Voyages: Hélène Amouzou's Self-Portraits and the Stages of Invisibility

When I arrived in Brussels from Togo, I had to go through the bureaucracy that migrants face but had no citizenship papers and no right to stay, which meant I couldn’t look for work. So I had to stay at home without any kind of assistance. I began going to church and met a woman there with a background in video editing who offered to train me in video and film production. I lost contact with her after she left church but I wanted to learn more. Eventually, I found a college, the Sint-Jans-Molenbeek Academy of Drawing and Visual Arts in Brussels, where I could study film and photography. (...) I soon discovered my creative path and maximised the technical and creative potential of analogue photography.

I clearly recall the first photograph I ever took. From that first photo, my focus was always on producing work for myself and not for public show. In fact, one of the requirements for this three-year course was to produce a self-portrait to be judged before course assessors. Even then, I didn’t want my face to be seen so just took a photo of my body and kept myself anonymous. But the assessors encouraged me to have a more candid approach and share my story. As I progressed with the course, a teacher remarked on the quality of my work and encouraged me to approach a Brussels gallery to exhibit my pictures. But I felt uncomfortable – I was quite shy at the time. Even after the exhibition, I didn’t pursue other exhibitions because I wasn’t ready to share my personal story with the world. But I guess the transition had already occurred.

(...) I didn’t have the official papers that gave me the right to stay in Belgium so I felt I was always on a journey. I had a child with me yet couldn’t give her safety, security, a home or an identity. Indeed, I do have an identity but in Europe and Belgium I just feel like a nobody. I feel I am on this constant journey to find acceptance and in search of somewhere to settle down and find peace. So the pictures I create are documenting this journey to a place where you can just be yourself and don’t need ID cards and papers and can just exist as a human being.

(...) I feel invisible. I feel like I don’t exist. Yes, I have family connections – I have left family behind in Togo but here in Europe I am alone. On the streets of Belgium, no one really sees me and this is a very personal pain. It’s difficult to share and describe so I document it creatively through my photographs.

Self-portraiture is a way of writing without words. My aim is to reveal the deepest parts of myself.
Hélène Amouzou

photographs via and via and via and via and via 

Giovanni and Roberto in Sardinia

Photographer Giovanni Corabi and creative director Roberto Ortu spent two weeks in Sardinia capturing "the rebellious youth" living on an island where the "traditions are strong and can sometimes feel heavy" making many people decide to leave and for those who stay hard to find their own voice. Corabi and Ortu celebrate "the rebellious youth that lives on the island but is an active part of where the culture is headed, somewhere between tradition and modernity" including migration (via).

photographs via

Narrative images: Disco in Wolverhampton (1978)

A decade after Enoch Powell's speech on immigration, in anticipation of its anniversary, the Sunday Times Magazine commissioned British photographer Chris Steele-Perkins to travel to Wolverhampton to capture the effects of Powell's words on ethnic minorities (via). 

 "I sensed that people would rather not talk about it. It was a nasty stain, but they wanted to move on. This [the series] happened ten years after Powell, but this stuff doesn’t wash out that quickly." Chris Steele-Perkins

In the 1950s, Wolverhampton's economic growth was booming needing more workforce. Newspapers published stories stating that Britain's boom could only be maintained by attracting recruits from abroad, i.e. the "Continent", Ireland, and the colonies. Commonwealth immigration was encouraged by the governement, however, it was unprepared for the number of people seeking employment in the factories which led to tensions between native residents and immigrant newcomers. The immigrant population (mostly West-Indian and South-Asian) was blamed for lowering wages and taking jobs. In the context of this tension, Enoch Powell, then Conservative MP for Wolverhampton, gave a controversial anti-immigration speech (via).

“It wasn’t a surprise. Powell was on the right of the Tory party, and he had been banging on about immigration before. It was just that this was the most extreme version of this kind of prejudice that he had come out with.” Chris Steele-Perkins 

When Steele-Perkins visited Wolverhampton, he found a city different from the rest of Britain,  immigrants who were alienated and given second-hand opportunities (via).

"I am essentially aware of it, as I am not part of the mainstream group. I have a Burmese mother and an English father, and I wasn't born in this country. I can't pretend it's something that happens to other people and is not connected with me." Chris Steele-Perkins

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Enoch Powell's "Rivers of Blood" speech, excerpts (1968)

(...) A week or two ago I fell into conversation with a constituent, a middle-aged, quite ordinary working man employed in one of our nationalised industries.

After a sentence or two about the weather, he suddenly said: "If I had the money to go, I wouldn't stay in this country." I made some deprecatory reply to the effect that even this government wouldn't last for ever; but he took no notice, and continued: "I have three children, all of them been through grammar school and two of them married now, with family. I shan't be satisfied till I have seen them all settled overseas. In this country in 15 or 20 years' time the black man will have the whip hand over the white man."

I can already hear the chorus of execration. How dare I say such a horrible thing? How dare I stir up trouble and inflame feelings by repeating such a conversation?

The answer is that I do not have the right not to do so. Here is a decent, ordinary fellow Englishman, who in broad daylight in my own town says to me, his Member of Parliament, that his country will not be worth living in for his children.

I simply do not have the right to shrug my shoulders and think about something else. What he is saying, thousands and hundreds of thousands are saying and thinking - not throughout Great Britain, perhaps, but in the areas that are already undergoing the total transformation to which there is no parallel in a thousand years of English history.

In 15 or 20 years, on present trends, there will be in this country three and a half million Commonwealth immigrants and their descendants. That is not my figure. That is the official figure given to parliament by the spokesman of the Registrar General's Office.

There is no comparable official figure for the year 2000, but it must be in the region of five to seven million, approximately one-tenth of the whole population, and approaching that of Greater London. (...) Whole areas, towns and parts of towns across England will be occupied by sections of the immigrant and immigrant-descended population. (...)

The natural and rational first question with a nation confronted by such a prospect is to ask: "How can its dimensions be reduced?" (...)

The answers to the simple and rational question are equally simple and rational: by stopping, or virtually stopping, further inflow, and by promoting the maximum outflow. Both answers are part of the official policy of the Conservative Party.

It almost passes belief that at this moment 20 or 30 additional immigrant children are arriving from overseas in Wolverhampton alone every week - and that means 15 or 20 additional families a decade or two hence. Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make mad. We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependants, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant-descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre. So insane are we that we actually permit unmarried persons to immigrate for the purpose of founding a family with spouses and fiancés whom they have never seen. (...)

Nothing is more misleading than comparison between the Commonwealth immigrant in Britain and the American Negro. The Negro population of the United States, which was already in existence before the United States became a nation, started literally as slaves and were later given the franchise and other rights of citizenship, to the exercise of which they have only gradually and still incompletely come. The Commonwealth immigrant came to Britain as a full citizen, to a country which knew no discrimination between one citizen and another, and he entered instantly into the possession of the rights of every citizen, from the vote to free treatment under the National Health Service.

(...) The sense of being a persecuted minority which is growing among ordinary English people in the areas of the country which are affected is something that those without direct experience can hardly imagine.

I am going to allow just one of those hundreds of people to speak for me:

“Eight years ago in a respectable street in Wolverhampton a house was sold to a Negro. Now only one white (a woman old-age pensioner) lives there. This is her story. She lost her husband and both her sons in the war. So she turned her seven-roomed house, her only asset, into a boarding house. She worked hard and did well, paid off her mortgage and began to put something by for her old age. Then the immigrants moved in. With growing fear, she saw one house after another taken over. The quiet street became a place of noise and confusion. Regretfully, her white tenants moved out.

“The day after the last one left, she was awakened at 7am by two Negroes who wanted to use her 'phone to contact their employer. When she refused, as she would have refused any stranger at such an hour, she was abused and feared she would have been attacked but for the chain on her door. Immigrant families have tried to rent rooms in her house, but she always refused. Her little store of money went, and after paying rates, she has less than £2 per week. “She went to apply for a rate reduction and was seen by a young girl, who on hearing she had a seven-roomed house, suggested she should let part of it. When she said the only people she could get were Negroes, the girl said, "Racial prejudice won't get you anywhere in this country." So she went home.

“The telephone is her lifeline. Her family pay the bill, and help her out as best they can. Immigrants have offered to buy her house - at a price which the prospective landlord would be able to recover from his tenants in weeks, or at most a few months. She is becoming afraid to go out. Windows are broken. She finds excreta pushed through her letter box. When she goes to the shops, she is followed by children, charming, wide-grinning piccaninnies. They cannot speak English, but one word they know. "Racialist," they chant. When the new Race Relations Bill is passed, this woman is convinced she will go to prison. And is she so wrong? I begin to wonder.” The other dangerous delusion from which those who are wilfully or otherwise blind to realities suffer, is summed up in the word "integration." To be integrated into a population means to become for all practical purposes indistinguishable from its other members. (...)

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photograph by Magnum photographer Chris-Steele Perkins via

Children Vanishing

Every day, about 17 unaccompanied child migrants go missing in Europe. Most of them come from Morocco, Algeria, Eritrea, Guinea, and Afghanistan, 90% of them are boys. Among the migrants, these children are the ones most vulnerable to violence, trafficking, and exploitation (via).



photograph (UNICEF, Sanadiki) via

The Migrant Acceptance Index

According to an index that is based on three questions Gallup asked in 138 countries in 2016 and 2017, nine of the ten countries that score a 2.39 or lower are Eastern European countries, most of them  located along the Balkan route. They also happen to be the ones most strongly opposed to accepting Syrian refugees. In Macedonia, Montenegro and Hungary, at least two-thirds say that their countries should not admit Syrian refugees ... a predisposition these countries already had before any "influx of refugees" (via).

But there is evidence that people in these countries -- many of which have long histories of conflicts with neighboring countries -- were already predisposed to be suspicious of outsiders, and the influx of refugees further inflamed these attitudes. Even before the crisis, the majority across Eastern Europe said that migration levels in their countries should be decreased. The same is true of Israel, where three in four residents in 2012 -- the year before the country finished building a fence along its border with Egypt to keep out migrants from Africa -- said they wanted immigration decreased. 

The three questions:
Immigrants living in this country                                  A good thing
An immigrant becoming your neighbor                         A bad thing
An immigrant marrying one of your close relatives       (It depends)*

The least accepting countries:
1) Macedonia: 1.47
2) Montenegro: 1.63
3) Hungary: 1.69
4) Serbia: 1.80
5) Slovakia: 1.83

The most accepting countries:
1) Iceland: 8.26
2) New Zealand: 8.25
3) Rwanda: 8.16
4) Sierra Leone: 8.05
5) Mali: 8.03

 
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photograph via

When Art Theft Becomes Artwork

"I decided to steal the painting." In 1976, German performance artist Ulay (1943-2020) stole Spitzweg's painting "The Poor Poet" - which also happened to be Hitler's favourite one and an icon of the Third Reich - from Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie, ran with his hands and feet through the snow and drove "with the museum guards at his heels" to the district of Kreuzberg at the time known for its large percentage of immigrant workers mainly coming from Turkey and rather a ghetto. Before entering an impoverished Turkish family's home, he called the police, then hung up the painting in their living room.

Here, Ulay ran through the snow with the painting under his arm, to a Turkish family, who had agreed to let him shoot a documentary film in their home—however unaware that it involved a stolen painting. Before entering the family’s home, the artist called the police from a phone booth and asked for the director of the museum to pick up the painting. He then hung up the painting in the home of the family “for the reason to bring this whole issue of Turkish discriminated foreign workers into the discussion. To bring into discussion the institute’s marginalization of art. To bring a discussion about the correspondence between art institutes from the academy to museums to whatever. (via)

This demonstrative act, which lasted around thirty hours, expressed the artist’s personal conflict with his German origins and, at the same time, raised awareness about the discrimination of foreign workers as well as the marginalization of art in post-war Germany because – as Ulay stated years later – “everyone should have art in their homes”. (via)

::: Watch: How I Stole a Painting

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photograph via

The New Normal: Racism after Brexit.

Several studies show a clear link between xenophobia and support for Brexit - regardless of voter age, gender, and even education (via). Hutchings and Sullivan (2019) argue that the vote to leave the EU was no surprise given the "increasing negativity regarding immigration" over the past ten years and have no doubt that prejudice was a factor in the Brexit vote.



In other words, racism led to Brexit. However, Brexit is also encouraging people to blatantly display prejudice. According to a survey, ethnic minorities are facing more overt racism since the Brexit referendum (2016: 58%, 2019: 71%). Authors see a causal correlation explaining the trend with the divisive rhetoric used in public by e.g. certain candidates making racist feel more confident in showing abuse and discrimination which again seems to have become the new normal. (via).

What people see is acceptable, they do.
Golec de Zavala

People have those sorts of beliefs in a more or less stable way. That would mean that they had them before Brexit. Those attitudes were made salient by the Leave campaign, and were more likely to mobilise these people.
Golec de Zavala

In recent years the public discourses on Polish migration in the UK have rapidly turned hostile, especially in the context of economic crisis in 2008, and subsequently after the EU referendum in 2016. While initially Poles have been perceived as a ‘desirable’ migrant group and labelled as ‘invisible’ due to their whiteness, this perception shifted to the representation of these migrants as taking jobs from British workers, putting a strain on public services and welfare. While racist and xenophobic violence has been particularly noted following the Brexit vote, Polish migrants experienced various forms of racist abuse before that.
Alina Rzepnikowska

- Hutchings, P. B. & Sullivan, K. E. (2019). Prejudice and the Brexit vote: a tangled web. Palgrave Communications, 5, link
- photograph of The Who by Art Kane via and via and by Colin Jones via

The World of Yesterday: Memories of a European, by Stefan Zweig

"Completed less than a year before Zweig killed himself, “The World of Yesterday” is less an autobiography- he mentions his two marriages only in passing - than a manifesto about his era. He portrays himself as an idealist, devoted to the cause of international brotherhood, even as Europe collapses around him."
Leo Carey, The New Yorker



“For I have indeed been torn from all my roots, even from the earth that nourished them, more entirely than most in our times. I was born in 1881 in the great and mighty empire of the Habsburg Monarchy, but you would look for it in vain on the map today; it has vanished without trace. I grew up in Vienna, an international metropolis for two thousand years, and had to steal away from it like a thief in the night before it was demoted to the status of a provincial German town. My literary work, in the language in which I wrote it, has been burnt to ashes in the country where my books made millions of readers their friends. So I belong nowhere now, I am a stranger or at the most a guest everywhere. Even the true home of my heart’s desire, Europe, is lost to me after twice tearing itself suicidally to pieces in fratricidal wars. Against my will, I have witnessed the most terrible defeat of reason and the most savage triumph of brutality in the chronicles of time. Never - and I say so not with pride but with shame - has a generation fallen from such intellectual heights as ours to such moral depths.”

“Nationalism emerged to agitate the world only after the war, and the first visible phenomenon which this intellectual epidemic of our century brought about was xenophobia; morbid dislike of the foreigner, or at least fear of the foreigner. The world was on the defensive against strangers, everywhere they got short shrift. The humiliations which once had been devised with criminals alone in mind now were imposed upon the traveler, before and during every journey. There had to be photographs from right and left, in profile and full face, one’s hair had to be cropped sufficiently to make the ears visible; fingerprints were taken, at first only the thumb but later all ten fingers; furthermore, certificates of health, of vaccination, police certificates of good standing, had to be shown; letters of recommendation were required, invitations to visit a country had to be procured; they asked for the addresses of relatives, for moral and financial guarantees, questionnaires, and forms in triplicate and quadruplicate needed to be filled out.”

“It is generally accepted that getting rich is the only and typical goal of the Jew. Nothing could be further from the truth. Riches are to him merely a stepping stone, a means to the true end, and in no sense the real goal. The real determination of the Jew is to rise to a higher cultural plane in the intellectual world.”

“In 1938, after Austria, our universe had become accustomed to inhumanity, to lawlessness, and brutality as never in centuries before. In a former day the occurrences in unhappy Vienna alone would have been sufficient to cause international proscription, but in 1938 the world conscience was silent or merely muttered surlily before it forgot and forgave.”

“The Nazis no longer resorted to hypocritical pretexts about the urgency of opposing and eliminating Marxism. They did not just rob and steal, they gave free rein to every kind of private vengeful instinct. University professors were forced to scrub the streets with their bare hands; devout, white-bearded Jews were hauled into the synagogues by young men bawling with glee, and made to perform knee-bends while shouting “Heil Hitler!” in chorus. They rounded up innocent citizens in the streets like rabbits and dragged them away to sweep the steps of the SA barracks. All the sick, perverted fantasies they had thought up over many nights of sadistic imaginings were now put into practice in broad daylight. They broke into apartments and tore the jewels out of the ears of trembling women—it was the kind of thing that might have happened when cities were plundered hundreds of years ago in medieval wars, but the shameless pleasure they took in the public infliction of pain, psychological torture and all the refinements of humiliation was something new. All this has been described not by one victim but by thousands, and a more peaceful age, not morally exhausted like our own, will shudder some day to read what horrors were inflicted on that cultured city in the twentieth century by a single half-deranged man. For in the midst of his military and political victories, that was Hitler’s most diabolical triumph - one man succeeded in deadening every idea of what is just and right by the constant attrition of excess.”
Stefan Zweig

::: Link to the whole book: READ

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photographs via

Look under your feet

"We know the force of gravity, but not its origins; and to explain why we become attached to our birthplaces we pretend that we are trees and speak of roots. Look under your feet. You will not find gnarled growths sprouting through the soles. Roots, I sometimes think, are a conservative myth, designed to keep us in our places."
Salman Rushdie



photograph by Elliott Erwitt via

International Migrants Day

"Migration is a powerful driver of economic growth, dynamism and understanding. It allows millions of people to seek new opportunities, benefiting communities of origin and destination alike.



But when poorly regulated, migration can intensify divisions within and between societies, expose people to exploitation and abuse, and undermine faith in government.
This month, the world took a landmark step forward with the adoption of the Global Compact for Safe, Orderly and Regular Migration.
Backed with overwhelming support by the membership of the United Nations, the Compact will help us to address the real challenges of migration while reaping its many benefits.
The Compact is people-centered and rooted in human rights.
It points the way toward more legal opportunities for migration and stronger action to crack down on human trafficking.
On International Migrants Day, let us take the path provided by the Global Compact: to make migration work for all."
António Guterres

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photograph by Dorothea Lange via

Enninful's Vogue

"My Vogue is about being inclusive, it’s about diversity. Showing different women, different body shapes, different races, class. To be tackling gender.
Before I got the job I spoke to certain women and they felt they were not represented by the magazine, so I wanted to create a magazine that was open and friendly. A bit like a shop that you are not scared to walk into.
You are going to see all different colours, shapes, ages, genders, religions. That I am very excited about. You are going to see less of models who don’t look so healthy."
Edward Enninful



Edward Enninful is (British) Vogue's first black and male editor-in-chief. While shortly working for Italian Vogue, he led the magazine's first "Black Issue" featuring black models only (via). Before Enninful, Alexandra Shulman was Vogue's editor for 25 years, 25 years in which she gave black models solo covers only twice as otherwise she "would sell fewer copies". Enninful put a black model on his first cover (via).

In 2017, Enninful created the short film "I Am an Immigrant" with "81 of the international fashion community's most recognisable faces" because:

"There is so much unrest in the world right now, I simply wanted to show how beautiful it could be if we all were able to get along. The message is that we are all the same. The people that gave their time to this project, from the director, the subjects, hair, makeup, casting and the team at W, all came with a message of love and optimism."
Edward Enninful

Related postings:

::: Audrey, Givenchy and Diversity in Fashion: LINK
::: The Diversity Coalition & The Fashion Industry: LINK
::: Jeans & Ageism: LINK

The Fortune 284

Since 1955, Fortune Magazine has been ranking the 500 largest US-American companies by total revenue. The Center of American Entrepreneurship analysed the Fortune 500 data for 2017 and found that 43% of them were founded or co-founded by a first- or second-generation immigrant. Among the largest Fortune 500 companies their occurence is even higher (52% of the top 25 firms, 75% of the top 35 firms) (via).



photograph via

Superman and the Undocumented Workers

In Actions Comics #987 - "The Oz Effect" - Superman protects undocumented immigrants from an angry white man who wants to shoot them for taking his job. Superman, once an undocumented immigrant himself, has always stood up for justice. The issue was released a few days ago, at a time Superman's protection is very much needed again.



image via

"The Road Ahead", by Kirk Douglas

I am in my 100th year. When I was born in 1916 in Amsterdam, New York, Woodrow Wilson was our president.

My parents, who could not speak or write English, were emigrants from Russia. They were part of a wave of more than two million Jews that fled the Czar’s murderous pogroms at the beginning of the 20th Century. They sought a better life for their family in a magical country where, they believed, the streets were literally paved with gold.



What they did not realize until after they arrived was that those beautiful words carved into the Statute of Liberty in New York Harbor: “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free,” did not apply equally to all new Americans. Russians, Poles, Italians, Irish and, particularly Catholics and Jews, felt the stigma of being treated as aliens, as foreigners who would never become “real Americans.”

They say there is nothing new under the sun. Since I was born, our planet has traveled around it one hundred times. With each orbit, I’ve watched our country and our world evolve in ways that would have been unimaginable to my parents – and continue to amaze me with each passing year.

In my lifetime, American women won the right to vote, and one is finally the candidate of a major political party. An Irish-American Catholic became president. Perhaps, most incredibly, an African-American is our president today.

The longer I’ve lived, the less I’ve been surprised by the inevitability of change, and how I’ve rejoiced that so many of the changes I’ve seen have been good.



Yet, I’ve also lived through the horrors of a Great Depression and two World Wars, the second of which was started by a man who promised that he would restore his country it to its former greatness.

I was 16 when that man came to power in 1933. For almost a decade before his rise he was laughed at ― not taken seriously. He was seen as a buffoon who couldn’t possibly deceive an educated, civilized population with his nationalistic, hateful rhetoric.

The “experts” dismissed him as a joke. They were wrong.

A few weeks ago we heard words spoken in Arizona that my wife, Anne, who grew up in Germany, said chilled her to the bone. They could also have been spoken in 1933:

“We also have to be honest about the fact that not everyone who seeks to join our country will be able to successfully assimilate. It is our right as a sovereign nation to choose immigrants that we think are the likeliest to thrive and flourish here…[including] new screening tests for all applicants that include an ideological certification to make sure that those we are admitting to our country share our values…”

These are not the American values that we fought in World War II to protect.



Until now, I believed I had finally seen everything under the sun. But this was the kind of fear-mongering I have never before witnessed from a major U.S. presidential candidate in my lifetime.

I have lived a long, good life. I will not be here to see the consequences if this evil takes root in our country. But your children and mine will be. And their children. And their children’s children.

All of us still yearn to remain free. It is what we stand for as a country. I have always been deeply proud to be an American. In the time I have left, I pray that will never change. In our democracy, the decision to remain free is ours to make.

My 100th birthday is exactly one month and one day after the next presidential election. I’d like to celebrate it by blowing out the candles on my cake, then whistling “Happy Days Are Here Again.”

As my beloved friend Lauren Bacall once said, “You know how to whistle don’t you? You just put your lips together and blow.”

Kirk Douglas
(via Huffington Post)



Photographs via and via and via and via

Collective Angst and Opposition to Immigration

Awareness of group history has an impact on social identity as it promotes a sense of common fate and fosters ingroup cohesion. Collective history is fundamental since "history grounds social identity and, thereby, makes social identity possible". Group history becomes more important for social identity when group members are concerned about losing their connectedness to the past. This happens when they are, for instance, afraid to lose their cultural identity, unity, and distinctiveness through immigrant minorities. The potential loss of historical continuity affects different group members in different ways. The authors hypothesise that those who strongly identify with the ingroup will suffer most when historical continuity is disrupted. It is also assumed that these higher identifiers have enhanced levels of collective angst.


Jamaican immigrants arriving at Gatwick Airport, 22nd March 1962, before the Immigration Bill becomes law.

In their studies, Jetten and Wohl measured identity preservation and protection and manipulated historical continuity by providing information about contemporary English continuity with its past.


Greek women arrive in Wellington, New Zealand, in the 1960s

Here is an example for high historical continuity condition and for low historical continuity in brackets:

"Until recently England was generally thought of as a gentle, fabled land freeze-framed sometime in the 1930s, home of the post office, country pub and vicarage. It’s now better known for vibrant cities with great nightlife and attractions, contrasted with green and pleasant countryside. It is incredible how these two sides of England can go so well together and both represent the England of today [But, it is also clear that this is no longer true for the present England. In fact, the English we know today and the English of yesteryear are two very different peoples]." 

Chinatown, London, 1955

The authors also measured collective angst and opposition to immigration. Results show that "group processes do not operate in a time-vacuum" and that the past, the present and the future are very much linked to each other shaping group actions. When the past is manipulated and presented less connected to the present, high identifiers suffer more and are particularly opposed to immigration. while lower identifiers feel less threatened by discontinuity ... and immigrants.


An Italian immigrant working in the Bedfordshire brickfields, 24th September 1955

Although the sample was rather small and only few items were used to measure complex constructs, the results are rather interesting. Hopefully, more research will follow.


Polish Church of St Bride's, Glasgow, 2nd April 1955

- Jetten, J. & Wohl, M. J. A. (2012). The past as a determinant of the present: Historical continuity, collective angst, and opposition to immigration. European Journal of Social Psychology, 42, 442-450
- photographs (first one by Keystone/Hutton Archive/Getty Images) via and via and via and  (Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Getty Images) via and (Bert Hardy/Picture Post/Getty Images) via, copyright by the respective owners

This posting was originally published on Science Google+ on 24th of January 2015