  In fact, the “language problem” is framed only as a “learning difficulty” and not a “teaching difficulty.”  The only kind of aporia registered in interviews with teachers is whether they are correct in discouraging students from using their native language. Despite variations in teachers’ framings of the “language problem”, a comparative analysis of findings suggests that teachers (a) do not hesitate to hold migrant, refugee or ethnic students (and their parents, as in the case of Greece) accountable for not learning or not making enough efforts to learn the language of instruction and (b) treat the effort put into the learning of the language of instruction by the students as indicator of the their will to learn (and, in the case of Greece and Cyprus, their will to become integrated in a Greek setting as well).  It is assumed that those who have the will to learn, they will learn anyway, despite structural inequalities, language barriers and other obstacles.  Although it is applied specifically to the mixed language class, this line of thinking is not different from the reasoning used in neoliberal accounts of schooling which, in substantiating excellence, treat that, variously, as the mobilizing force, the product, and the hero (always individual) of an entrepreneurial school success story. Findings from the three national contexts diverge with regards to the use of native language in the classroom.  In fact, our research shows that there are more commonalities between Macedonia and Cyprus rather than Cyprus and Greece. Zavos reports that in general, Kerameikos teachers adopt a more liberal attitude to students’ capacity to use their mother tongue, considering knowledge of the mother tongue an important aspect of children’s identity, which they should retain and develop.  This liberal approach is expressed especially with regards to Albanian students. Lack of formal language training in Albanian students’ mother tongue is considered a problem, and an impoverishment of their cultural capital. Teachers do not go as far as advocating the teaching of students’ languages at school even though they consider that Albanian students will eventually lose their language: Of course, unfortunately, they will lose it.  Where are they going to use it? They do not learn it in school, ok, orally yes [they might preserve it], because of the home, the family. Growing up, getting a job […] How is their family going to be?  They might end up together with a Greek, a Pakistani, an Afghani.  You never know.  Their mother tongue will be lost. They will lose it, that’s for sure.  Unfortunately, for it should be this way (Interview with Nano, Greek Report). Learning and speaking Albanian is for children of Albanian background a complex issue, according to teachers’ views. The school contributes towards legitimizing or discrediting the students’ mother tongue, but other factors outside the school also play a role. Most importantly, Albanian children refrain from speaking Albanian in public because they do not want to be identified as Albanian and would rather pass as Greek. But poor knowledge and command of Albanian can also present problems for these children when visiting family back in Albania, where they are treated with some disdain, by their peers, for not knowing proper Albanian. In fact, teachers contend that even though they do not want to be seen as Albanian in Greece, they would still like to have more formal instruction in Albanian, a provision that, in some teachers’ views, should be offered by the school itself, thus setting an example of tolerance of ethno-cultural difference. In contrast to Albanians who want to integrate by passing as Greek, and relinquishing the signs of difference, linguistic, cultural or historical, Afghan refugee children enjoy speaking their language and introducing their own words in class. While this is not explained, it is considered funny by some of the teachers, as well as too demanding for them to follow: At the beginning, in order to learn, anything that I was trying to teach them they would say that in Afghan, for me, but unfortunately I did not take the time to write these down, it would have been very nice for me to learn those [words, phrases]. So, I taught them something, they taught me too.  I was never good at learning languages, otherwise they would have taught me a lot.  Even now, yesterday in the zoo I was telling them “This animal is …like this” and they would tell me, “A, Ma’am, in Farsi this way” (Interview with Machdi, Greek Report). In some teachers’ accounts, speaking Albanian in school also becomes a resource or means for students to enact their autonomy from teachers, or other students, by using an inaccessible language - code, such as Albanian, to create and control their own separate culture. Zavos argues that teachers’ attitudes to the students’ use of Albanian reflect views that language functions as a mediator of national difference and a catalyst of cultural intimacy, For example, Greek teachers, who listened to their grandmothers speaking Albanian dialects at home, can now recognize similar words spoken by present day Albanian migrant children, and feel moved to identify with them. In a sense, these students and their families represent long lost relatives: You know, I am Arvanitissa as well, and I know it […] when I was a little girl I knew it better that what I know it now […] I heard my mother, my grandmother, and you know, when they wanted to say something that children were not supposed to hear, they said it in Arvanitika.  That was a motive for you to want to understand, to know what is going on in the family […] Now, I like it [Albanian language], for as I listen to this, it [Arvanitika] comes bacj to me and I feel a kind of pleasure. (Interview with Nano, Greek Report) Migrants/refugees’ (Cyprus) and minority students’ (Macedonia) use of native language is not mediated neither as a process of cultural interaction nor as an interesting class interaction.  It is rather perceived as something that must be contained.  While making this comparison, however, we must keep in mind that all data from Macedonia and most data from Cyprus on the use of native languages in the classroom are collected from high schools, whereas in the case of Greece data were collected from an Elementary school (specifically, a school where the majority of students speak a native language other than the official language of instruction). The following example from the Cypriot Report shows how the use of native languages in the classroom is constructed as an expression of rudeness and a sign of conspiratorial action: Nina (the “reactionary Pontian girl” of the class), is called out by the teacher to solve a math problem on the blackboard.  A male classmate tells something to her in Russian and she replies to him, also in Russian, in an angry tone. “Come on, please Nina, don’t talk about these things in your language.” (Note: Nina’s native language is Georgian and not Russian) Later, another student, Maria (also Pontian) is asked to come out solve an equation but she does not know the answer. “Eighteen” [dekaochtó], the other students shout from below in Greek. “Eighteen”, Nina also shouts to Maria in Georgian. The teacher (female) turns to Nina and reprimands her again in a really strict tone: “Please, stop telling her the answer and, even more, telling her the answer in your language so as to laugh/cheat at me” (KC Fieldnotes, Phaneromeni Gymnasium Nicosia) The following example, from the Macedonian report, shows a situation where using Albanian (the student’s native language) in the Macedonian classroom is considered unacceptable: Researcher: “How do they speak among themselves, in their mother tongue, right? Teacher: Oh yes, and I  scold them because I don’t understand. And they say – but I speak to him. Ahaa, but I don’t care, maybe you say to him: look at her how she is.. But I don’t speak about you. I don’t know that, you will speak Macedonian. And it is so hard for them. I give them hard time”. Interviews with students from Macedonia and Cyprus also register how minority and migrant/refugee students negotiate the experience of this difficulty, variously, in silence, with anger, humor and defiance.   The first example is that of Sabina, a Bosnian girl is stuying in the Macedonian class.  Sabina is quite competent in Macedonian language but she has also learned Albanian in order to feel more comfortable in the school. R.: You understand both Albanian and Turkish, how did you feel before, when you didn’t understand? S.: If they started to laugh and look at me I thought that they talk about me and felt uncomfortable. R.: What did you find out after you learned the languages, was this true? S.: I realized that they didn’t talk about me, but about something else. R.: You experience this as something personal when you don’t speak the language? S.: When you don’t know the language it is much harder. R.: Was it the main reason for you to learn it? S.: Well, from the entrance in the school, when guys from the security speak to me in Albanian and most of others too and I say I don’t understand you, they said it is your problem and you should learn it.   The second example, that of an Albanian boy studying in the Macedonian class, shows how constructions of gender identities are intersecting with performances of linguistic competence and stamina. In the interview cited below, the boy foregrounds his learning of Macedonian and undermines any difficulties, even though participatory observation findings show that Albanian boys keep being together in their small groups, ignoring the educational process that goes on parallel with their games, conversations, jokes, or just not being there, missing the classes. R.: How did you accept to study in Macedonian language? You studied in Albanian until 8th grade I suppose? G.: Yes, yes. R.: And you still don’t know Macedonian like you know Albanian, how did you accept to study in Macedonian? G.: Well, I had low grades, I wanted to study in Albanian but they didn’t accept my documents, so I transferred to the Macedonian..: R.: Wasn’t a problem for you, didn’t you want to go to another school to study in Albanian?   G.: No, it is not a problem, we learned Macedonian in primary school as a subject and I knew something and here we can learn it better. (Mini focus group, May 29 2009) The third example, from the Cypriot Report, shows that classroom experiences of communication gaps and the normalization of language borders are sometimes negotiated by students as a performative terrain where they can reclaim positionalities of power. During a TGSOL lesson, the class (all are Arabs, except one Moldavian student) make a lot of noise. The most troublesome of all is Sahim who makes all the time side comments in Arabic.  The teacher keeps reprimanding him: “Didn’t I tell you a thousand times that it is rude to speak Arabic in front of people who do not know Arabic?”  Sahim keeps ignoring her remarks.  Finally the teacher shifts to tougher measures of control: Teacher: (GR) I will send you to Mr Neophytos if you do not stop [“Tha se steílo ston Kýrio Neophyto an den stamatíseis”]. Sahim: (GR) No Ma’am … [“Óxi, Kyría”] … (GR) To the (EN) “Immigration Police” [“Sto Migration”] Teacher: (GR) What did you say? [“Ti eípes?”] Sahim: (GR) Nothing Ma’am!!!  …About the Arábians… Ha ha ha [“Típote kyría!!! … gia toys Arápies.” (The class bursts into laughter.) Sahim not only is disrupting the language lesson but he is also enacting a border which will later be turned by both him and the teacher into a warlike front.  Her teacher’s threat to send Sahim to Mr Neophytos (the Physical Education teacher in charge of the Arab boys) introduces officially the order of power.  Sahim both reiterates and expands her gesture, invoking an ever tougher disciplinary measure, that is, the reporting of an Arab refugee by a Greek Cypriot to the Immigration Police (implying the threat of arrest and/or deportation).  Whereas the teacher is trying to contain Sahim’s disruptive behavior within the borders of the classroom and the school’s authorized disciplinary mechanisms (both are topoi of exception, in that both of them operate under exceptional rules which have been specifically developed for the management of the allóglossi Arabs of the school), Sahim is trying to politicize their confrontation and question the significance of the boundaries between school order and state control, the school’s mechanisms for containing disruption  (for learning’s sake, for students’ sake) and the Immigration Police’s mechanisms of surveillance, threat and deportation (for society’s sake). What Sahim eventually seems to be doing is to say aloud, in front of the class and the teacher, the same thing that all Arab boys in the specific school have been saying individually and discreetly in their interviews with the researcher, that is, “They hate the Arabs”, “they hate us”, “All Arabs out of Cyprus”.  This scene seems to confirm the hypothesis that in the discursive context of an intercultural interaction, a context characterized by asymmetry of power and dominated by normative monolingualism, there is still a possibility for subjects to reposition themselves as agents of defiance despite the fact that their subjectivity is originally enacted though their institutional interpellation as both educationally deficient and ethnically dangerous outsiders.  The same scene that, from the teacher’s perspective, constitutes an exemplary example of an alloglossos’, a migrant’s, a minority’s, or even a deranged other’s disruptive behavior, from some other perspective it could be viewed as the transformation of the apolitical classroom into a politicized field where new solidarities can be enounced, denounced, empowered or punished, but, nevertheless, tried out as legitimate acts of intercultural politics. In this section we analyze some of the sociograms produced during Phase III.  As explained in the methodology section, data on social relations were elicited by asking all students of a classroom to state their preferred (or non-preferred classmates) in regards to scenarios of social groupings in academic or leisure contexts.  Social dynamics as mapped in the sociograms below are compared and contrasted to teachers’ views about students’ cross-cultural and ethnic group dynamics. 46th Elementary School, Kerameikos Diagram 1: Sociogram for School Work As the above sociograms show, the most ‘popular’ students in class, around which a cluster of other students gather, are two Albanians, Alvina and Esli. These two students are systematically chosen by their Albanian and Greek classmates as preferred choice for both schoolwork and leisure activities. Interestingly, while choices guiding leisure activities seem to be separated according to gender identities, boys choosing other boys, and girls choosing other girls, choices regarding schoolwork cross the gender divide. Significantly, the two Afghan students are also systematically avoided by other students, and form an island in the midst of the class. Diagram 2: Sociogram for Holidays Given the composition of the class, we observe that the majority of Albanian students impacts social relations in the classroom. It is Albanian, rather than Greek, students, who become the nexus points of social activity. Greek students either form alliances with Albanian students, or are marginalized. Albanian and Greek students together form a group that excludes other nationalities, such as the Afghan students. Socially, Albanians appear to be the dominant group. This, however, needs to be juxtaposed to the dominance of Greek cultural and educational discourses, which are reproduced by Greek and Albanian students in their interviews, and, particularly, in the common front that develops against other foreigners, who are considered culturally less adapted and more violent. Christakeio Elementary School Sociograms were developed for five classrooms in Christakeio Elementary School. As explained in the chapter on methodology, social dynamics were mapped with reference to both positive and negative preferences. This section provides some meta-analysis for sociograms discussed in more detail in the Cypriot National Report.   In classroom sociograms we can observe three patterns of separation between Greek Cypriot and migrant students: (a) ethic clustering, where migrants and Greek Cypriots indicate intraethnic preference (Diagram 3), (b) center-periphery deployments, where all kids indicate preference mostly for Greek Cypriots, with Greek Cypriots locayed in the center/s of the popularity webs and most migrant kids marginalized (and also isolated) at the peripheries (Diagram 4), and (c) combinations of the first two patterns (this is the mose frequent pattern).  Ethnic clustering tends to be more intense in break time than in a classroom settings and the crossing of ethnic ‘lines’ (mostly by migrants who combine high academic performance with markers of high socioeconomic status) tends to be one way (the ‘crossers’ choose and are chosen by Greek Cypriot but do not choose to associate with other migrant). When we compare these sociograms with teachers’ perceptions of ethnic relations (as registered in interviews), we observe that teachers are sensitive only to patterns of ethnic clustering and overstep (not see or underrate) patterns of center/periphery.  In other words, teachers consider a sign of “ghettocization” the fact the migrants ‘isolate themselves’ and ‘speak amongst themselves’ in ‘their’ language, but do not make a note of the most prevalent pattern of exclusion, that is, the dispersal and isolation of the majority of migrant kids at the peripheries of social networks.  Classroom diagrams mapping othering and invisibility (i.e., class students perceived as unimportant, inconsequential) were also developped by asking students to designate other students in their class “whose absence does not matter” (Diagram 5).  When comparing mappings of marginality in these diagrams to mappings of social preference in Diagrams 3 and 4, we observe that othering is more consistent in classrooms with center/periphery deployments rather than cluster patterns of ethic separation.  In classroom G6-A, for example, three of the four kids whose absence is perceived as insignificant are the same three migrants kids we were not picked as friends by any classmate, migrant or non-migrant (Diagram 3).  In contrast, in classroom G6-B, where the four most marginal migrant girls form an ethnic cluster amongst themselves, these girls seem to ‘escape’ their othering by peers as inconsequential. In classroom sociograms we can also trace relations of intersectionality (gender, ethnicity, competence in Greek).  Comparing Diagrams 3 and 4 we notice that the gender clustering in G6-A is slightly destabilized with regards to the math group project scenario (as opposed to yard/play scenario).  Girls express preference for boys and boys express preferences for girls as possible group partners in math projects.  These preferences, however, do not cross ethnic lines (Greek Cypriots would not prefer to work with a migrant of the opposite sex, even if that peer was among the most popular students).  We notice, however, that in classrooms with Roma children, the Roma group mitigates the gender divide, particularly in break time/ school yard settings.  It appears that in this case an interesting kind of antagonistic intersectionality operates between gender and ethnicity: instead of “sticking” to their gender and their “ethnic” group, Roma kids form ethnic networks across gender lines.  The force for these crossings can be attributed to a combination of factors, i.e., the Roma comprise, numerically, a small ethnic group which at the same time is visible, and some of them are related by family bonds. Another interesting finding is that some of the migrant children who were identified by teachers (in interviews) and researchers (fieldnote journals) as good examples of integrated migrants (they are popular and seem ‘connected’), are actually not included in the inner circles of social preference networks.  Furthermore, they are usually included among those students indicated by their peers (migrants and non-migrants) as the ones “most likely to be expelled”.  It appears that these children are attracting the adults’ attention (both the teachers’ and the researchers) because they are ‘acting out’ but, for the same, reason, they are considered outsides by their peers (both migrants and non-migrants) since obedience to classroom norms and academic performance constitutes for all kids a strong criterion for choosing “good” classmates.   Finally, some remarks can be made on the reliability and appropriateness of sociograms as tools for mapping children’s social networks.  The first remark is that classroom sociograms can only measure social dynamics that develop within the classroom. In the case of a traditional Cypriot classroom, a classroom sociogram could probably give us a reliable picture for a child’s social networking.  This, however, does not apply to the case of a multicultural classroom because migrant kids (particularly those that appear to be the most marginalized and isolated in classroom sociograms) form ethnic social networks that stretch beyond, despite or sometimes even against the classroom’s range.  Interviews with migrant kids show that their closest friends are children from other classrooms who are either relatives (siblings or cousins) or neighbors (sometimes from a very different age cohort).  The second remark is about the cultural bias of the questions that which were used in order to elicit statements of social preferences (e.g., “who would you prefer to go to the movies with?”, “who would you invite to your house for your birthday party?”).  As it came up in interviews with migrant kids, places like McDonalds, popular little spots (e.g., Galactica snack bar) and even hotel lounges with electronic games are among the most popular “hang out” places for them.  Our research also shows that extra-school social networks are activity rather than place oriented (e.g., roaming in the neighborhood and taking long bicycle rides with friends are indeicated by boys as their most preferred afternoon activities).  This suggests that research on migrant children, social dynamics and intercultural interactions must look for spatial and temporal framings of social networking beyond the classroom or the school, as well as for framings of social and cultural activities that overstep the binaries private/social or school/family.  Forming new interdisciplinary partnerships between intercultural education and urban studies might open up new fields of study for intercultural research. Conclusions Conclusions are outlined with regards to context, methodology and findings. “Context matters.”  Treated as a cardinal methodological principle in comparative education, an argument against the logic of globalism or a guideline for re-enacting the vital link between education and people’s empowerment, the idea that context matters has been overstepped in most EU discourses and agendas on intercultural education.  This has led to the unreflective adaptation and reproduction of top-to-down neo-liberal conceptualizations of intercultural education, such as “promoting respect and tolerance for others” (i.e., migrants, refugees and ethnic minorities), “acceptance of difference” and developing “cultural awareness” in multicultural societies.  Our research in three different European National contexts suggests that these conceptualizations have prevailed in national educational agendas on intercultural education for various reasons: (a) they are compatible with a eurocentric conceptualization of “European integration” and with the securitization of migration, migrants and borders, (b) they leave untroubled the notion that hospitality is conditional and that integration requires assimilation, (c) they are compatible with the politics of the nation, (d) their emphasis on culture provides an alibi for educational reforms’ silence on race, class, sexism and heteronormativity as prevalent systems of thought and rationalities of governance in schools, and (e) they are compatible with neo-liberal understandings of school autonomy and student excellence which distract attention from structural analyses situated within economic and cultural contexts.   Research in the three national contexts shows a gap between national declarations for promoting intercultural dialogue and actual arrangements and practices developed in schools.  Problems, challenges and opportunities for institutional change ensuing from intercultural interactions in schools are left to the schools to deal with within the “ordinary” school life.  Multicultural schools can fail but “ordinary” school life is preserved.  Our research shows that some of the measures, tactics and structures of feeling (tolerance or fear) developed in situ with regards to the integration of “non-ordinary” students (migrants, ethnic minorities, refugees, asylum seekers, Roma) into “ordinary” settings operate under to the logic of exception: “present absences” (Cyprus), “cultural intimacy” (Greece) and “parallel lives” (Macedonia).  These produce forms of power and subjectification which are based on the antonomic (within) view that “other” students are extra-ordinary (too violent, too masculine, too ethnic, too coverer, too traumatized of war, too Afghani, too Albanian, too Arabic, and so on) but the boundaries of gender and culture and the identity of the Nation are “ordinary” and must be respected.   The focus of our research on case studies, while adopting a qualitative research methodology, raises issues of comparability, representativeness and generalizability.  Each school constitutes a unique setting and a unique terrain of intercultural and interethnic interactions.  Kerameikos is not an ordinary Elementary school in that it comprises a majority (60%) of migrant (specifically Albanian) student population and a comparatively large percentage (17%) of refugee students, placed at the school temporarily, whose status in the school and in Greece is unclear and unsettled. Cvetan Dimov is a very big high school with 1800 students, unique in that it operates in two shifts (Macedonian and Albanian), also often cited in TV news as an extraordinary example of “fights, quarrel and knives” becoming an ordinary part of a school’s life.. The schools selected for multi-sited research in Cyprus also are not typical schools in that some of them have comprised a majority of migrants for more than a decade and some of them, relatively homogeneous until very recently, have received a significant number of refugees and asylum seekers (most of them from Iraq) over the last few years (which comprise a school percentage of aproximately 15%).  All these schools where our our fieldword was conducted are not representative of all schools in Greece, Cyprus and Macedonia, and conclusions drawn from our research findings cannot be generalized for all multicultural schools in the three countries and, even less, other EU member states or candidate countries.  However, the tensions, contradictions but also dynamic processes of cultural and social change that take place in these “exceptional” schools are typical of intercultural interactions and tensions that take place in “ordinary” national schools whose function remains oriented to the production of tolerant national citizens and tolerable ethnic others.   Our research shows that teachers and administrators in multicultural schools that learned or strive to learn to live with and serve the educational needs of others do not question the normative, ideological aspects of school and education.  In fact, most of the teachers interviewed consider the multicultural/multiethnic destabilization of their school to be a tentative and temporary condition which will be (or has already been) contained through the enactment of special measures (separate language tracks/shifts, affirmation of the national recognition of minority languages within ethnic tracks, provision of tutorial/remedial classes, flexi-employment of welfare and translation personnel). Once ‘destabilization’ is contained, multicultural/multiethnic schools consider that their balance is restored and thus, like ordinary schools, they must protect and serve, variously, their identity (e.g., ceilings imposed on the percentage of migrants or refugees), the progress of those who have already been integrated, the spirit of tolerance that has been reached, the securitization of the violent, the cultural attribution of violence to out-of-school sources, the confirmation of national or ethnic monolingualism within schools or school tracks, the disowning of multi-lingual language uses that becomes defiant of language order/s, and the school’s social cohesion against those whose cultural difference is perceived as too unbridgeable to become integrated in schools.   However, our fieldwork shows that the modus operandi of multicultural schools is both continuous and precarious and that schools will always feel at-risk against new arriving others, Roma others, Asian others, Arab others, “mental” others, defiant ethnic non-others (e.g., Albanians who become entitled by birth and successful acculturation to citizen rights but are still deemed deficient in love of the Greek nation, as in Greece; Bosnians, Albanians or other minorities whose border-crossings destabilize the exchange between national [Macedonian] subjection and comfort zones of ethnic identification, as in Macedonia; Turkish Cypriots whose indigenous, secular muslimness embarrasses Islamophobia and its imperative to discern between Europe and its others, as in the case of Cyprus). In this sense, the interactions and tensions that develop in national schools or ethnic tracks are not that different whether these schools have to deal with majorities or minorities of others.  This condition exposes the limits of solutions that attribute cultural difference and social disturbance to others and renders apparent the need to re-think critically the goals of intercultural education, the exemption and exceptionalization of multicultural schools, the inconspicuous intertwnings of effective school organization and management with processes of racialization and racial thinking, and the normative ideologies of national and/or ethnic schools in multicultural societies.   With regards to gender, we observe that normative gender thinking (stereotypes on masculinities and feminities, homosociality and heteronormativity) in receiving or majority societies intersects with, reinforces and it is reinforced by multicultural schools’ culturalist approaches to the perceived difference of others. It is often uncritically assumed by multicultural schools that the construction of gender identities by migrants and ethic minorities explicates and crystallizes native cultural codes and values and thus programs for cultural awareness and policies for migrant control or migrant protection conform to gender regimes under the ideological coverage of culturally sensitive approaches.  Fears of troublesome ethnicized masculinities, surveillance of perceived predatorial and/or hypersexualized masculinities and femininities, and tolerance to ‘subjugated’ scarfed girls are often fed by orientalist and heteronormative ideas.   In our fieldwork in schools we have also registered performances of troublesome ‘scarfed’ girls, de-ethnicized masculinities and silenced-but-eager discourses of desire, all of which testify to the possibilities of gender trouble and intercultural interactions to destabilize regimes of ethnicity and the homosocial fraternity of the Nation.  Whether schools will recognize these possibilities is something that remains contingent on the willingness to repoliticize intercultural education. Policy Recommendations Teach about the histories and trajectories of migrations and minorities Teach the histories of imperialism, race and racial thinking Introduce criteria and checks for school disciplinary mechanisms, student divisions and classifications, exceptions and colorblind responses to learning difficulties (e.g., Do these arrangements implicate the racialization of students?  Do they promote their growth as learners? etc.) Address the multiple localities of school conflict (in ethnic-cultural and gender divisions, socio-economic and legal status inequalities and sense of disempowerment within schools and schooling’s contribution to and influence by social and economic contexts) instead of attributing cultural and psychological characteristics to violence Develop systematic and ongoing forms of localized teacher training and integrate this training into teachers yearly work load Develop learning environments that allow non-native speakers to learn the language of instruction and, in parallel, to enroll as regular students in academic classes Teach the language of instruction as a Foreign/Other Language Expand the range of foreign languages which are taught in school and which are offered for credit to both migrants and non-migrants, minority and majority students Encourage student learning by teaching – peer tutoring Foster school-parent collaboration and neighborhood communication Develop channels of communication and interaction between academic research on ethnicity and gender and school-based initiatives for policy reform and curriculum development Re-evaluate critically national strategies and policies for intercultural education (Is migration understood as a dynamic, two-way process?  Are problems attributed to migrant/minority others, to institutional deficiencies, etc.? 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