Isabelle Albisser
Last Name
Albisser
First name
Isabelle
Email
isabelle.albisser@unisg.ch
Phone
+41712242687
4 results
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Item type:Publication, Affective Politics of Boundary-making and Belonging: Affective Negotiations and Resistant Agency in Integration Promotion(2026-08-28)In Switzerland, public authorities encourage volunteer work by migrantised people. Despite narratives of cohesion, equality and inclusion, integration policies often produce exclusionary structures. Thus, migrantised volunteers who themselves experience racialised and gendered boundary-making, are encouraged to become providers of care and support. Within such arrangements, care practices are inherently contradictory and need to be affectively negotiated. This paper examines how such arrangements generate ambivalent affective dynamics between boundary-making and belonging. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Swiss integration promotion, I analyse the affective dynamics shaping relationships between migrantised volunteers, integration professionals, and refugees. I show how integration regimes generate affective orientations that oscillate between insecurity, obligation, care, and belonging. Insecurities and obligations foster unease, grief, and anger among marginalised individuals. At the same time, however, affective solidarity and emotion work oriented towards care and belonging function as resources for reclaiming resistant agency in this context of vulnerability. I argue that, while democratically legitimised integration policies produce many exclusionary affects, migrantised actors still mobilise affects as tools of their resistant agency. By foregrounding affective solidarity and emotion work by migrantised individuals, this paper contributes to debates on how affects and emotions sustain collective action, negotiate boundaries, and enable forms of belonging and participation despite exclusionary infrastructures.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Institutional whiteness, affective economies, and the silencing of racial hierarchies in Swiss integration promotion(2026-07-24)Debates around migration and integration are deeply racialised, yet often framed as neutral efforts to foster cohesion, equality, and inclusion. This paper examines how settings in integration promotion in Switzerland reproduce institutional whiteness and racial hierarchies through an affective economy (Ahmed 2004, Fortier 2010). Based on ethnographic research of state-affiliated educational workshops for volunteers, I analyse how whiteness operates through an affective economy of positivity. In these workshops, racism appears in workshop materials and in interactions but is consistently unnamed or positively reframed. Drawing on feminist affect theory (Hemmings 2012, Guschke 2023), I use my own affective trajectories as a racially privileged researcher to trace how comfort, ease, and humour are cultivated, while discomfort or anger are excluded. I argue that this affective economy of positivity reproduces institutional whiteness in these settings: It secures comfort, and security for those not subjected to racialisation, while discomfort or anger related to racism and racist inequalities are excluded or stopped. By situating these dynamics within Switzerland’s post racial discourse (Boulila 2019, Michel 2015), the paper shows how institutional whiteness is reproduced through an affective economy that prevents from talking about racist structures and from dealing with institutional inequalities. The contribution speaks to anthropological debates on the reproduction of whiteness through institutional and everyday interactions in contemporary Europe.Type:conference paper - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Undoing whiteness in organizations by white bodies? From affective dissonance to anti-racist praxis(2024-03-07)Drawing on Nkomo’s call to address race in organizations, I will elaborate on the im/possibility of undoing whiteness in organizations by white bodies. Understanding whiteness as a system of power that privileges white bodies over non-white bodies, and which makes white people ‘feel at home’ (Ahmed), I elaborate on how to undo hegemonic structures of whiteness from the privileged position of the white person. I base my argument on critical race and critical whiteness scholars who show that the white person’s affects and practices are always entangled with racist structures and white hegemony. They highlight the danger of reifying the hegemonic position of the ‘good white subject’ by claiming the white person as either racist or non-racist. I will draw on the rich theorizing by women of colour scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa and Maria Lugones. They conceptualize the subjectivity of the marginalized self as multilayered, contradictory and simultaneously within and beyond hegemonic narratives of identity. Starting point for their theorizing is the contradictory experience of being marginalized and made ‘the other’ within white hegemony, while not identifying with ‘the other’ at the same time. The ‘affective dissonance’ (Clare Hemmings) experiencing a self between such binary identity constructions and a self beyond these invocations leads to 'active subjectivity' (Lugones) as a form of resistant agency. I will make use of these perspectives on multiple and active subjectivity to elaborate on the (self-)critical white person as both racist and non-racist at the same time. I argue, that affects of dissonance are moments of ‘active subjectivity’ by privileged subjects. Awkward and uncomfortable feelings of white bodies can lay the groundwork for anti-racist praxis and the undoing of hegemonic whiteness in organizations. Ahmed, S. (2007). A phenomenology of whiteness. Feminist Theory, 8(2), 149–168. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700107078139 Hemmings, C. (2012). Affective solidarity: Feminist reflexivity and political transformation. Feminist Theory, 13(2), 147–161. https://doi.org/10.1177/1464700112442643 Lugones, M. (2005). From within Germinative Stasis: Creating Active Subjectivity, Resistant Agency. In A. Keating (Hrsg.), Entre mundos/among worlds: New perspectives on Gloria E. Anzaldúa (1st ed, S. 85–99). Palgrave Macmillan. Nkomo, S. M. (2021). Reflections on the continuing denial of the centrality of “race” in management and organ-ization studies. Equality, Diversity and Inclusion: An International Journal, 40(2), 212–224. https://doi.org/10.1108/EDI-01-2021-0011Type:conference lecture - Some of the metrics are blocked by yourconsent settings
Item type:Publication, Beyond 'othering': Embodied (self-)criticism of a hegemonic emotional regime(2023-09-14)Type:conference lecture