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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]

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]

This paper uses analysis of interview transcripts and notes from participant observation to explore white reactions to the introduction of diversity management in a large public sector workplace in Glasgow. The paper analyses white talk about racial equality in a social context where the shaming, exclusion and demonization of disadvantaged groups including migrants, asylum seekers and the poor have ensured that issues of entitlement and race are highly charged. It is suggested that in such contexts diversity management is being wielded as a new kind of civility by middle-class people invested in the objectification of poor whites. This represents a form of class conflict over belonging within the body of whiteness that risks reinforcing rather than redressing racial resentments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasingly diverse character of London's multicultural landscape has shaped how migrants interact with(in) the different spaces of the city. This process entails both settled and incoming migrants' participation in place-making; a mutual imbrication that might promote the long-settled migrants' evocation of a lost terrain. This article unpacks that process by looking at the Latin American social football scene of South London, specifically a space known asla cancha(the pitch). This was founded by Chilean political refugees during the 1970s and it has incorporated Latin American ‘economic’ migrants and ‘local’ Britons through time. Starting from the evocation of a lost ‘golden age’ ofla cancha, the paper unpacks this space's contested, complex and changing nature. It presents diaspora space, community and belonging as lived processes. Through this depiction, the assumptions of homogeneous and isolated migrant communities are challenged, as are the diaspora's nostalgic claims that also emerge from them. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on two important questions. First, how can we explain changes in the employment position of England's racialized minority groups over the past three decades? And second, why have these changes taken place at a different pace for different minority groups? It is argued that much of the increase in Asian self-employment represents working-class accommodation to the inferior conditions of employment available under neo-liberal modernity rather than evidence of upward social mobility as current orthodoxy claims. It is also contended that the growing representation of minorities in junior non-manual work was driven by anti-racist activism around a racialized ‘black’ identity and confirms the continuing significance of ‘race’ in the English labour market. By unravelling the complex relationship between the geographical distribution of different minority groups, their educational qualifications, anti-racist activism, and racism, the study establishes why such employment change has taken place at a different pace for different minority groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]