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The expansion of faith schooling in countries such as England raises important questions about their appeal in multicultural societies. Through a case study approach, this article aims to understand the influences behind parents' decisions to send their children to Jewish schools. It illustrates a tension experienced by Jewish parents between a desire for their children to be educated as a community of 'similar' peers, and the segregation that might result as a consequence. In order to 'justify' their choice of separate schooling, parents constructed a desirable, essentialized notion of Jewishness that coalesced their two main selection criteria, academic standards and the presence of other Jewish students. By operationalizing their Jewishness for 'secular' purposes in such a way, they were able to secure a perceived superior academic education whilst avoiding disfavoured 'others' in multicultural comprehensive schools, and in the process defined multiculturalism on their own terms. Consequently, the article foregrounds the broader dynamics of multiculturalism and community that are implicated in questions of (faith) school choice, and the complex intertwinement of parents' school selection criteria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While enchantment has been used productively to think through the geographies of social encounter, extant research – drawing largely from cases in the West – has reinforced a celebratory notion of enchantment, characterized by egalitarianism and serendipity. In this paper we draw ethnographically on encounters between Malay and Chinese users of two street football courts in Singapore, a non-Western context where principles of public interaction converge with but also exceed those in the West. In so doing we aim to advance existing debates by conceptualizing enchantment as it is negotiated and constituted, rather than asking if observed occurrences live up to dominant interpretations. We find that enchantment can be experienced through the construction, perpetuation and negotiation of boundaries; it is also a product of enduring rhythms in space that are produced and developed via the interactions of its users over time. In specifying the different ways in which enchantment is created, negotiated and lived we contribute to signalling the validity of expansive notions of publicness i.e. the different ways in which encounter in public space can be made meaningful and fulfilling. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We analyse the emergence of the ‘Highway to Heaven’, a distinctive landscape of more than 20 diverse religious buildings, in the suburban municipality of Richmond, outside Vancouver, to explore the intersections of immigration, planning, multiculturalism, religion and suburban space. In the context of wider contested planning disputes for new places of worship for immigrant communities, the creation of a designated ‘Assembly District’ in Richmond emerged as a creative response to multicultural planning. However, it is also a contradictory policy, co-opting religious communities to municipal requirements to safeguard agricultural land and prevent suburban sprawl, but with limited success. The unanticipated outcomes of a designated planning zone for religious buildings include production of an agglomeration of increasingly spectacular religious facilities that exceed municipal planning regulations. Such developments are accommodated through a celebratory narrative of municipal multiculturalism, but one that fails to engage with the communal narratives of the faith communities themselves and may exoticize or commodify religious identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks at the various ways in which arranged marriage is practised among members of the British-Indian population. It argues against a singular definition of this practice by highlighting the diversity of routes that lead to an arranged marriage. It also makes a case for understanding arranged marriage as a discursive practice which represents the British-Indian views on matchmaking and kinship. Drawing upon original empirical research conducted in the north-east of England, the article presents a ‘spectrum of arranged marriage’ practices that was prevalent among its practitioners. It highlights that the attraction of this institution lies in the elastic nature of the traditions associated with it. Finally, it proposes that the various discourses of arranged marriage are employed by British-Indians to interpret and tailor-make this traditional practice to carve out hyphenated identities such as British-Indian and other transnational forms of belonging. They achieve this by incorporating the demands of modernity such as the notion of romantic love and a certain level of individual choice within arranged marriage practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ambivalence of race is taken as a starting point in exploring the cancellation of the 2012 St Paul's Carnival, an African-Caribbean arts event in Bristol, England. That race is unstable, that it can be done and undone, has long been a focus of scholarship in social and cultural geography and beyond. This article asks instead how such a fragile state is maintained and with what implications. This necessitates regarding racial ambivalence as an activity; a condition that has to be worked at to be sustained. Ethnomimesis is used to frame these operations of racial ambivalence. Ethnomimesis is the way in which we encounter, stereotype and recognise cultural practices for ourselves and manifest them to others. It demonstrates how different configurations of race are precariously held between the creative possibilities and contingencies of situated cultural practices. Three moments of cancellation are narrated to show how ethnomimetic processes work through multiple formulations of race. This racial ambivalence is central to Carnival's failure. The organisers attempted to produce a performance of African-Caribbean culture that simultaneously denied the histories of racism that motivated the event. Ethnomimesis exposes how the racial ambivalence emergent in these cultural practices both opens and closes the possibilities to belong. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For parents, the school playground is a site of daily intermingling—an important and yet often overlooked site of sociality. Yet whilst it is a space where common needs and experiences are shared, and where friendships and subtle gestures of familiarity are formed, it is also a site of ‘panoptic force’, where on-going conflicts over class, religion, race and competing interpretations of morality are played out and reinforced. This paper focuses on an ethnographic account of an urban multicultural primary school in Birmingham, UK, to argue that the playground, as a prosaic space of urban encounter, can open up a new set of discussions around segregation and the everyday (dis)assemblies of collective life. Attending to both the routines of daily school life and the work of a voluntary Parents Group that aims to address the challenges of living with difference, the paper details the fragile associations, friendships and mechanisms for social learning that develop within the prosaic spaces of the playground. As such, the paper (re)positions the playground as a site of productive sociality, ongoing negotiation and incremental change, which can work to counter anxieties around cultural diversity and challenge wider concerns about the state of contemporary multiculturalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of a shift away from municipal multiculturalism towards community cohesion, and in the light of renewed debates around difference, national identity and Britishness, this article sets out a geographically informed theoretical framework which focuses upon the spatial (re)construction of racial and ethnic identities. The article develops the idea of the everyday as a way of viewing the spatially contingent, complex and negotiated state of inter-ethnic relations in a specific UK city. Not only does this reveal the manner in which strong and stubborn boundaries between social groups are entrenched through the (re)enforcement of spatialised relations of power, but also how accommodations across, between and within difference are realised. Through the employment of empirical material from Leicester, England, the article contends that everyday solidarities emerge from a number of intersecting spatial influences which do not equate to abstract or fixed versions of national belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this introductory piece, I use the concept of cosmopolitanism as a framework around which to discuss both Trieste the city and the papers that make up this special themed issue. Intriguingly, Trieste relates closely to two of the principal discursive worlds around which contemporary understandings of cosmopolitanism have been built: the more restricted usage by historians and anthropologists referring to the cities of the eastern Mediterranean, which I call here Oriental cosmopolitanism, and the aspirational cosmopolitanism of current debates around new forms of European (and indeed world) governance, which I have called European cosmopolitanism. In both these senses, Trieste prompts reflection on what cosmopolitanism may mean, not least in its passage through periods of ethnic division and conflict. I conclude by echoing the sentiments of Minca and Bialasiewicz in their contributions to this themed issue and suggesting that Trieste might indeed be well placed to serve as laboratory for a cosmopolitan European future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]