Katie Marie Mulkowsky

Katie Mulkowsky
INTA International Urban Development Association
France

I haven’t written much in the past month because I’ve been trying to figure out how to best synthesize the various forces imbued in statements like Beth’s. The situation in the banlieue is just as much about France’s colonial past as it is about the post-WWII housing crisis, the legal framework of laïcité (secular law that disproportionately restricts Muslim religious expression), and the militiamen, fully armed with fingers on their triggers, who I see in so many Parisian public spaces, seemingly waiting for the next terror attack to spill onto the streets.

This sounds harsh but it feels very real. It’s a weird and kind of scary time to be in Europe, and I think I underestimated how that would manifest in Paris when going into this project. When I met with Gilles Kepel’s banlieue research team earlier this month in his office at the École Normale Supérieure, I discovered that it sits behind about three locked doors, none of which bears Gilles’ name. Gilles, one of France’s most prominent (and controversial) scholars of political Islam, is now flanked by national bodyguards 24/7, in the wake of a direct death threat he received from a French-born jihadi.

I arranged this meeting because I wanted to better understand how scholars are approaching the spaces I’m interested in and to learn how to conduct fieldwork interviews in a more academic than journalistic manner. I didn’t expect to learn as much as I did about the politics of what I am studying, or to leave viewing Gilles as a complex figure. One researcher I spoke with, a Syrian Frenchman, told me not to mention Gilles or their ongoing projects to anyone I would meet in the field; it’s all hyper-confidential because of today’s inflammatory situation regarding both blatant Islamophobia in the public sphere and France’s track record with terror.

My first encounter with Gilles happened in May, before I left New York. He was speaking about French terror at a Center for National Security event at Fordham Law. He joked that he had had his first “free” breakfast in 11 months that morning (there being no need for his bodyguards to follow him to the States). He also noted that, in today’s political climate, “‘banlieue’ is now the only word in French which doesn’t need [an English] translation” and that “jihadi violence usually benefits the extreme right because it boosts the voice of those who say the left is too weak on that issue.”

Robert Worth, in his NYT profile, “The Professor and the Jihadi,” wrote that “Kepel has argued that much of France’s left-leaning intelligentsia fails to understand the nature of the threat the country faces—not just from foreign terrorists but also from the Islamist provocateurs in its exurban ghettos.”  Gilles and the scholarship surrounding his work thus complicate the initial notions of my study (being, of course, that the banlieue is a site of disproportionate surveillance and Islamophobic attack). Yet, while he does assert that there are ideologues who find breeding ground for radicalization in the depraved banlieue, he is careful to distinguish between mainstream Islam and jihad. He does not support the xenophobic Front National; he is an immigrant’s son, speaks fluent Arabic, and his wife’s family is North African. 

But, Worth also noted that Gilles was a member of the commission that helped create France’s controversial 2004 law banning Islamic head scarves and other religious symbols in public schools and that Gilles “remains proud of that role.” Worth wrote that Gilles “believes that eroding French state secularism, known as laïcité, would lead to a ‘Balkanization of Europe along religious and ethnic lines,’ with a Muslim voting bloc, Muslim schools and a hardening of quasi-separatist communities of various religions.” Yet, other scholars like Z. Fareen Parvez argue that such laws have accomplished the same thing: in “Prayer and Pedagogy,” Parvez writes that Salafist women turn to Islamic schools as a safe haven from their public counterparts, in which they experience hostility and discrimination.

Two of the forces most discussed by my interviewees so far, used to show their understanding of the banlieue and the rights of its inhabitants today, are laïcité and colonialism. Some even see laïcité as a neocolonial force. Beth Epstein, for instance, noted that, “In many ways, France has not gotten away from its ‘civilizing mission.’” One of Gilles’ team members, who confidentially told me that he does not support the French state, gave me a list of bookstores to visit and middle/high school textbooks to glance through, to see how French history is represented. In the same national schools where veiling is outlawed, he said, there is no mention of France’s colonial empire.

In the coming weeks, I want to explore these ideas further and see what bearing other specific vestiges of colonial history have on people in the present. 

Katie Mulkowsky
INTA International Urban Development Association
France 

Greetings from my creaky office chair at INTA, the organization under which I’ve been working for a little over a month now. I have been assigned to help with the research, organization and scheduling of the City Development Policy for Inclusion, a 2-day seminar on the integration of migrant and refugee populations throughout European cities. Held in Malmö, Sweden, at the end of August, INTA’s event is bringing in private and public initiatives along with individual scholars and research groups to address three broad categories of integration: time, people, and space.

My human rights interests have manifested most apparently in the “people” dimension, allowing me to raise questions for our panelists surrounding issues such as how their programs facilitate access to language lessons and resources helping new workers understand their rights, along with practical logistics like the recognition/transfer of their foreign credentials. While settling into my life here, it’s been really fantastic to intern for an organization broadly engaged with these facets of integration, since my specific research on the banlieue surrounds many of these concerns, even though a lot of today’s residents in social housing cités are French-born descendants of migrants.

Generally, I come into INTA’s Paris office for a 10-6 shift three days each week and spend the other two to four days doing fieldwork for my independent project—conducting interviews, meeting with other scholars, and sometimes just sitting in maisons de quartier (neighborhood houses, or community centers) on market day, observing the different languages spoken, types of dress worn, and concerns voiced among banlieue residents, both political and personal. I’ve concentrated my research on the specific fringe city of La Courneuve, a commune in Seine-Saint-Denis. Loïc Waquant, the researcher whose work I mentioned in my last post, concentrated his study here as well.

One interviewee I spoke with provided my favorite description thus far of the district’s vibrancy and charm (resisting, of course, media portrayals of a dirty violent breeding ground for terrorism). “A wedding will always spill out from somewhere,” she said, going on to note the mixing of cultures that is always apparent: “There’s Algerian fabric, Senegalese song.” Likewise, a Hindu temple can be found right off the 7 train to La Courneuve.

NYU Paris Director Beth Epstein is actually the one who told me about this mix. Her research has focused upon the French banlieue as well, and in assessing its complex multiculturalism, she said to me, “The question then becomes, who are we all together? This new thing that we’re constantly reforming and rebuilding. Because that is what France is.”

(to be continued)

Katie Mulkowsky
International Urban Development Association (INTA)
France

“This is the African district,” my driver said. “Don’t go there.”

Those three words—don’t go there, n’y allez pas—rung in my ears as we jolted from Charles de Gaulle to the city. I arrived in Paris early last week, and of all I’ve seen since, I actually think my cab ride from the airport to my accommodation has been the most striking.

As I’ve written, I’m using this fellowship to study the housing projects in Paris’ banlieues, or suburbs, some of which we spotted from the highway. Tall, towering communes, they are predominantly peopled by North African and Middle Eastern immigrants. According to The Economist, 36% fall below the poverty line—three times the national average. 

Following a two-fold increase in incidents of terror and anti-Muslim violence, the banlieues have become tricky for the Republic to navigate. François Hollande called for an “Islam of France” last September, but of course, racial tension in Burkini-ban-era France breeds off of the scapegoating of a people for the evil done by a subgroup.

This tension does not dull itself for newcomers. Already from the Boulevard Périphérique, my driver spoke of “the people on the outside.” When we made it to the 18th, he unabashedly called it “African territory.” It became all the more strange when he stopped at a corner here, where four veiled women stood holding passports and papers. “They’re Syrian refugees,” he quickly explained. I braced myself, expecting him to hurl insults their way. Instead, he joked with their kids and handed over cash. From the back of the cab, I stayed quiet, unsure how to interpret this odd kindness from a man who had just spent an entire drive badmouthing the French non-white. 

I have no profound conclusion about his actions but can say that our ride jump-started my acquaintance with the turbulence of today’s Paris. Arriving at my apartment in the 9th, my driver told me my corner bordered a “bad street,” and not to walk alone at night. Funny enough, my host, a young Frenchwoman, immediately told me the same thing. In fact, she gave me a map, marking an X on our location and drawing around it a geometric border, filled with a large “NO.”

Loïc Wacquant writes of the banlieue in Urban Outsiders. My host’s warning against very specific neighbors of ours reminded me of a line in his work about ‘ghettos:’ “they are known, to outsiders and insiders alike, as lawless zones, problem estates, the no-go areas or the wild districts of the city, territories of deprivation and dereliction to be feared, fled from and shunned because they are, or such is their reputation, hotbeds of violence and social dissolution.”

The point of my project is to examine not how this reputation affects the safety of people who look like me, but rather how it affects the safety of those inside these areas, including their vulnerability to police violence, public shame, employment discrimination, unfair surveillance, and unjust political targeting.

For the record, I feel perfectly safe in my neighborhood. The 9th is vibrant and well populated. On Wednesdays and Saturdays there’s an incredible farmer’s market underneath the train station that I’ve been warned against visiting; its vendors’ signs are in French and Arabic. Why should I fear the man who greets me there, in impeccable polite French? What should a nation owe people like him, who comprise the areas deemed so derelict?

But on the topic of segregation and stereotype, my first few days at work have been optimistic. INTA is holding a seminar on integrating migrants and refugees into European cities in Malmö, August 30-31. We’ve been reaching out to people doing incredible work in this sphere, and it feels great coming from Paris. At the end of the week, I’m meeting with a research team focusing directly on the banlieue, and from there my project will quickly take shape. 

Before signing off, I want to make note of a doctrine I came across in the office yesterday. In 2000, the European Charter for the Safeguarding of Human Rights in the City was signed by more than 350 European cities in Saint-Denis, France. Home to the Union of French Islamic Organizations, Saint-Denis is a sub-prefecture of Seine-Saint-Denis, the French department with the highest proportion of immigrants. I can’t help but feel that there is a special kind of power in such a doctrine being rooted in such a place. Everyone I’ve met in this city so far certainly has the “right” to be here; I’m interested in learning more, though, about how this right becomes challenged, and what tangible work can be done to assert it. 

Katie Mulkowsky
International Urban Development Association (INTA)
France

Hi all! My name is Katie and I’m a sophomore at Gallatin concentrating in sustainable development and urban theory. A lot of what I’m studying surrounds the various intersections of environmentalism, city planning, geography, and policy, and I’m so excited to explore these topics further in France this summer as a Global Fellow in Human Rights.

My project concerns a very specific interest I have in promoting human rights through space. To me, public housing developments throughout the urban fringe of Paris raise questions surrounding not just access and separation but also about what it means to be “French” and the ways that religious and ethnic minorities can become excluded from that narrative. Human rights pertaining to migrants, living standards, religious expression, local activism, women, and labor all come into play when considering the Parisian banlieue, or suburbs, and recent ways in which counterterrorism measures have directed public sentiment toward it.

France’s banlieues are generally peopled by working-class North African and Middle Eastern immigrants. In a New Yorker article describing the situation inside one of them, George Packer writes that “to many Parisians, the 93 [district] signifies decayed housing projects, crime, unemployment, and Muslims.” He goes on to say that “France has all kinds of suburbs, but the word for them, banlieues, has become pejorative, meaning slums dominated by immigrants … Conceived as utopias for workers, they have become concentrations of poverty and social isolation.”

In such a context, I’m looking to situate my project within the framework of both urban justice and planning. It will be overseen by International Urban Development Association (INTA), whose Paris office I will be working with part-time while I conduct my own interview-driven research in the banlieues. I hope to eventually compile this into some sort of oral history project. This summer, INTA will be coordinating a seminar on the impacts of sustainable urban development on mass migration and refugees. I am greatly looking forward to learning from the organization as well as the people I meet, and can’t wait to keep you updated once I’m on the ground!