Abstract
With her book, Muslim Fathers and Mistrusted Masculinity in Danish Schools, Anne Hovgaard Jørgensen provides a significant and important contribution to the ethnographic research field on ethnically and racially minoritized students and their families in Danish schools. While previous educational research has explored experiences and marginalization of ethnic and racially minoritized students in Danish schools (Gilliam, 2009; Gitz-Johansen, 2006; Jaffe-Walter, 2019; Khawaja, 2010; Staunæs, 2004), some particularly devoting attention to boys (Gilliam, 2018, 2021) and parents (Gilliam, 2024; Matthiesen, 2016), the experiences of home-school cooperation from ethnically minoritized fathers’ perspectives have largely been left unexplored. Thus, this book's main contribution to the research field is a nuanced and rich ethnographic analysis of a perspective rarely shown. The book, which is a reworking of Jørgensen's PhD thesis, explores Muslim migrant fathers’ experiences with home-school cooperation drawing on perspectives such as culture, religion, race, gender, place and class.
The book is based on a 15-month fieldwork at the public school, “Rosendal School” placed in a stigmatized neighborhood in Copenhagen, as well as in various father's groups in different stigmatized neighborhoods across Denmark. For five months, Jørgensen followed everyday life at Rosendal School and observed parent-teacher conferences, parent meetings, class breakfasts and visited families in their homes to conduct interviews. While the analytical focus is dedicated to Muslim migrant fathers, the ethnographic material also covers interviews with teachers and Danish fathers and Danish as well as migrant mothers.
Jørgensen coins the concept of “mistrusted masculinity” to grasp the gendered mistrust that Muslim migrant fathers experience sticks to them and their masculinity. The concept is explored as a social phenomenon in media, political discourse as well as in the fathers’ descriptions of interactions with teachers. One key argument of Jørgensen is that mistrusted masculinity is often subtle and underplayed, happening “in-between the lines” in social interactions between e.g., child professionals and Muslim migrant fathers, and that it is therefore difficult to object to for the fathers experiencing this mistrust. In her development of the concept, Jørgensen draws on Raewyn Connell's concept of “marginalized masculinity,” a form of suppressed masculinity in contrast to the dominant “hegemonic masculinity” (Connell & Messerschmidt, 2005). Jørgensen critiques Connell of creating a dualistic and over-simplified image of masculinity as either hegemonic or marginalized. Instead, Jørgensen argues for approaching both masculinities and fatherhood as emergent (Inhorn, 2012). Thereby, Jørgensen underlines her understanding of masculinity as affected by influences and life-circumstances beyond the fathers’ individual control and simultaneously as something they actively shape through resistance.
Jørgensen initiates her analyses by stating how, during her fieldwork at Rosendal School, teachers often asked, “where are the ethnic fathers?,” illustrating their experience that the “ethnic fathers” were somehow more absent and less engaged in their children's schooling than other parents. Jørgensen spends the book's nine chapters answering this question from perspectives ranging from the very concrete (number of children in the family for instance) to the bigger perspectives (a societal mistrust of the dangerous migrant man). Since this review cannot contain findings from all chapters of the book, I will point to some of Jørgensen's most central findings and arguments in the following.
In the book's introduction, Jørgensen provides a historic overview of how the responsibility of children's learning has gradually been expanded from the realm of the school to also involve the parents. Today, she argues, it has become “culturally given” that parents are actively involved in their children's schooling both at the school and in the home. Here, Jørgensen identifies a core contradiction in which Muslim migrant fathers feel excluded from home-school cooperation by teachers, while simultaneously sensing an omnipresent responsibility for their children's learning resting on their shoulders.
In Chapter 5, Jørgensen shows how the fathers of her study are held back from participating in both formal and informal school activities by working constraining blue-collar jobs that require their physical presence, and which are often physically demanding, such as working in a pizzeria, a kiosk or delivering packages. Many fathers in the book describe working 14–16 h a day, 6 days a week without the possibility to flex their hours to e.g., attend class breakfast or keep up with a chat on the Parent Intranet app. Their work life prevents them from performing visible fatherhood, and thus their presence and active participation as fathers goes unnoticed by their children's schools. This class perspective adds great nuance to Jørgensen's analysis of the lived life of these fathers and offers a relevant answer to the question of the “absent father” that is not (as is often the case in similar research) based in issues of religion, culture or gender.
In Chapter 7, Jørgensen unfolds how Muslim migrant fathers are met with a tacit mistrust from their children's teachers in everyday interactions and how a negative controlling image of the “Muslim migrant man” as dominant and violent is at play in teachers’ interpretations of the fathers’ and their children's behavior. A central and heartbreaking point in this chapter is how this constant mistrust also affects the fathers’ relationships with their children. Jørgensen shows how several Muslim migrant fathers in her material fear that one word from their child to a teacher that may indicate conflict or violence in the home, immediately will result in them being suspected of child abuse. In some instances, it would contribute to the nuances of the analyses if Jørgensen were clearer on how she interprets her interlocutor's stories. For instance, Jørgensen makes an argument that some teenagers use the negative controlling image of their Muslim migrant father to weaken his authority, for instance by him losing custody rights over his children. This is based on stories told by fathers such as Nabil, but without perspectives from the children mentioned in the stories. It is a strong claim to state that teenagers exploit their father's vulnerable position for their own benefit, especially when this claim is only based on the fathers’ perspective. Nonetheless, it is also an important aspect of the way mistrusted masculinity limits these fathers’ possibilities for engaging with their children. Hence, it would serve to make the analyses even clearer if Jørgensen underlined how the fathers’ stories reflect their experiences, the way they understand their own situation and how they make sense of it, and that the fathers’ stories do not necessarily reflect the experiences of the people they include in their stories; sons, daughters, ex-wives, parents of their children's friends.
As a whole, this book's nuanced account of an underrepresented perspective as well as its rich and thorough ethnographic analysis and wide selection of references makes it highly recommendable to readers of the field and to courses within sociology, education and anthropology.
