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The papers in this issue examine various aspects of ethnic differences in higher education. The first three papers, all of which focus on Britain, attempt to explain the very high motivation behind enrollment in higher and further education by ethnic minority students. These papers argue that investment in higher education is a defiance strategy that is used by ethnic minorities to counterbalance the effect of ethnic penalties. It seems that aspirations are still significant in shaping the educational attainment and are fuelled by the grim structural barriers facing ethnic minorities. The anticipation of labour market discrimination on the one hand, and the belief in the value of education as the main means for social mobility on the other hand, lead ethnic minorities in Britain to over-invest in education. The fourth paper tells a different story, in that immigrant students experience systematic disadvantages throughout their school careers including a much lower enrollment in higher education. These young immigrants hold more negative perceptions towards the value of education, not only in comparison with their Italian counterparts, but it seems also in comparisons with minority young people in Britain. However, in the last paper, the results resemble the British case, in that the second generation students hold higher academic expectations than their non-immigrant origin peers, and that these higher expectations are associated with higher levels of persistence and attainment. The authors here highlight the importance of the theory of immigrant optimism in explaining the between-groups differences. However, this theory does not seem to have strong explanatory power in the Italian case, if anything, perhaps ‘immigrant pessimism’ is a better theory to explain the low aspirations for higher education and poor educational attainment among immigrants in Italy. Of course, further evidence is required to substantiate this claim. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Polish experiences of lived diversities in the UK through the lens of their precarious socio-economic status and ambivalent racial identity. Using the concept of conditional citizenship, the article explores how being only tentatively accepted in British society affects Polish migrants' understandings of British diversity. Drawing on qualitative data from a study of Polish migrants' lived diversities, this paper exposes the repertoires of actions that individuals apply in different social contexts in the process of learning to live with diversity. It advances the academic debate on everyday multiculturalism through an exploration of the relationship between conditional citizenship and lived diversities and contributes to an understanding of migrants' racism by contextualising it within national hierarchies of belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While politicians and scholars have debated the meaning, value, and purposes of multiculturalism for decades, less attention has been paid to the views of a broader group of Britons. In this paper I analyze the meaning of multiculturalism for elite university students in Britain. Many British leaders spend their early adulthood in elite universities. Do they hold the same conceptions of multiculturalism that scholars, the media, and politicians espouse? And, do they express strong support for multiculturalism (as they understand it) as discussions about political division in Britain assume? This paper answers these important questions by analyzing 67 in-depth interviews with undergraduates at Oxford University. I find that students define multiculturalism as a diverse array of ethnic groups living in the same society. Most simultaneously report little impact on their lives. Still, a significant minority express concerns about a perceived lack of integration and impingement on traditional British culture. These findings demonstrate precarious support for multiculturalism even among those who express more tolerant, inclusive understandings of British society related to immigration and Brexit in opinion polls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Numerous studies suggest that British society is becoming more Islamophobic, and Muslims, especially youth, in Britain have been its victims. But while there is growing evidence of how they have been targets of explicit and severe instances of Islamophobia, less attention has been focused on how they are also targets of its subtle and implicit forms. The purpose of this paper is to examine how Islamophobia manifests in everyday interactions and how Muslims are racialized from the perspective of one of its supposed victims that has been so far under-researched, i.e., young Turks in Britain. The young Turks' accounts about themselves and their immediate circle of relatives revealed that Turks in the UK experience Islamophobia, but that it is often enacted during mundane interactions without ever becoming explicit. Visible Turkish-Muslim women, however, are the target of everyday Islamophobia far more than Turkish men and secular women, both of whom do not display any religious signifiers in public places. They face Islamophobia at the intersection of gender and religion. Many Turkish women are racialized through the hijab which is interpreted and described in ways that draw upon a set of symbolic meanings and associations. In addition, contrary to what has been discussed about the Islamophobic experiences of Muslim women in previously conducted studies, the evidence of this research shows that Islamophobia appeared to visible Turkish women more frequently in a more mundane, subtle way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young Black Muslim Women (BMW) have complex, intersectional identities and exist at the margins of various identity groupings. Given this, members of the community can face societal relegation across, not only race and gender lines, but across religious ones, too. This paper explores the lived experiences of intragroup discrimination, identity and belonging in 11 young Black Muslim Women in the United Kingdom. In-depth, semi-structured interviews were conducted with participants and thematically analysed through the lens of intersectionality. The use of an intersectional framework facilitated an understanding of the manner in which the sample was multiply marginalised. Two key themes emerged from the interviews: firstly, around experiences of intragroup and intersectional discrimination and, secondly, around the challenges of responding to and coping with the negative effects of such discrimination. Participants discussed the cross-cutting nature through which they faced discrimination: from within the Black community; from within the Muslim community; and as a result of their gender. The non-exclusivity of these three identities result in constant encounters of discrimination along different dimensions to their personal identity. They also developed diverse means of coping with this marginalisation including drawing from religious beliefs and mobile identifications, i.e. performing different aspects of their identities in different contexts. The present study contributes to existing knowledge in its focus on an under-researched group and emphasises the negative effects of intragroup discrimination. The paper importantly highlights the diversity within the Black community and considers the (in)visibility of Black Muslim Women within society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Citizenship testing in the UK assesses the applicant's knowledge of English and of life in the UK as part of a legal requirement. This testing is one part of the British citizenship process which also creates other forms of assessment for applicants that function as bordering techniques. This paper demonstrates how these non-test forms of assessment emerge, in some cases, before the citizenship test through pre-arrival language testing for non-EU spouses and family reunification. They also take place after the citizenship test through citizenship ceremonies and post-ceremony passport interviews. The data is drawn from a four year project examining the experiences of those experiencing the citizenship process. Using the notion of raciolinguistic perspectives and Derrida's metaphor of the Shibboleth, I show how the individual may stand in the face of judgment in various forms through their interactions with the State. The multiple assessment points in the naturalisation process beyond the main test itself enforce the need for 'believeability' of the applicant who must submit themselves to be assessed – in some cases, repeatedly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Attitudes towards social groups that have traditionally been marginalised or discriminated against have changed markedly in Britain over the past three decades. This change is particularly marked in attitudes towards homosexuality and racial diversity which, as public opinion surveys have regularly shown, have become more accepting over time. This change is often attributed to older, less tolerant generations being replaced by young cohorts who are more inclusive and open minded in their attitudes to cultural others. The paper explores this argument by examining trends in people's attitudes towards a variety of minorities, including the said groups, but also immigrants and foreign workers. It starts with a discussion of several perspectives predicting different trends with regards to these attitudes. A distinction is made between optimistic ones (i.e. those anticipating rising levels of tolerance) and pessimistic ones (i.e. those expecting stable or declining levels of tolerance). Subsequently, the paper presents trend analyses and an analysis of age, cohort and period effects to broadly assess the explanatory power of these perspectives. Using these approaches, we find that tolerance towards racial minorities and homosexuality has indeed risen across the board, and that young people are also more accepting of these groups than their parents or grandparents and previous generations of young people. These trends broadly support the optimistic perspectives. However, we also find that prejudice has not disappeared from youth attitudes altogether; for a sizeable minority of youth, it has merely shifted its focus to immigration. Not only have unwelcoming attitudes towards immigrants generally become stronger, young people are not always the most tolerant age group regarding this social group. These findings are thus more in line with the expectations of the pessimistic perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In societies where solidarity and cohesion are experienced primarily via shared national identity, immigration raises questions regarding how non-nationals can gain social membership, so that they are not perceived as undermining solidarity and cohesion. A key aspect of immigrants' experiences is thus whether they embrace the national identity of the destination country. Governments in many destination countries increasingly seek to ensure that they do, via policy initiatives that impose specific requirements for gaining legal citizenship: applicants for naturalization are commonly required to pass a test (ensuring sufficient knowledge of e.g. 'life in the UK') and attend a ceremony that includes a pledge of loyalty. This paper considers whether the British version of these requirements is effective in leading immigrants to embrace British national identity. It uses data drawn from the UK household panel survey ('Understanding Society') to facilitate a comparison between those immigrants who become citizens and those who do not. The main finding is that those who become citizens significantly increase their attachment to British identity. Whether they do so specifically because of the policy requirements (the test and ceremony) is debatable, but it seems clear that these requirements do not inhibit development of a sense of Britishness among the immigrants who meet them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In its current shape, British Muslim politics has been described as following a 'democratic constellation'. The idea challenges conventional understandings of post-immigrant agency, especially assumptions underpinning political representation. Recent contributions to the study of representation draw attention to assertions of 'presence' or highlight 'acts of representation'. Both of these perspectives struggle to capture the self-conscious calibration of representative claims that is characteristic for Muslim representative politics today. Developing an alternative account of representation, the paper draws attention to the making of images of Muslim constituencies in correspondence with an image of the British polity. It considers evidence from three cases: (i) the mobilization of Muslim constituents by the advocacy group Mend; (ii) Sadiq Khan's campaign for the London Mayoralty; and (iii) educational guidance issued by the Muslim Council of Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the turn of the century, young people’s aspirations have featured prominently in UK education policy and practice. Governments of all sides have espoused a rhetoric and enacted initiatives which have tended to focus on somehow ‘correcting’ the aspirations of students of working-class and minority ethnic origins. This paper applies a Bourdieusian framework to the analysis of the education and career aspirations of British-born young women of Bangladeshi heritage in higher education. In doing so, it advances a theoretically informed understanding of aspirations, which accounts for the multiple factors that contribute to shape them as well as for the relative implications in terms of future pathways. Drawing on interviews with 21 female undergraduate students, and building on Bourdieu’s notions of habitus and capital, I conceptualise aspirations as an aspect of habitus. I argue that this conceptualisation allows light to be shed on the ways in which multiple, intersecting dimensions of social identity and social structures play out in the shaping, re-shaping and possibly fading of aspirations. Additionally, it enables us to examine the mutually informing influences of aspirations and capital on practice. Findings indicate that the valuing of education and social mobility expressed by those of Bangladeshi and other minority ethnic origins are integral to collective constructions of ‘what people like us do’, which are grounded in diasporic discourses. They also illuminate the significance of social and cultural capital for young people’s capacity to aspire and actualise aspirations, as these contribute to delineate their ‘horizons for action’. This suggests that by failing to adequately recognise how structural inequalities inform differential access to valued capital, prevailing policy and practitioners’ approaches attribute excessive responsibility to students and their parents. The notion of ‘known routes’ is in this respect put forward as a way to make sense of aspirations, expectations and pathways, and the role of institutions in forging possible futures is highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The issue of working out a viable relationship between accepting and/or living with diversity on the one hand and fostering integration on the other has occupied public debates, political agendas, and social sciences for decades. Our point of departure is that the contemporary European context provides distinct challenges. We need to understand how postmigrant integration is shaped and conditioned by the European public space understood as a geographical space; a composite of legally and institutionally constituted entities; covering nations, regions, and cities mainly within but also beyond the EU; and a site of interaction, and public expression of contestation and cooperation. In so doing, we have to contend with the fact that such important perspectives for handling diversity as multiculturalism, interculturalism, transnationalism and cosmopolitanism occupy distinct roles within the European public space whose governance is multi-levelled yet not reducible to a single tiered system. The European public space is more encompassing than the EU even while that level of governance has some important regulative functions upon member states and to some extent even on non-EU states such as Norway and the UK, especially in what we refer to as the outer circle. While the national level is the most powerful normatively and by most other measures on the inclusion of difference (our inner circle), municipalities also contribute to the constitution of this space. We explore the logics of our four 'isms' and of the tiers of governance and their interaction with each other, both the isms in tensions and syntheses with each other and differentially in relation to the levels of governance. This is an exercise that has not been done before. Our purpose is to suggest a new normativity that might feasibly achieve a broader degree of support and success than any of the isms have achieved alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the significance of class to English national identity. It takes one systematic exposition of the argument that Englishness has been traditionally and intimately bound up with class: George Schopflin’s essay Englishness: citizenship, ethnicity and class, published in 2000. Schopflin thought that Englishness was distinctive in European terms by its class rather than its ethnic character and that this provided people with a very secure and very stable identity, though he did observe a more ethnicised form of identity emerging at the beginning of the new millennium. This is a strong definition of Englishness as class and the paper reassesses its claims in terms of recent research on identity. It argues for a more nuanced understanding of the role of class but suggests that the modus vivendi of English class relations still distinguishes its identity within Europe and the United Kingdom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article responds to the paper "Faith Communities, Communitarianism, Social Capital and Youth Civic Engagement," by John Annette. It recognizes the paper for providing a critique about the reaction of the British government to the imperatives of civic renewal and community participation. It agrees with the author about the use of the concept of social capital.

The sustained policy focus on combating institutional racism at all levels of British society has given new impetus to discovering how racialized groups experience a variety of institutional settings. This article draws on research conducted amongst British Hindu women working as professional accountants to further understand how privileged institutional spaces are racialized. The narratives of the women discussed in this article demonstrate how professional occupations are important in understanding articulations of racial identity in privileged institutional spaces as not only empirically and historically contingent, but also complex, contradictory and ambivalent. The article suggests that although their professional work spaces were racialized, the experiences of the research sample did not seem to indicate that race was an all-determining influence in their career progression. Its influence did not appear to close all avenues for potential change and progression against discriminative employment cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper uses the 2010 Ethnic Minority British Election Study to look at the political attitudes of Muslims in Britain. It tests the relationship between political alienation and political participation on the one hand, and Islamophobia and disapproval of British military involvement in Afghanistan on the other. The principal findings are that perceptions of Islamophobia are linked to greater political alienation, to a greater likelihood of non-electoral participation and to a lower likelihood of voting among Muslims. Likewise, disapproval of the war in Afghanistan is associated with greater political alienation and a greater likelihood of some types of non-electoral participation. There is strong evidence that British Muslims are more likely to interpret discrimination they experience as motivated by their religion and that they perceive more prejudice at the group level. These findings have two theoretical implications. First, they support the theory that non-electoral participation is motivated by dissatisfaction with the party political system. Second, they suggest that perceptions of sociotropic discrimination (for minorities) and a rare salient political issue in which all parties are in opposition to most voters can lead to negative affect towards the political system and stimulate non-electoral participation at the expense of voting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the formation of European identity among children in two very different countries: the traditionally Eurosceptic United Kingdom and the enthusiastic EU newcomer, Bulgaria. The paper revisits existing debates about the relationships between European identity, knowledge and the political and historical context, paying particular attention to the meanings attached to Europe. It demonstrates that children who identify as European are more likely to see Europe in geographic terms, which facilitates the perception of the European identity as ‘default’. In contrast, children who refuse to describe themselves as European see Europe as an exclusive political entity, associated with high standards and distant elites. These perceptions are significantly more common among Bulgarian children, who often depict Europe as a dream, and perceive the European identity as an ideal they aspire to reach. The article also shows how ethnicity and the images of Europe influence the relationship between national and European identities. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examines how ethnicity informs the ways in which Romanian migrants in the UK cope with stigmatisation. Instead of assuming ethnicity’s relevance, our purpose is to examine how responses to stigmatisation may or may not become ethnicised. We consider two strategies. The first strategy invokes and reinforces the salience of ethnicity, albeit in a negative and thus still stigmatised way. Instead of countering stigma with a positive reappraisal of ‘Romanianness’, some Romanians seek to transfer the stigma onto the ethnic Roma with whom they are frequently associated. This strategy thus acknowledges stigma, but attempts to detach it from the self and reattach it to the ethnicised other. The second strategy emphasises individual skills and accomplishments to overshadow the effects of a stigmatised ethnicity. Ethnicity is made less salient by this switch to a register of personal skill and worth. Exploring the interplay of these coping strategies, we highlight the fluctuating relevance, rather than declining relevance, of an ‘ethnic lens’ (Glick Schiller et al., 2006) in individual migrants’ de-stigmatising discourses and practices that produce, transform or at times elide different ethnic boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much research in the UK has shown a close relationship between family position and educational attainment. Yet, this association seems to apply to whites rather than to children from ethnic minority backgrounds who are usually found to outperform whites in spite of their poorer family situation. The classical theories do not give an adequate account of this apparent mismatch as they were designed for the general population. I propose a thesis of ‘reinvigorated ambition’ to try to explain the second-generation drive for success. Drawing data from the UK Household Longitudinal Study, I show that multiple disadvantages faced by ethnic minorities in the labour market give pervasive signals to the second generation that they have to aim higher and work harder in order not to fall too low in their life trajectory. The educational success of children from ethnic minority heritages can thus be seen as a determined effort to shield off cumulative discrimination in the labour market and in wider society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores the effects of the UK citizenship test on migrants through the focus on the injunction to become an active citizen. We draw on qualitative interviews with 158 migrants of different nationalities who are at various stages in the process. We identify two responses. First, participants in our study drew on neo-liberal repertoires of active (knowledgeable) citizenship whereby they proved they are responsible and law-abiding agents of 'social cohesion' yet also simultaneously presented themselves as politically passive. Second, some participants perform critical, alternative narratives which contrast with the neo-liberal understanding of active citizenship. We note that these responses are not mutually exclusive and show the process of making sense of and positioning oneself around the competing, unsettled understandings of what counts as 'active' and what it means to be a citizen. The coexistence of these different responses shows that migrants going through the citizenship test process experience this policy instrument – and the injunctions on which it is based – in unsettling and contradictory ways. Through the citizenship test, and specifically the call to be an active citizen, adherence is sought to particular values – 'British values' – and the performance of active dispositions in a certain way. However, the neoliberal understanding of what it means to be an active citizen is also exceeded and challenged, in sometimes quite 'ordinary' and everyday ways. These coexisting and contradictory narratives bring to light the uncertainties through which migrants perceive the injunction to become an active citizen and the paradoxes of active citizenship more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union membership referendum (i.e. the Brexit referendum) in the United Kingdom in 2016 triggered a process of introspection among non-British European Union citizens with respect to their right to remain in the United Kingdom, including their right to entry, permanent residence, and access to work and social welfare. Drawing on interview data collected from 42 European Union nationals, namely Finnish and Polish migrants living in Scotland, we explore how European Union migrants' decision-making and strategies for extending their stay in the United Kingdom, or returning to their country of origin, are shaped by and, in turn, shape their belonging and ties to their current place of residence and across state borders. In particular, we draw on the concept of embedding, which is used in migration studies to explain migration trajectories and decision-making. Our key argument is that more attention needs to be paid to the socio-political context within which migrants negotiate their embedding. To this end, we employ the term 'politics of embedding' to highlight the ways in which the embedding of non-British European Union citizens has been politicized and hierarchically structured in the United Kingdom after the Brexit referendum. By illustrating how the context of Brexit has changed how people evaluate their social and other attachments, and how their embedding is differentiated into 'ties that bind' and 'ties that count', we contribute to the emerging work on migration and Brexit, and specifically to the debate on how the politicization of migration shapes the sense of security on the one hand, and belonging, on the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is growing evidence that shows that social context is becoming less significant in influencing educational achievements and expectations. Additionally, evidence indicates that expectations are high across the board and becoming of declining significance to educational achievement. In light of this, we reexamine and offer an alternative to the renowned linear models connecting background variables to scholarly achievement via pupils' educational expectation. Analysis of GCSE scores, using three consecutive waves of the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, reveals that the verity of this classical claim is dependent on occupational class, ethnic origin, and school socio-economic status level. These results thus confirm an unrecognized effect of family and school background variables on achievement—not only to engender expectations but also to moderate their influence. This recognition expands and deepens understanding of inequality in educational achievement and social mobility by treating expectations as a resource and analytically distinguishing between the ability of a social group or a certain school to attain or create high expectations and their ability to capitalize on it and translate these into achievements. We find that in many cases, expectations still possess strong potential to transform into achievement, while in others they are high across the board and rather inconsequential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If the 1997 New Labour’s winning election seems to correlate with an upsurge in both the political arena and in public favour for multiculturalism in the UK, the overall decade and a half that ensued took the very opposite path. For example, Prime Minister David Cameron declared in 2011 that state multiculturalism was a failure. In this article, I question the impact of such declarations onto the UK’s immigrant multicultural policy. In particular, using and updating the Multicultural Policy Index, I show evidence of the evolution, between 2000 and 2015, of the UK’s multicultural policy. In turn, this provides a satisfactory framework for having a clear understanding of the public policy dynamic in matters of multiculturalism in the following of David Cameron’s declarations concerning the failure of state multiculturalism. Then, echoing Meer and Modood’s argument of a ‘civic-thickening’ for the UK’s integration policy, I discuss citizenship education programs of the four constituent nations of the UK – where such integration policies have been implemented. This shows that while such curriculums all put forward approaches for ‘thickening’ togetherness, it is nonetheless consistent with a ‘multiculturalist advance’. Hence, one must invalidate the thesis following which multicultural policy and integration policy should be understood through the strict prism of a zero-sum game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are now a growing number of studies on intermarriage in Western multi-ethnic societies, especially in countries with post-colonial migrants (and their descendants). Intermarriage is of great interest to analysts because a group’s tendency to partner across ethnic boundaries is a key indicator of the social distance between groups in a multi-ethnic society. However, theorizing on intermarriage is typically premised upon the union (usually) of a White and non-White individual. We know little, therefore, about what happens the next generation down: the unions of multiracial people, who are the children of intermarried couples. With whom do multiracial people partner? Furthermore, are multiracial individuals who are partnered with White people different in their outlooks, identifications, and socialization of their children, from those who have ethnic minority partners? I draw upon some findings from a Leverhulme-funded research project on multiracial people and their experiences as parents in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the rise of multiculturalism in Britain the visibility of religion, in particularly Islam, has increased. A growing religious diversity has created new contexts and affected young people’s identity and transitions to adulthood. This article applies and extends Bourdieu’s theory of habitus and social fields to a new area: the study of how South Asian young Muslims living in England negotiate between the Muslim and British aspects of their identity. The set of individual dispositions (habitus), which originates in the family field under the influence of South Asian cultures and Islam, changes when it comes into contact with non-Islamic fields. As with the concept of habitus, identity involves reconciling individual dispositions and structural conditions. Based on qualitative insights emerging from 25 semi-structured interviews with young South Asian Muslims, the article presents different strategies of identity negotiations exemplifying the constant and complex interplay between individual agency and the social world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most sociological and anthropological studies of UK race relations produced in 1950s stress the wide spectrum of British reactions to new migrants. Yet, recent historians have tended to focus on the racism and xenophobia of the research and period, on the ‘antagonisms’. The ‘ardently sympathetic’ responses referred to by Ruth Glass in 1960, which were evident also in 1950s fiction, film and radical political movements, have often been ignored or misrepresented in order to construct a more dystopian picture. This article examines the cultural and sociopolitical context of the time and argues that the mood was more critical of British insularity and more anti-racist than many recent historians of 1950s Englishness and race relations research allow. This was, in part, the influence of dislocated intellectuals from postwar continental Europe and the commonwealth, white and black, who, radicalised by anti-fascism and decolonisation, contributed to a growing cosmopolitanism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the UK, the diversity of ‘national’ experiences provides a comparative framework for understanding the salience of national symbols. Using survey data, this article examines which symbols people in England and Scotland see as important to British culture, and to English/Scottish cultures; how their own national identity affects those choices; and the relationship between political and cultural aspects of their national identity. The English and the Scots agree broadly on what constitute important symbols of British culture, but their perceptions of English and Scottish culture differ considerably. The key finding, however, is that people’s sense of their own national identity makes little difference to their perceptions of the important symbols of British culture, whereas at the national level feeling strongly English or Scottish is associated with seeing the ‘national’ flag, the flag of St George and the Saltire respectively, as important. ‘Britain’ remains an important and meaningful concept in symbolic terms even though increasing numbers of English as well as Scots do not define themselves primarily as British. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Among student and young professional migrants to the UK the opportunity for a global or cosmopolitan experience emerges as a motivating factor for migration. This article takes the example of student and young professional migrants to the UK from the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and explores how this cosmopolitan ambition plays out in the formation of UK social networks. Two ‘types’ of research participant are identified; ‘self-conscious cosmopolitans’ whose social networks are cross-ethnic, and others whose networks are largely co-ethnic and who are often derided by their self-consciously cosmopolitan counterparts as ‘clannish’ or ‘cliquey’. The article asks how ethnicity emerges as salient (or not) in these migrants’ talk and practice around UK social network formations. It then considers whether a co-ethnic social network necessarily limits the cosmopolitan experience, or whether this interpretation reflects a narrow understanding of cosmopolitanism which excludes the multiple inter-cultural encounters these migrants experience in their everyday lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Muslim organizational field in Britain based on interviews with activists. It applies a political opportunity perspective to address the degree to which organizations’ aims and activities have been shaped by the contextual factors confronting them, or more independently, by ‘bottom-up’ beliefs and commitments drawn from their relationships to the community. Specifically, the empirical part examines, first, how activists perceive media representation as an opportunity or constraint, and second, how their organizations have constructed collective identities in order to advance their aims within the UK context. Generally, we find that organizations have come together using under a broad ascriptive ‘Muslim’ label that works across denominational, national and ethnic differences. Not only is this orientation a direct response to the pressures of community cohesion policies and discourses but it also has a strong independent and faith-based component in serving the community and its social needs. The resultant Muslim organizational field is strongly acculturative to UK society, but remains critically independent of governing authorities. Finally, organizations have responded to what they see as poor media representation of Muslims by proactively engaging in media work. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Many western European states are adopting integration and naturalization policies that focus on the practices, values and identities of citizenship. On this background, and given the combined crisis of multiculturalism and decline of old-school ethno-nationalism, it has been argued that national, cultural–ideological distinctiveness matters less for what is traditionally the heartland of national sovereignty and identity. A comparison of three citizenship/integration trajectories – Germany, Great Britain and Denmark – suggests that the thesis of liberal convergence must be qualified. Although occurring in civic and liberal registers, national citizenship policies still reflect continuities, and path-dependent reactions to such continuities, of culturally bounded nation states. Germany’s development reflects a republican normalization, facilitated by reunification, but also a distinct liberal and political culturalism and discourse of membership, which grows out of the country’s post-war nationhood. The British critique of multiculturalism is more a re-balancing whose concepts represent the continuity of a weak, non-state-oriented citizenship. And Denmark’s development represents a civic–egalitarian nationalism, embedded in the welfare state, which was never challenged, but recently politicized with Muslim immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Recent evidence concerning the racial identifications of ‘mixed race’ people suggests growing latitude in how they may identify. In this article, we examine whether mixed race young people believe that their chosen identifications are validated by others, and how they respond to others’ racial perceptions of them. While existing studies tend to assume that a disjuncture between self-identification and others’ perceptions of them is problematic, this was not necessarily the case among our respondents. While a racial mismatch between expressed and observed identifications was a common experience for these individuals, they varied considerably in terms of how they responded to such occurrences, so that they could feel: (1) misrecognized (and there were differential bases and experiences of misrecognition); (2) positive about the mismatch; or (3) indifferent to how others racially categorized them in their day-to-day interactions. Some differences in responses to such mismatch emerged among disparate types of mixed people. This study also found that we need to consider national identity, and other forms of belonging, in making sense of the diverse and often multilayered identifications and experiences of mixed race young people in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article draws on the narratives of the two groups of South Asian women (SAW) in the UK who took part in industrial disputes some 30 years apart, in order to examine the ways in which they have negotiated their way through their classed, racialized and gendered inclusion in the labour market. The comparison of the Grunwick and the Gate Gourmet disputes and the employment histories of the actors involved in these disputes enables us to explore the centrality of waged work to the social construction of a diasporic identity and the complexity of SAW’s identities in the UK. This article utilizes an intersectional framework, based on life history interviews, to reinterpret historical events by examining women’s experiences of industrial action in the context of their class backgrounds and changing class positions, and particular histories of migration and settlement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In fighting alongside those whom society has oppressed, Socialists have often found themselves shoulder to shoulder with Muslims, but British Left groups have recruited relatively few Muslim members. Then, with the formation of the Respect Coalition, Leftists and Muslims appeared to have tied the knot. This article examines the nature and limitations of this coalition through an exploration of wider ideological relationships between Islam and the Left. It argues that the coalition was based on a fundamental misconception that it would be possible to combine two different ways of understanding the world, with the result that Respect was ideologically stillborn. It could never have built up a genuine political base, leaving it to rely on opportunism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article outlines the complex stories through which national belonging is made, and some ways in which class mediates the racialisation process. It is based on fieldwork on the ways in which white UK people in provincial cities construct identities based on positioning vis-à-vis other groups, communities and the nation. I argue that this relational identity work revolves around fixing a moral-ethical location against which the behaviour and culture of Others is measured, and that this has a temporal and spatial specificity. First, attitudinal trends by social class emerge in our work as being to do with emphasis and life experience rather than constituting absolute distinctions in attitudes. Second, in an era supposedly marked by the hegemony of ‘new’ or ‘cultural’ racism, bloodlines and phenotypes are still frequently utilised in race-making discursive work. Third, in provincial urban England, there is a marked ambivalence towards Britishness (as compromised by Others) and an openness to Englishness as a more authentic source of identification. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In this article I will examine the changing nature of faith-based community action in England and consider what evidence we have about the extent and diversity of such forms of community action. I will also analyse the current government policy toward faith-based community action and the continuum of policy initiatives from community cohesion to prevention of terrorism. Having done this I will look specifically at what we know about the role of youth civic engagement in relationship to faith identity and faith-based community politics. This will be seen in the context of a shift from encouraging youth volunteering, which followed from the Russell Commission Report, to the new emphasis on youth civic engagement and various proposals for a youth National Civic Service. Finally, in conclusion I will consider models of social capital being utilized in this policy development concerning faith communities and youth civic engagement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Over the last 10 years in the UK, there have been various citizenship policy developments in the domains of education and naturalization. These developments can be contextualized in relation to the UK government’s concern with promoting the significance of ‘national’ (or state-level) citizenship, against a backdrop of perceived internal division — namely devolution and immigration — as well as policy attempts to promote community cohesion in the wake of security threats. Drawing on the UK context, I make two key arguments regarding the relation between education and naturalization. The first is that discourses of naturalization are framed in educative terms. Second, I examine naturalization and education policy in the UK’s multination context of England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. I illustrate that policymakers’ conceptions of ‘successful’ citizenship integration are currently based on limited conceptions of both citizenship and learning. I propose that social constructivist conceptions of learning provide a more productive framework for understanding citizenship, learning for citizenship and integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The author discusses the concept of Critical Race Theory (CRT). He cites the inadequacy of CRT in its advocacy of white supremacy and in its prioritizing of race rather than class as the primary contradiction in capitalist society, to explain the occurrences of racist and xeno-racist in capitalist societies. He mentions the problem with the theory's promotion of the abolition of whiteness, particularly in the context of education in schools. He also discusses the entry of CRT into British education.

In the late 1990s, a diverse group of British South Asian musicians began to gain notoriety in the UK for their distinctive blends of synthesized beats with what were considered South Asian elements (e.g. tabla, sitar and 'Hindustani' samples). Following these successes, the British media industries engaged in discourses on whether these South Asian musicians should be labelled under pre-existing musical genres such as acid jazz and electronic music or under an ethnically oriented classification such as 'The Asian Underground'. Despite vociferous opposition, the latter categorization became the most promulgated. However, this discourse underwent a second iteration when South Asian musicians in New York City created a dance night largely influenced by their transatlantic diasporic colleagues. The purpose of this study was to examine the tensions between ethnically categorizing this New York dance night and not doing so. Using ethnographic data gathered during three months of fieldwork in 2001 as well as through a web-based questionnaire, this study yields interesting findings regarding not only ethnic labelling, but also the larger debate of ethnic essentialism. More specifically, the findings suggest that, on the one hand, ethnically labelling this dance hall as South Asian could facilitate an increased solidarity (sociopolitically) within the diaspora in New York City. While, on the other hand, such labelling could be dangerous to diasporic interests, as it essentializes the South Asian community into a homogenous entity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 2001, political concerns over social and ethnic cohesion have stimulated new debates over citizenship and belonging in the UK. A central feature of which has been a civic requirement of new citizens to learn English. Such a debate however coincides with concerns around in-migration in Wales, and the highly contested notion that non-Welsh speakers have a civic responsibility to learn Welsh. This article aims to explore the contradictions between these two cases via research with adult language learners in Wales -- a group often ignored within literature on language, identity and citizenship. In analysing learners' discourses, the article identifies the ways in which learners come to terms with such notions of responsibility. However, the article argues that by positioning language learning in Wales in relation to the development of Welsh civic institutions, and by locating learning itself as a means of expressing such civic identification to place, so the demands for linguistic accommodation by monolingual English speakers may be increasingly articulated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the time of the devolution settlement in the UK, there was widespread concern that the establishment of the Scottish Parliament and National Assembly for Wales would prompt a rise in English identity at the expense of British identity and, in turn, threaten polyethnic constructions of citizenship. Such presumptions typically rested on reified understandings of the category labels British and English, and conflated the construct of national identity with the constructs of territorial belonging, social inclusion and citizenship. Post-devolution survey data do not currently reveal a decline in British identity in England. Measures of attachment to Englishness vary as a function of ethnic origin of respondent, hut also as a function of question wording. A qualitative interview study of young adult Pakistani-origin Muslims in Greater Manchester, north-west England, illustrates how Englishness may be understood to pertain variously to an exclusive cultural or racial category, or to an inclusive territorial entity or community of political interest. Ethnic constructions of English identity need not imply exclusive understandings of citizenship, but their meaning depends crucially on the ways in which nationality and identity are in turn understood in relation to matters of polity and civil society. Conversely, inclusive understandings of national identity do not guarantee the existence of effective ethnic integration or substantive ethnic equality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interpretive turn in urban studies signals a heightened emphasis on the locus of the city as the site for both the making and unmaking of identities and differences. Juxtaposing examples from British popular culture with narrative extracts from my published ethnographic research on 'mixed race' family and memory, this article addresses two key problematics associated with this discursive shift. First, I explore the concept of multiethnicity as another paradigm for understanding the relationship between structures and forms of agency, particularly as multiethnicity forces a rethinking of racialized and essentialist notions of Englishness and non-Englishness; what I refer to as differentiating between the hyphen and the ampersand. Second, I assess the extent to which lived and constructed ideas of 'the urban' in general and 'the city' in particular are preconditions for the performance of multiethnicity. That is, are urban sites ideal laboratories for an illustration of the ways in which 'mixed race' and multiethnic subjectivities are intertwined? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing largely on Latin and North American and British examples, the three sections of this article each provide a different illustration of the relationship between whiteness, modernity and the urban. The article, first, offers a critique of the lack of engagement with the issue of racialization apparent within some recent studies of urban westernization. This section proceeds to illustrate the association between whiteness, modernity and the urban with reference to Latin America. In the second section, I address narratives of the 'dark city'. It is argued that these discourses reflect the zoning of non-whiteness and, at least in the case of Britain, have sustained a class-based, colour-coded imaginative geography of the city. Third and last, I return to the Americas to discuss the way the rural, non-whiteness and nature have been conflated and constructed in opposition to negative racialized portrayals of the city as an inauthentic and unnatural landscape. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current developments towards globalization, European integration and devolution have opened up a space for the transformation of national identity in Britain. Our interest is in the question of how this space is being filled by members of the post-war generation elite. Given that the relationship between generations and national consciousness has received little attention, this article explores how a particular generation is responding to these developments. Moreover, because the literature on both generations and nationalism has tended to marginalize women, this article focuses on post-war women. Based on an inductive approach, we have constructed a model of an emergent national identity that we have called 'cosmopolitan nationalism'. We found that members of the post-war elite generation of women were offering narratives about national identity that were open in their toleration for local national identities such as Welsh and Scots; cosmopolitan in their identification with Europe and empathy for multiculturalism; ironic in their awareness of the constructed nature and inventiveness of national identities; feminine in their antipathy towards aggressive nationalism and militarism; and creative in their objective to rebuild a more open identity. We suggest that the sense of national identity being promoted by these women could be both a function of their gender and generational location, reflecting as it does the values formed in the 1960s and by the women's movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What does it mean for ethnic minority groups to possess 'ethnic options'? Do ethnic minority groups differ in their abilities to choose and assert their ethnic identities, and can some groups be said to possess more ethnic options than others? It has been recently suggested by certain analysts that while Asian Americans can exercise some ethnic options, African Americans possess few, if any, ethnic options. This article critically assesses this view, and puts forward various reasons why such a view is problematic. In particular, it argues for the need to rethink and broaden the conceptualization of ethnicity and the need to re-examine our understandings of the images and labels applied to various ethnic minority groups. Although the article draws primarily upon studies of Asian Americans and African Americans, it also refers to the experiences of ethnic minority groups in Britain with whom American minority groups share both commonalities and differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]