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In the context of increasing dissatisfaction with “Eurocentric” models of racialization, this paper draws on the idea of plural modernities to offer an alternative. It argues that diverse modernities and racializations are “co-evolving” and interwoven and that these processes have been profoundly shaped by, but cannot be reduced to merely a set of local reflections of, Western influence. After introducing and contextualizing these themes, the paper sets out the main opportunities offered by, as well as the limitations of, a research focus on co-evolving racialized modernities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the connection between three forms of diversity -- religious, ethnic, and linguistic -- and family values. The article builds on the idea that diversity challenges social identity and people react by returning to traditional family values in order to protect their social identity and the in-group culture. The paper aims at contributing to the sociological debate about the effect of diversity on social life and investigates how different types of diversity connect with traditional family values because individuals want to protect their in-group culture that is mainly transmitted within family. The paper tests the research hypotheses employing multilevel regression models and using data from the ISSP IV from 2012. Religious diversity associates with traditional attitudes regarding marriage and gender roles, ethnic diversity goes together with lower support for marriage, but has no connection with attitudes towards gender role, while linguistic diversity is not associated with attitudes family values. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 1 January 2014 the transitional controls on free movement adopted by the UK when Bulgaria and Romania joined the EU in 2007, ended. This paper demonstrates how the discourses of politicians relating to their removal, amplified via news media contributed to the extension of state bordering practices further into everyday life. Based on ethnographic research into everyday bordering during 2013–15 the paper uses an intersectional framework to explore how this homogenizing, bordering discourse was experienced and contested from differently situated perspectives of Roma and non-Roma social actors from established communities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the impact of governmental management of the pandemic on the morbidity and mortality of migrants, gendered and racialized groups by focussing on the relation of its public health message campaign to accommodation, health and survival. The Hostile Environment immigration policies have restricted the ability of these groups to adhere to Government's public health guidelines, increasing risks of their contracting coronavirus. These policies exacerbate existing health inequalities in intersectional ways. The Covid virus, in its socially reproductive capacity, can thus be understood as a biological descriptor for a political crisis of intersectional inequality in the politics of health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social scientists working on race and ethnicity are facing up to the challenge of how the Covid-19 pandemic is impacting on their research agendas. In this introduction, we discuss the emerging evidence about the impact of Covid-19 in terms of race and ethnicity, on migrants and refugees, and on research agendas. By focusing on the discussion that has developed about these issues during 2020 we aim to provide some of the broader background to the specific concerns to be found in the rest of this themed issue. We move on from this overview of key developments to a discussion of the key themes that are explored by the fourteen papers that follow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inspired by a super-diversity approach, this paper seeks to explore the influence of the 'ethnic hierarchy' of 'old' minority groups over the way 'new' migrants from Turkey negotiate their interaction in the daily life in three settings: Amsterdam, London and Barcelona. By focusing on highly educated migrants from Turkey who by virtue of their country of origin or religion are positioned at the bottom of 'ethnic hierarchies', it strives to understand the significance of these different sources of diversity in daily interaction. Applying boundarydrawing strategies developed for ethnic boundaries, this paper argues that education does not necessarily 'trump' nationality, but allows for substantial claims of difference. New migrants from Turkey carve out a space for themselves by on the one hand homogenizing Turkish or other Muslim communities through attributing 'unwanted' behaviours and on the other redefining the boundaries of their individual identity with emphasis on different sources of diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores convivial culture in a settler society. The paper draws on interview data from ethnographic research exploring how Māori and Pākehā worked together on a building project in a rural community. Both Māori and Pākehā participants reported their pleasure in engagements with each other that centred on Maori tikanga (protocols). In these encounters, Māori 'difference' was the catalyst for the development of new, convivial relationships. The paper argues that such everyday conviviality contributes to the process of decolonizing Māori-Pākehā relations at the level of everyday life. Through decolonizing conviviality Pākehā 'become ordinary' in Māori cultural contexts, and are offered the opportunity to come to understand themselves as embedded in colonial relationalities. Crucial to the development of such conviviality is the opportunity for face-to-face, embodied encounters with Maori in contexts where Maori cultural difference matters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

This paper engages with the methodology being used within a research project auditing concerns and aspirations in an impoverished Indigenous community in North West Australia. The community is in the heart of booming resource industries and it symbolizes the many challenges and opportunities for contemporary Australia. The paper advances the notion that social scientific research with Indigenous communities can be positioned not just as the result of consultation with the communities but as the authorized product of those communities. Although this adds to the complexity of the governing forces that impact on researchers, it also affords new possibilities for meaningful social change. If research starts with the proposition that social scientific research with Indigenous communities can be about what communities want to know, and finding out what they have to say, we may make more progress than by asking what needs to be done. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper interrogates the structural conditions, macropolitics and governmentality of family ‘regroupement’ in France in an era of shifting immigration policies in Europe and the imaginative possibilities that Senegalese immigrants exercise to maintain family and kinship ties with those left behind. It argues that while the need to maintain ties from diasporic locations is mediated by policies, material and emotive transnational practices, the materiality of displacement as well as the state's politics of immigration render more elusive possibilities of maintaining family in situ. What tensions and creative strategies emerge? How is ‘home’, the primordial site of family structure, reimagined and reconstituted? Taking into account state's politics and immigrants’ entrapment within multiple spheres of power and their active agency as determinants, this paper uncovers how displacement gives rise to multiple ruptures while simultaneously motivating a search for active agency to reconstruct and reimagine kinship, family and conjugality across multiple temporalities and spatialities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies on transnational families argue that the subjective well-being of migrant parents is negatively affected by living separated from their children. Most studies employ qualitative methods without a control group and hence are not able to distinguish whether the effects found are associated with separation only or with other factors. This paper investigates the association between parental subjective well-being and parent–child separation by comparing migrant parents who have at least one child in their country of origin with those who live with all their children in the Netherlands. The paper further investigates whether the same associations are found between migrant groups from Angola and Nigeria. Results indicate that transnational parents indeed report lower subjective well-being, as measured by happiness, life satisfaction and mental health for both groups and additionally, self-assessed health for Angolans. However, legal status, socio-economic status and the quality of the parent–child relationship are found to be important mediators. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Through an analysis of a pollution-based incident at Refinery-G in an infamousQiaoxiangtown in Fujian, China, this paper analyses how transnational migrants participate in and influence the public management activities in their hometowns. This paper underscores four factors driving civic and political participation that emerged during the revelation, resistance, negotiation and settlement of this incident: (1) the role of the ‘leisured’ villager; (2) the role of overseas Chinese in caring for the developmental path of their hometown; (3) the role of independent civic organizations; and (4) the role of the news media in shaping public opinion.Qiaoxiang's civic participation is both more active and more effective. With the development and globalization of modern communication technology and low-cost and convenient communication and transportation systems, it is possible for overseas migrants to influence public management activities in their hometown through civic organization and political participation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper explores the identities that North American lifestyle migrants in Ecuador adopt as they adjust to life in a new racialized social environment. It is based on qualitative interviews with migrants from North America, as well as ethnographic field notes. North Americans describe their growing community in racialized terms and adopt a series of practices that demonstrate anxiety about their position in the racialized social order of Ecuador. The paper discusses the strategies that North American migrants engage in to diminish the importance of their racialized identities in Ecuador. I identify two main practices that complicate North American incorporation in Ecuador: self-policing practices that aim to optimize Ecuadorians' perceptions of them; and desires for integration and ethnic mobility, which seek to erase their ‘Otherness’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The US government has simultaneously increased efforts to close its border to unauthorized migrants, and opened the border to increasing flows of tourists from Mexico. In this paper I focus on the experiences of Mexican tourists who are able to freely cross the USA–Mexico border with US visas, given that their unique status as tourists from Mexico is an important element to consider because it organizes their daily lives, their moral understandings, and their experiences across the USA–Mexico border. I show how Global South cosmopolitans from Mexico benefit from class privilege in Mexico, but become legally vulnerable in the USA due to their racialization as Mexicans and lack of citizenship rights. This paper draws on ethnographic data and in-depth interviews collected in the border town of Mexicali, Baja California, Mexico between July 2009 and August 2010. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper emerges from an ethnography of the economic and cultural life of Rye Lane, an intensely multi-ethnic street in Peckham, South London. The effects of accelerated migration into London are explored through the reshaping and diversification of its interior, street and city spaces. A ‘trans-ethnography’ is pursued across the compendium of micro-, meso- and macro-urban spaces, without reifying one above the other. The ethnographic stretch across intimate, collective and symbolic city spaces serves to connect how the restrictions and circuits of urban migration have different impacts and expressions in these distinctive but interrelated urban localities. The paper argues for a trans-ethnography that engages within and across a compendium of urban localities, to understand how accelerated migration and urban ‘super-diversity’ transform the contemporary global city. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper looks comparatively at the process of social change and its impact on local community cohesion in two Melbourne suburbs, ‘Northburb’ and ‘Greenburb’. The two localities are geographically close, part of the same local government area and both highly ethnically diverse, but considerably different in terms of their socio-economic and ethnic profiles. Based on ethnographic data collected through individual interviews, focus groups and participant observation in 2012–2013, the paper shows how the process of deindustrialization and the switch to service economy over the past decades took distinctly different turns in the two localities. Our data suggest that the processes of social change seem to have diminished local community cohesion in both localities. In Northburb, gentrification has contributed to socio-economic polarization, while Greenburb has lagged behind in socio-economic indicators and experienced ethnic fragmentation due to a considerable influx of new immigrant groups. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper speaks against tolerance as an instrument of institutionalized anti-racism within academia where collegiality is a minimal expectation in interpersonal interactions. Through auto-ethnographic readings, the discussion focuses on the racial affective economies produced in universities as tolerance ‘makes race ordinary’. Within this reading, ‘making race ordinary’ is shown to produce unliveable lives because of its racial affective economies animated by contemptuous tolerance, disgust and disattendability. These negative affects emerge within the epistemology of ignorance produced by the racial contract and have affective and career consequences for racialized others placed outside of organizational networks. The paper argues that to destabilize the white power in networks that decide on access, tenure and promotion and to enable liveable lives within universities, the transformative potential of the transracial intimacy of friendship must be engaged. This entails ‘race made ordinary’ through disalienation-estrangement from the ‘raced’ subject positionings of the racial contract. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

As cultural texts, music and movies generate transnational publics united by shared identities and tastes. As objects of economic value, they fall under the juridical protection of global intellectual property institutions. These institutions aspire to produce their own version of a global citizenquathe responsible consumer. This paper argues that illegal copying and distribution have a capacity to forge new transnational affiliations. At the same time, they are subject ‘abjection’ by the apparatus of copyright enforcement. Focusing on the acts of semantic enclosure that such enforcement produces, the paper concludes that ‘policing’ has been increasingly mobilized as a path to becoming ‘global citizen’, thus reducing possibilities for the development of a critical, pluralistic subjectivity commonly termed ‘cosmopolitan’. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article contributes to the emerging critiques of inequalities in the access to water by focusing on three inter-related aspects: affordability, accessibility and quality of water. Based on extensive fieldwork, the paper explores the situation in segregated Roma settlements in Slovakia and highlights the critical role of power asymmetries at a local level. It builds a conceptual framework using Bourdieu’s notions of “social field”, “habitus”, “doxa”, and “capital”, highlighting the central role of power asymmetries at a local level. Insights are drawn on how dominantly positioned social actors command decision-making regarding water supply, and how social hierarchies, inequalities and the “positionality” of Roma as a marginalized group are functional to the lack of political will to address insufficient water access for Roma in any efficient manner. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the political and media discourses on Roma in Hungary, Finland and the UK, in relation to the local Roma in these countries as well as those who migrated from Central and Eastern Europe countries following the fall of communism. The authors have analysed left of centre and right of centre major newspapers in these three countries, focusing on specific case studies which were the foci of public debates during the last two decades. We also examined a common case study in 2013 (“blond Maria”) that was discussed throughout Europe. In each news paper, the constructions of Roma, local and migrant, and the changes to related discourses over the period were studied. In conclusion, we examine the multi-layered processes of social and political borderings in Europe which dominate discourses on Roma, “indigenous” and migrant, and the extent to which they constitute a coherent “European” construction of “the Roma”. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent scholarship has declared multiculturalism to be in retreat, yet multiculturalist discourses and practices remain salient in many realms of social reproduction. This paper explores multiculturalism in predominantly white churches in the U.S. South, a region that has seen significant demographic transformations due to immigration. Church outreach to immigrants draws on theologies that reject racial prejudice and that call for the accommodation and celebration of cultural differences. Drawing on qualitative research with pastors and congregants, this article explores how multiculturalist practice is both re-working and reinforcing existing social relationships in Christian faith communities. Multiculturalist practices, we show, disrupt racialized hierarchies long embedded in white churches. But they simultaneously leave racialized distinctions and inequalities intact, in part by maintaining separation between immigrants and non-immigrants. This case illustrates the everyday politics of multiculturalism and the ways in which the boundaries of social membership take shape in ordinary, seemingly non-political spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the concept of strategic ethnic performance (SEP), when members of one ethnic group present themselves as members of a phenotypically similar ethnic group for economic gain. I use ethnographic and interview data focused on Sub-Saharan African merchants involved in the Hip Hop fashion boutique business in urban Japan to show how SEP develops from four interconnected areas: the opportunity structure for ethnic entrepreneurs, the physical presentation of sellers, the arrangement of the selling venue, and feedback loops between the seller and the consumer. By utilizing SEP, ethnic entrepreneurs enhance the perceived authenticity of their goods and themselves. A thorough analysis of this process illuminates the interactional nature of ethnic authenticity as it is understood by consumers within urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mounting tide of foreign fighters leaving Britain for the Middle East to fight, sacrifice or find new lives has blighted European governments and led to the further tightening up of counter-terrorism measures. Since the first British arrest of a Syrian returnee (Choudhury) in 2014, the latest figures of foreign fighter returnees have surged to approximately 800. A number of strategies aimed at thwarting these trends have surfaced including a call upon Muslim parents to scrutinise their children’s attitudes and behaviour and to be watchful of their radicalization. Based on a study in the West Midlands (in the UK), the paper provides a snapshot of how Muslim parents have received calls upon them to report their actual or potentially radicalized children to the police. We argue that current practices are likely to be ineffective unless more democratic spaces are provided for free political expression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The 1.5 generation migrants are often presented by scholars as the vanguard of new cosmopolitan possibilities. Their hybrid identities and intercultural competencies are viewed as evidence for new ways of approaching difference in diverse societies. This paper examines these claims in relation to Chinese 1.5 generation migrants in New Zealand, focusing on their experiences of negotiating the family and early life, and possibilities for becoming cosmopolitan. By drawing insights from ‘everyday cosmopolitanism’, we examine how hybrid identities both facilitate and undermine capacities to overcome difference and alter the power dynamics within social worlds. This demonstrates that everyday cosmopolitanism is not easily achieved but rather oscillates around strategies for fitting in that sometimes reinforce uneven social positions. We argue for caution in accounts of the 1.5 generation and recognition of the ways that cosmopolitanism is socially situated, subject to the multiple pressures, and enacted within the uneven power relations of society. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Immigrant women are a particularly vulnerable part of the immigrant population. In this paper we analyse negative attitudes towards immigrant women in Norway. We focus on immigrant women’s formal job qualifications, their religious background and wearing of hijab – the headscarf sometimes used by Muslim women. Using survey-embedded experiments we are able to analyse the net effects on attitudes of job qualifications, Islamic religious background and the hijab. The results show that native population frequently has more negative views of Muslim women who wear a hijab. The negative effects of a hijab do not seem to be strongly reduced if a woman wearing it has higher education. With a single exception, the results also show that Muslim backgroundin itself(i.e. without the hijab) does not have any strong effect on attitudes of the native population towards immigrant women. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many scholars have cited socioeconomic status, cultural tastes, and group reference as the major determinants of class identification. Few have conceptualized minority ethnicity as a vital source of class subjectivities, however. I address this knowledge gap in this paper by examining Uyghur subjective class status in Ürümchi, China. I show that income and occupational attainment are not correlated with Uyghur choices of class labels. I also show that Uyghur ethnic identity affects their choices of class labels. I argue that Uyghurs think that they are a dominated group and compare themselves with Han Chinese unfavourably when defining their subjective class positions in Ürümchi. As a result, intergroup competition overshadows the variability in socioeconomic attainments among different Uyghur groups. The implications of these findings for research on class identification in multi-ethnic societies are discussed. Data are drawn from a survey (N = 900) conducted in Ürümchi in 2007. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many Western European countries, concern rises that both formal mechanisms of redistribution and informal acts of charity, reciprocity and support are challenged by ethnic and cultural diversity. Against such gloomy perspectives, this paper draws on insights from sociology, geography, pedagogy and political science to argue that four traditional sources of solidarity (interdependence, shared norms and values, struggle and encounter) remain relevant, but require a rethinking of their spatial and temporal framing to capture today's intricate engagements of solidarity. More specifically, we draw on theories from the aforementioned disciplines to claim that our understanding of solidarities grounded in the spatial boundedness of territorial states and the intergenerational continuity of supposedly culturally homogeneous nations should be complemented and enriched with an in-depth knowledge of solidarities developing in an entirely different spatio-temporal register, namely that of the everyday places and practices in which people engage across ethnic and cultural boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The good governance argument for diversity in civil service is based on the notion that creating a bureaucracy that represents the diverse communities it serves strengthens government accountability and legitimacy. This paper argues that ethnic representation in national bureaucratic governance in the Philippines primarily constitutes a means for political reallocation of space, as it is embedded in the government's framework of asymmetric political autonomy. Mired in intersecting political and ethnic tensions (i.e. blurred ethnic distinctions/ethnic identity disputes and politico-ethnic conflicts), patrimonial forces could easily exploit the country's bureaucratic representation policies as spaces for patronage and as superficial tokens to mollify interethnic factions of their share of the national polity. Thus, instead of facilitating equitable voice in bureaucratic governance, such policy framework could only hold ordinary indigenous and minority ethnic communities captive in the elite-dominated interethnic struggle for representation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While the concept ‘justice’ undergirds every discourse on affirmative action, its meaning is feverishly contested with contradictory definitions wielded as battling swords in a zero sum struggle over the distribution of scarce material resources and symbolic goods. In part, the issues have become even more important since the number of states that have now embarked on affirmative action policies have been growing and the results have been diverse. Affirmative action policies have occurred most frequently in internally heterogeneous societies marked by deep ethno-cultural divisions in which one ethnic community has tended to dominate the rest. To overcome inequalities and ingrained segmental prejudices in these multi-ethnic countries that witnessed over the years the cementing of advantages and privileges among certain ethnic groups has been the primary aim of affirmative action policies. Upheavals and ongoing conflicts have generally dogged these experiences, attesting to some successful societal changes in institutions and practices, to winners and losers. In this paper, we examine some of the controversies, especially in relation to two paradigms and perspectives of social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Tolerance has an ambiguous role in anti-racism strategies. On the one hand, it is a clear antidote to racial intolerance. Yet on the other, not only is it not the only antidote to racial intolerance (respect for difference and indifference to difference are also possibilities), but the fact that it involves a negative attitude or belief and the power to act on it suggests it is far from ideal. These problems are compounded by the fact that racial tolerance can only deal with racial intolerance, which because of its intentionality seems to be only a small part of racism. In this paper, I defend racial tolerance by arguing that conceptually it does have a role in anti-racism strategies and normatively describes an important minimum for those at risk of committing acts of racial intolerance. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Among incidences of everyday racism, offensive jokes are writ large as a way of establishing and maintaining social norms and policing the boundaries of the social body. Yet humour's possible deployment toward anti-racist ends constitutes an under-researched problem. This paper examines an incident of supposedly humorous blackface performance on an Australian family variety television show. The incident was notable as an occasion where humour was used with racist effects but also to anti-racist ends. Literature on anti-racist action commonly assumes that responses to racism should have the gravity commensurate to the problem. We argue that humour enables actors to take a ‘decommitted’ relationship to their actions, creating the perception of distance between themselves and the action. While this capacity to decommit enables racist actions to masquerade as ‘just a joke’, it may also form the basis of a less confrontational, but potentially powerful, form of anti-racist action. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While a focus on institutional anti-racism challenges structural formations of racialized inequality, the inattention to quotidian resistance misses the complex manner in which racism is negotiated in everyday life. Examining ‘everyday anti-racism’ can better identify the cultural repertoires that frame how individuals deal with racism across different contexts. This paper shares findings from ethnographic research with migrants living in Sydney. Specifically, it focuses on middle-class Filipino migrants and their use of social mobility to manage routine racism. The experience of middle-class racial minorities presents distinct perspectives as their strategies do not sit comfortably with anti-racism ideals of ‘equality for all’. I advance the concept of everyday anti-racism to argue for a broader anti-racism politics that captures situated approaches to combating racism. Furthermore, I propose that the identity repair in middle-class contexts offer a chance to build anti-racism praxis that cuts across traditional solidarities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper focuses on building a theory of collective singularity using the case of anti-racist collectives targeting the marginalized Roma minority in the Czech Republic. The collective singularity concept is one in which the values, norms, and practices that constitute a collective render it impossible for the group to transcend its own axioms in any manner other than by rejecting precisely these constitutive elements. The concept of anti-racism contains the trope of ‘the other’, perceived not only as an object of protection, integration, assistance, and interest, but also as an object under pressure to find its own (anti-)concept. Anti-racism oscillates around four dispositives (hysteria, paternalism, individualism, bionumerics) and finds itself unable to follow a radical pluralism with the potential to undermine the roots of the hegemonic discourse. As a result, the dispositives of anti-racism essentially become a ‘hidden’ form of disciplination, reproducing oppression and the impossibility of self-deconstruction. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Studies of transnationalism typically frame it in opposition to the entrapping effects of borders. Yet, for many people, transnationalism is negotiated in contexts marked by forced separation and differential mobility. Drawing on long-term fieldwork among West Bank and Israeli Palestinians, this article explores transnational ties and orientations in relation, not in opposition, to the entrapping effects of borders. Specifically, I examine the two-way traffic in emotions and perceptions that marks family, social and symbolic relationships between West Bank and Israeli Palestinians. I show how entrapping and transnational processes combine to generate a tense interplay between closeness and distance, solidarity and estrangement. The paper calls attention to complex transnational formations among people prone to entrapment such as detained and deported migrants, refugees and minorities divided by rigid borders, and it suggests that a focus on emotions and perceptions is critical if we are to understand such formations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines the slow but steady transformation in how Coptic identity has been articulated and expressed since the mid-1990s. In the past, Copts were careful not to challenge a particular narrative of national unity, which formally included Copts in the Egyptian nation (‘religion is for God, and the nation is for all’), but which in practice imposed a kind of public invisibility on them. Today, a growing number of activists are seeking a public identity for Copts, a form of the ‘politics of recognition’ and the ‘right to difference’. This is a controversial approach within the Coptic community, as well as between the Copts and the Muslim majority and the Egyptian state, and to some extent has required new vehicles for Coptic self-organization and expression, outside the older ‘neo-millet’ institutions that had governed Coptic life for decades. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper, I begin to construct an inheritance map for the epistemological insights in Patricia Hill Collins’s bookBlack Feminist Thought. An inheritance map attempts to take stock of what one has been given in a particular project and what one inherits as work yet to do. Here I outline thatBlack Feminist Thoughtdemonstrates that knowledge has no proper subject, while leaving a project to imagine black feminist epistemology outside of ascriber dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper studies to what extent participating in days for national commemoration and celebration is associated with feelings of national belonging, and to what extent this is comparable across generations and ethnic groups. Utilizing data from a national survey (N = 4,505), three major national days in the Netherlands are examined. We find that whereas participation in Queen's Day is associated with national belonging for all generations, for Remembrance Day this holds only for the generation born between 1945 and 1955, and for Liberation Day for the generations born after 1955. Moreover, for citizens with a non-Western origin, participating in national days is associated with national belonging more strongly than for citizens with a native Dutch or other Western background. These findings highlight the importance of paying attention to potential group differences in the association between participation in national days and feelings of national belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Negative attitudes and explicit racism against Muslims are increasingly visible in public discourse throughout Europe. Right-wing populist parties have strengthened their positions by focusing on the ‘Islamic threat’ to the West. Concurrently, the Internet has facilitated a space where racist attitudes towards Muslims are easily disseminated into the public debate, fuelling animosity against European Muslims. This paper explores part of the online Islamophobic network and scrutinizes the discursive strategies deployed by three ‘prominent’ online actors. By combining social network analysis and critical discourse analysis, the study shows that Islamophobic web pages constitute a dynamic network with ties to different political and geographical milieus. They create a seemingly mainstream political position by framing racist standpoints as a defence of Western values and freedom of speech. The study also shows that Islamophobic discourse is strengthened by xenophobic currents within mass media, and by the legitimization of intellectuals and political actors. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Several countries have imposed bans on the wearing of face veils, a controversial option considered in Bill 94 by the province of Quebec in 2010. This paper examines non-Muslim women's support for the acceptability of the niqab in public spaces. Analysing the 2010 Quebec Women's Political Participation Survey, we find that key feminist arguments – that wearing the niqab is a woman's free choice, a matter of freedom of religion and a visible symbol of women's oppression – are important drivers of opinion. Their role in shaping opinion, however, is complex and mirrors divisions among feminist groups in the province. Additional attitudinal drivers include generation, exposure to the practice and openness to immigration. Equally important, our findings suggest that being a member of a racial minority, feelings of cultural insecurity and religiosity are of little consequence for thinking on the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the formulation of policy frames towards new minorities in France by analysing Lyon's membership of the European Commission's and Council of Europe's Intercultural Cities programme (ICP). Here, with culture accounting for 20% of Lyon's budget, emphasis is placed on the adoption of the Charte de Coopération Culturelle to use cultural institutions to implement difference-orientated policies. Critically, important issues emerge with this strategy. The effort to engage new minorities is hampered by significant apathy from cultural institutions in Lyon, and the limited geographical area of Lyon included in the ICP. Finally, institutions who engage with promoting interculturality co-opt existing organizations, with negative implications for the treatment of diversity in the city. This illustrates the problems with a European framework fostering a policy frame based on recognition for minorities in a context that has yet to fully embrace such policies at the national level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The scope of immigrants' transnational ties and the relationship to their social position is subject to a controversial debate that suggests a dualistic picture. On the one hand, globalization theorists argue that an elite of highly educated and economically most successful professionals intensively engages in and benefits from transnationality. On the other hand, most scholars in migration and assimilation studies hold that it is the most underprivileged immigrants who maintain strong ties across state borders, which in turn furthers their marginalization. Yet, to date, very little systematic research has been conducted into the nexus between social inequalities and transnationality. This paper aims to fill this gap. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP), we show that the economic, cultural and social forms of capital are related to transnationality in different ways, rather than reflecting one uniform pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The notions of diversity and superdiversity are of promising relevance to social work with immigrant clients. They enable a nuanced appreciation of the complex and varied sources of inequality to which such clients are exposed. However, these categories are sometimes employed in overly principled or prescriptive tones, and their distinctive contribution is relatively under-debated. How can diversity and superdiversity be used to make sense of migrants' disadvantages as welfare clients, and what do they add to the pre-existing social work perspectives? This paper revisits three major issues from within the literature on social work with immigrants: (1) the shifting ways of framing these clients; (2) the relevance of diversity and superdiversity in the self-representations and organizational arrangements of service providers; (3) the methodological underpinnings, and ensuing dilemmas, of helping relationships with immigrant clients. Overall, social work emerges as an exemplary field to assess the conceptual transition from diversity towards superdiversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The population complexity associated with superdiversity brings a wide range of challenges for social welfare providers. Commentators have outlined concerns about the ability of service providers to meet the welfare needs of ever diversifying populations and point to potential problems in identifying the nature of need in rapidly changing superdiverse neighbourhoods as conventional approaches to consultation based around ethnicity become practically impossible. Using data collected in the West Midlands, which explored maternity service needs from the perspectives of new migrants and maternity professionals, some key barriers to effective welfare delivery in superdiverse areas are explored. The paper outlines the emergence of two challenges important in shaping new migrant access to maternity care in an era of superdiversity – novelty and newness – and proposes further research to examine the extent to which these challenges are faced in other social welfare services. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

International migration contributes to increasing cultural diversity in many European cities. Historically, migration studies have focused on the integration of immigrants foregrounding race/ethnicity and identity issues, limiting our understanding of intercultural diversity. A new paradigm focusing on relational patterns among groups is emerging, highlighting the importance of mutual relations, interactions and influences among residents of different origins and backgrounds, including the experience of both immigrants and autochthonous populations. The notions of superdiversity and conviviality have significantly contributed to this debate. This paper discusses how both were methodologically operationalized in multi-sited ethnographies carried out in Lisbon and Granada, during 2009–2012. Superdiversity and conviviality are the main theoretical frameworks used to understand how interculturality is lived and experienced at the local level. We reflect on their strengths and weaknesses, unpacking common assumptions about race, ethnicity and culture, specifically looking at the negotiation of difference in intercultural events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diverse schools have become the norm throughout much of what is considered the West. Many urban classrooms feature few white European children but are located in nations dominated by Eurocentric epistemologies and discourses that oppress minority students by devaluing their cultures. Most European scholarship fails to analyse cultures of whiteness in educational settings. This paper addresses this gap by documenting cultural discourses of whiteness infusing a diverse primary school classroom in Amsterdam. Discourses reflecting white cultural norms of order, time, cleanliness, and Western and Christian superiority dominated a classroom containing only one white Dutch child. These discourses contribute to diverse students' explicit racialization while promoting the supremacy of white Dutch culture. They are both assimilationist and exclusionary, suggesting that many students, because of their backgrounds, will never be considered fully Dutch. Findings are of relevance to all nations dominated by white cultures with large populations of students of colour. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many scholars have contributed to a broad spectrum of explanation to understand Malaysians' ethnic consciousness. Some scholars engage the historical materialism approach. Other scholars use the social construction approach. There are also scholars who use both approaches to explain the phenomenon. This paper intends to reconsider all these approaches and propose an approach that will explain Malaysians' ethnic consciousness more concisely. In order to do so, eight focus group discussions (FGDs) were conducted in Malaysian public universities. The FGDs were conducted to investigate the Malaysian Malay and Chinese students' interpretations concerning their ethnic consciousness. Judging from the outcomes of the FGDs, the social construction or the ‘bottom-up’ approach emerged as the more concise analytical method with which to analyse the nature of students' ethnic consciousness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this paper we advocate the study of local street markets to explore fundamental issues about the relationship between economy and society. This relationship evolves over time and we believe that it has been recast in an age of increasing cultural diversity and neo-liberal state regulatory structures. In street markets we can see how diversity and the nature of economic transactions become mutually constitutive. We argue that cultural diversity propels local markets, while everyday interactions in markets influence intercultural relationships. These complex processes are affected by the spatiality of markets and the regulatory environments within which they operate. We conclude by framing a research programme on street markets and discuss a number of methodological complications that would need to be addressed in this endeavour. [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]

This paper revisits the contact hypothesis by assessing differences in generalized trust among participants of Turkish non-profit organizations and ethnically mixed organizations in Amsterdam. Most voluntary sector research takes the contact hypothesis at its core and assumes that the concentration of ethnic minorities in non-profit organizations is detrimental to learning generalized trust. These studies assume that diversity within organizations is better for developing generalized norms without examining participation in ethnically homogenous organizations. I address this gap in the literature by analysing the variance of generalized trust among organizations and their participants. I achieve this through the analysis of purposively designed survey data. The findings suggest that a contact mechanism at voluntary organizations is problematic and should not be asserted uncritically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]