“You can’t take it to heart”: Responding to Racialization and Othering in the Czech Civil Sphere.

At the 2023 conference of the Civil Sphere Theory Working Group, held on October 18 in Heidelberg, Germany, Nadya Jaworsky presented our work titled “You can’t take it to heart”: Responding to Racialization and Othering in the Czech Civil Sphere. This study, a collaborative effort with Radka Klvaňová, Ivana Rapoš Božič, and Olga Zhmurko, delves into the critical issues of racialization and Othering within the civil spheres, particularly focusing on Western democracies.

Questions of who belongs and who doesn’t are often negotiated in the civil sphere. Within the civil spheres of Western democracies, processes of racialization and Othering abound, excluding those considered anticivil outsiders. Minority groups, including migrants, respond (or not) through various strategies. Through a critical, cultural sociological study situated in the urban civil sphere of Brno – a secondary city in Czechia that has been recently experiencing growing ethnic and cultural diversification of its population as a result of migration – we explore the ways in which migrants respond to racialization and Othering. Our analytical lens is focused on how they make sense of interactions with people and institutions in the city’s urban space, encountering symbolic and social boundaries and actively and creatively engaging with them. Based on in-depth interviews with different groups of people with a migratory background living in Brno, we identify several strategies through which they respond to the anticivil processes of racialization and Othering by demonstrating their moral superiority/worth and belonging.