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As Myanmar undergoes political and societal transition, observers are asking questions about citizenship and ethnic identity. How does one think about citizenship and people's negotiations with law in political-legal regimes that do not subscribe to liberal democratic norms? This paper investigates how law marginalizes the Burmese Chinese minority in Myanmar and the nature of their legal participation. Since law asserts cultural power impacting the way people think and behave, we engage with the concept of legal consciousness to understand how perceptions of legal vulnerability shape political subjectivity ambivalently. The paper highlights the spatial strategies and everyday practices that the Burmese Chinese deploy to navigate oppressive laws, but signals that internal social divisions and geopolitical considerations deter collective action towards rights assertion. It argues that studying the multiple sites and scales through which law is engaged contributes towards recovering citizenship aspirations where engagement with power and authority are articulated differently from Western norms. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Using ethnographic data on Boston's Haymarket Square, this paper demonstrates how public space and a market opportunity can generate solidarity among people of different ethnicities in the form of a cosmopolitan canopy, and how a single ethnic tradition can nurture an open, public multi-ethnic environment. The paper illustrates how Haymarket vendors' treatment of ethnic and racial difference is actively deployed in the construction of new groups that largely transcend such distinctions. This article outlines the mechanisms by which a cosmopolitan canopy is sustained, and how it serves a constructive social function within the city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is a methodological reflection on the experiences of a white Irish woman researching ethnicity in England. Ethnic identity is described as a performance between two social actors that requires the collusion of both parties in order to be socially accepted. The history and disputes around the white Irish ethnic group category in England are discussed. Through the use of fieldnotes and interview extracts, I discuss how I became aware that my ethnic identity was not always recognized by participants, and in some cases the distinction between white Irish and white British was denied. At the micro level, this affects my rapport with individual participants, while at the macro level it resonates with historical relationships between Ireland and England. I argue that such experiences can lead to an existential threat to a person’s ethnic identity and therefore that the status of white Irish identity in England can be fragile. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores collective memory in Newham, East London. It addresses how remembering East London as the home of whiteness and traditional forms of community entails powerful forms of forgetting. Newham's formation through migration – its ‘great time’ – has ensured that myths of indigeneity and whiteness have never stood still. Through engaging with young people's and youth workers' memory practices, the paper explores how phantasms of whiteness and class loss are traced over, and how this tracing reveals ambivalence and porosity, at the same time as it highlights the continued allure of race. It explores how whiteness and class loss are appropriated across ethnic boundaries and how they are mobilized to produce new forms of racial hierarchy in a ‘super-diverse’ place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the generational progress of ethnic minorities in Britain by analysing four labour market outcomes: economic inactivity, unemployment, access to salaried jobs and self-employment. An important contribution of this paper is the possibility to examine the impact of a range of cultural and social resources on employment outcomes, namely language fluency, co-ethnic spouse, co-ethnic employer, bridging and bonding social capital. Controlling for ethnic and religious identities, individual, social and human capital characteristics, it finds clear advantages of language proficiency in obtaining employment and salaried jobs. However, the second generation shows little advancement in all the outcomes examined and a particularly strong religious penalty is found among Muslim women. It concludes that persistent ethno-religious penalty experienced by the second generation poses a serious policy challenge and does little to strengthen our economy or in building a cohesive society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the social ties forged by Romanians in London with migrants of different origins in work and non-work contexts to offer a more nuanced view of ‘bridging’ social ties and related discussions of ‘everyday’ cosmopolitanism. Contrary to the overemphasis on ethnic ties seen as a form of bonding in migration research, the paper shows how Romanians bridge informally with many other migrants based on shared ‘non-native’ status. Alongside non-ethnically marked commonalities, ethnicity emerges as an important ingredient of cosmopolitan socialization, yet without necessarily signalling coexisting ethnic identities, as commonly assumed. Romanians' experiences further show that despite providing significant social and cultural capital, bridging ties with migrants, rather than natives, rarely accrue effective resources for social mobility. The findings suggest the need to disaggregate and qualify current understandings of ‘bridging’ social ties usually depicted in positive terms and uniformly as cross-ethnic relationships, or only linked with the ‘mainstream’ population. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the idea of ‘superdiversity’ at the city level through two churches with different approaches to architectural visibility: the hypervisible Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and the invisible Igbo Catholic Church, both in North London, guide our exploration of invisible Nigerian London. Although Nigerians have lived in London for over 200 years, they live beneath the radar of policy and public recognition rather than as a vital and visible element of superdiversity. This paper argues that we can trace the journeys composing Nigerian London in the deep textures of the city thus making it visible, but this involves re-mapping space and ethnicity. It argues that visibility is vital in generating more open forms of urban encounter and, ultimately, citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the inter-group difference in social leverage ties between Uyghurs and Han Chinese in Ürümchi, China. Social leverage ties refer to high-status ties such as professionals and managers who can provide egos with information or access to education, training, employment, etc. Existing studies have suggested three hypotheses (i.e. retention of culture, homophily and neighbourhood poverty) for the mechanisms of ethnic differences in network composition. Based on the survey data the author collected in 2005, this paper suggests another main mechanism – state policies – in explaining the ethnic variations. State policies have led to in-group association and ethnic inequalities, which have limited Uyghur access to high-status individuals. Data analysis shows the Uyghur–Han difference in social leverage ties controlling for key background characteristics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on data collection and research methods on ethnic/racial discrimination, and more particularly on the question of 'ethnic statistics'. Taking the case of the European Union's Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), an international body whose tasks include providing European overviews of data on discrimination, the paper addresses the problem of the comparability of discrimination data. Drawing upon the experience of the FRA, the paper describes how the problem of comparability is addressed by working at three levels: the first is to produce reports mapping available data, highlighting gaps, and explaining when and why data are not comparable. The second is to initiate primary research - such as the EU-MIDIS survey of migrants and minorities - specifically designed to produce comparable data. The third level is to contribute to political and policy discussion to help raise awareness of the need for convergence in data collection practices between EU member states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing ethnic diversity of the UK has been mirrored by growing public awareness of multicultural issues, alongside developments in academic and government thinking. This paper explores the contested meanings around ethnic identity/ies in community settings, drawing on semi-structured interviews with staff from Children's Centres and allied agencies conducted for a research project that examined the relationship between identity and the participation of parents/carers in services in northeast England. The research found that respondents were unclear about, especially, white ethnic identities, and commonly referred to other social categorizations, such as age, nationality, and circumstances such as mobility, when discussing service users. While in some cases this may have reflected legitimate attempts to resist over-ethnicizing non-ethnic phenomena, such constructions coexisted with assumptions about ethnic difference and how it might translate into service needs. These findings raise important considerations for policy and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether middle- and upper-class Latino entrepreneurs retain a sense of ethnic solidarity expressed through community giving that is aimed at promoting the mobility of co-ethnics. I find that middle-class Latino entrepreneurs engage in more unstructured philanthropic activities, such as volunteering their time at Latino-centric organizations or mentoring low-income Latinos. In contrast, elite Latino entrepreneurs are creating ethnic social structures that focus on education and Latino business development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the new second generation has paid much attention to testing one of the hypotheses posed by segmented assimilation theory – downward assimilation into America's underclass – and has neglected to examine other possible outcomes. In this paper, I address a much understudied pathway – assimilation by way of the ethnic community – based on a case study of Chinese immigrant children in the USA. I show that the children of Chinese immigrants have made inroads into mainstream America through educational achievement, not only because of the strong value their parents put on education but also because resources generated in the ethnic community help actualize that value. The Chinese American experience suggests that, in order to advance to the rank of middle-class Americans, immigrant parents have chosen the ethnic way to facilitate children's social mobility and achieved success. Paradoxically, ‘assimilated’ children have also relied on ethnicity for empowerment to fight negative stereotyping of the racialized other. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines the identity formation of middle-class Haitian youth. Segmented assimilation theory predicts that the Haitian second generation will integrate into the black American underclass or maintain strong ethnic group identities. The black middle class, however, is an unexplored pathway of cultural assimilation. This paper uses the literature on the racial and class experiences of the black American middle class as a departure point for understanding the boundary work of middle-class Haitian youth. Based on qualitative interviews and a focus group, we uncover the mechanisms of identity formation for this invisible population. Racial, ethnic and class boundaries compel Haitian youths to create strategies of either empowerment or distancing. They negotiate between their middle-class status and ethnoracial exclusion in a racially segregated neighbourhood, an ethnically homogenous church and a mixed-race school setting. This study's findings extend our theoretical understandings of middle-class immigrants and their identity work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnic and religious minority identity is a subject of intense public debate and academic scrutiny. While assimilation theories anticipate convergence of identity across the generations, discussions of reactive ethnicity, transnational identification and religious revival suggest that there may be a deepening or shifting of minority identity in the second generation. Yet the empirical evidence in support of these different perspectives is far from conclusive. Drawing on a rich data source for the UK, this paper addresses the question of whether minority ethnic groups in Britain show identity assimilation in the second generation. It concludes that both public and private forms of identification with the majority increase across generations, and minority identities tend to become less salient. This is true across ethnic groups, although there are differences in underlying levels and patterns of identity, reflecting variation in contexts of reception and migration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]