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This research explores the experiences of bilingual therapists whose first language is not English and who are therefore working in English as a second language, with native‐speaking English clients. Existing literature suggests that the therapeutic relationship is inherently unbalanced, with the therapist constructed as the more powerful. This is particularly true of psychodynamic therapy—the researchers' own modality—in which the therapist withholds self‐revelation. However, the power balance can shift in the client's favour, particularly if they hold knowledge about their therapist. Our research focusses on how bilingualism as an inherent self‐disclosure might result in shifting the power in the therapeutic dyad when the client is perceived as the more competent native speaker. This research aims to contribute an alternative to the prevailing view that linguistic difference is merely challenging. Qualitative semistructured interviews generated narrative transcripts from six participants, which were analysed thematically. Three themes emerged, demonstrating how the therapists experienced their difference in terms of power shifts: my difference is an inherent vulnerability; my difference is a tool; and my difference is unspoken. When experienced as a vulnerability, therapists' bilingualism results in a power struggle. Working with this vulnerability can facilitate the alliance and create a sense of equality. This brings bilingualism as a tool into focus. Almost all participants experienced a lack of recognition of this aspect of their diversity in training and supervision. Most participants acknowledged that it remained unspoken between them and their clients. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Building upon ethnographic research conducted among participants in UK-based initiatives in Jewish-Muslim dialogue, the paper contributes to anthropological literature on the essentialising nature of state-sponsored constructions of minoritised groups. More specifically, I put forward two sets of arguments. Firstly, I suggest a concept of simultaneity that challenges colonially inflected conceptualisations of the relationship between communities and their respective traditions. Activists of Jewish-Muslim inter-community work subvert dominant conceptualisations of intergroup commonalities and divergencies by developing a theorisation of Jewish-Muslim relations that acknowledges group similarities and differences as overlapping categories. Secondly, I contribute to John Jackson's (2005) theorisation of racial sincerity, a notion offering a conceptual challenge to the notion of authenticity. I argue that the complexity of my interlocutors' thematisations of Jewish-Muslim relations underpinned by the diversity of the sources of knowledge that they rely on could be best understood as an example of this analytic. On a broader theoretical plane, the paper proposes a framework that underscores the agentive power of minority communities and pays close attention to the way they define their positionalities vis-à-vis the majorities and each other in ways that go beyond binaries-based theorisations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movement scholars have increasingly examined how political intersectionality helps reveal and explain whose issues and interests are marginalised or privileged within particular activist spaces and discourses. Hitherto, much of the intersectional analysis into social movements has interrogated questions of sameness, difference and power in relation to feminist, anti-racist and queer organising; this article builds upon our knowledge of social movements and intersectionality by exploring the perceptions and experiences of disability activists in the UK. The research draws upon 24 semi-structured interviews undertaken with disability rights activists, finding that a traditional emphasis on unity means that those who are multiply marginalised still experience a silencing of issues and interests of importance to them; moreover, while there is a recognition of difference, this is principally understood in relation to impairment or social class. Simultaneously, the research finds evidence of an increasing tendency amongst disability activists in the UK to engage with intersectionality, both in how they understand disability but also in terms of how they organise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Representations of older age are often reductive in western societies, portrayed as a distinct period of life characterised by social disengagement and physiological decline. Through rich ethnographic accounts developed with older people from Greater Manchester UK, this paper is concerned with how the category of older age is made through representations, and the different ways people encounter and relate to it. In doing so, it disrupts reductive representations by considering how older age is lived. I respond to calls for the incorporation of more-than-representational and affective approaches into the geographic study of older age to advance research on ageing and highlight affect as a useful concept for thinking through difference. The paper is concerned with how older people are represented, with how representations differentially affect and are affected by older individuals, and with how representations of older age are performed and folded into lived accounts. More-than-representational theories offer an understanding of older age that is not pre-given or free-standing, but as something which can emerge, gather and disperse in relation with materialities as well as diffuse atmospheres, affects and emotional resonances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background & Aims: Research suggests that a therapist who works dynamically with their own explicit and implicit beliefs and attitudes, sourced in their own multilayered lived experience, may be better able to appreciate, and more accurately perceive, a clients' lived experience. This study aims to explore counselling psychologists' narratives around anti-discriminatory practice and to examine how counselling psychologists utilise self-awareness to make meaning of and to address the influence of potentially biasing explicit and implicit beliefs, on the therapeutic process in relation to difference and diversity. Method: Semi-structured interviews were carried out with six qualified counselling psychologists who graduated from UK-based counselling psychology doctoral programmes within five years previous to the study. Verbatim transcripts of the interviews were analysed using Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis (IPA). Findings: The analysis produced three master themes: 'Views toward anti-discriminatory practice'; 'Reflections on self-awareness of beliefs and attitudes in relation to difference and diversity'; and 'Actively working with difference and diversity in the therapy room'. Conclusion: The findings substantiate counselling psychologist's multifaceted and critical stance on anti-discriminatory practice. Participants were conscious of and sensitive to the relationship between self-awareness of potentially biasing beliefs and attitudes in relation to difference and diversity and therapeutic practice. Moreover, the findings suggest that core humanistic therapeutic skills, when aided by self-awareness and a reflective practice, can monitor potentially biasing and prejudicial attitudes in Counselling Psychology practice, thus providing a foundation for ADP from a counselling psychology perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I explore how attitudes towards difference in terms of ethnicity, religion, sexuality and gender travel between Polish migrants to the UK and their significant others in Poland. In doing so, I bring together and critically engage with two disparate literatures—on social remittances and family and peer transmission of attitudes. I demonstrate that what occurs between Polish migrants and their non-migrant significant others is a complex process in which favourable and prejudiced attitudes are passed on, challenged, rejected or negotiated. While I stress that both migrants and non-migrants influence each other’s perceptions of difference, I show that non-migrants are more likely to assume the ‘correctness’ of migrant’s attitudes due to the construction of migrants as trusted experts. Acknowledging the multidimensionality and simultaneity of such mutual influences, in the article, I call for the use of the term ‘circulation’ to describe the mobility of ideas, values and attitudes between people and places. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article addresses what appears to be a retrenchment into narrower forms of identification and an increased suspicion of difference in the context of educational policy in the UK – especially in relation to ‘Religious Education’. The adoption of standardized management protocols – ‘managerialism’ – across most if not all policy contexts including public educational spaces reduces spaces for encountering or addressing genuine difference and for discovering something new and creative. A theory of the ‘feminization of religion’ associated historically with Barbara Welter, provides some useful insights as to why this might be, suggesting that those in British society who would prefer to see greater separation from ‘religion’ in ‘secular’ schools may well also be caught up in forms of gender stereotyping. [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 article considers the place of theory within education in two contexts – Sweden and the UK – and advances the argument that both governments and academics themselves have contributed to a 'theoryless' education. Examples are offered from the fate of education science in Sweden and, in the UK, from responses to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) and from the actions of a group of independent academics charged with producing guidelines for assessing qualitative research. Work with the Council of Europe in which theory was used to guide discussions with Government Ministers is described and the paper ends with some proposals for enabling academics to engage more fruitfully with theory. These involve a framework of ethics, informed by Levinas, and a 'creative ontology', developed by Simons and Masschelein. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper highlights the contribution of theoretical discussions of social education in UK youth work to debates about ‘social pedagogy’, arguing that the analysis of power and difference, in particular the impact of gender difference, which has occurred in youth work is essential in discussions of ‘social pedagogy’ too. Since ‘social pedagogy’ has been discussed as a source for transformed visions of schooling, the paper extends and develops discussion of pre-figurative counter-practice and how it can be sustained through an engagement with difference, drawing especially on the work of Luce Irigaray. Ideas and practice associated with social pedagogy have been drawn on to illuminate a radical vision of the common school as a counter-practice to the neo-liberal credentialisation of schooling. Such approaches resonate strongly with so-called romantic models of youth work in the UK (Wylie, 2010) and their associated traditions of social education. The emphasis on the relational and the social in education might enable a fruitful engagement with feminist approaches especially that of the philosopher Luce Irigaray (1932–present) whose work forms the basis of the engagement with difference which is advocated here. Such an engagement with difference is essential to any democratic project which resists pressures simply to normalise, standardise and contain those involved in education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on qualitative interview research conducted with undergraduates at English universities, this paper examines Christian students' experiences of living out their religious identities at university. Noting the transitional nature of the higher education experience, which often destabilizes existing identities, we explore how, for students self-identifying as ‘Christian’, the enactment of faith helps to form experiences of continuity between pre-university home life and their university career. Religious beliefs and practices foster a sense of familiarity and offer cultural resources that assist in the forging of relationships among like-minded students. However, university-based Christian gatherings and groups are presented as less stable resources, and can come to symbolize heightened social difference amongst Christian students from different social backgrounds, provoking some to question, modify or give up their religious identities. In keeping with recent scholarship that stresses the dynamic, lived, continually negotiated nature of religious identities, we trace these patterns as contours within Christian identity construction, illustrating how religious and non-religious social factors interact as individuals navigate a key transitional stage in the life course. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participatory research (PR) strategies have been used extensively in policy and practice based research in the last fifteen years in the UK. This paper offers a critical reflection on the growth in PR programmes commissioned by statutory bodies as part of attempts to understand the influence of race, ethnicity and racism on issues related to substance misuse policy and practice. The stated aim of many PR programmes has been to alter the role of the communities involved, from the subject matter of research activity undertaken by academic outsiders, to co- roducers of knowledge. The paper addresses four specific issues: first, the recent political context in which the use of PR has grown; second, the ways in which participation and community have been operationalized in different projects; third, the differences between vertically driven and horizontally driven PR; and fourth, the different methods and modes of involvement and their implications. It finishes by raising some concerns which might inform future approaches to PR. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we extend recent discussions on the geographies of encounter to examine how students and staff narrate their experiences of cross-cultural contact on a British university campus. In theory, the campus environment offers opportunities for more intense and prolonged forms of contact than the ephemeral micro-scale forms of interaction that have dominated much of the literature on encounters. In practice, however, our interviews suggest that many respondents tend to self-segregate, or in some instances are prevented from mixing with ‘others’ through institutional arrangements. As we also illustrate, the pressures posed by commercial forces on campus orientate certain students towards lifestyle choices and expectations which exclude others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this article is how ‘religion’, as a materially heterogeneous concept, becomes mobilized in different educational spaces, and the kinds of knowing to which this gives rise. Three ‘case studyish’ illustrations are deployed in order to consider how religion and education produce kinds of knowing which may — or may not — involve knowing well and knowing differently. We argue that it is necessary to attend to both the understanding of religion that is being deployed and the specific educational imaginary within which such knowing takes place. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork carried out in Dumfries and Galloway, this article describes how Conservative Party activists put a variety of discursive artefacts to work as they sought to mass produce and distribute leaflets during the 2003 local Government and Scottish Parliament elections. The leaflet, called In Touch, rendered explicit the need to demonstrate that a political candidate and political party are connected (in touch) with a wider community. This leaflet was therefore designed to invoke a set of connections between person (the candidate), place (the Council Ward/community) and political party (the Conservatives) that might register with even the most disinterested elector. At the same time, the production of these leaflets facilitated the generation of an activist network amongst the party's volunteer base, which exhausted itself by the time Polling Day passed. I argue that addressing logistical and organizational questions - that is, activist methodology - in the production of the In Touch leaflet focused the attention of political activists more than the 'issues' on which they intended to campaign, which were 'found' or 'produced' as artefacts or contrivances of activist labour. In addressing such questions, Tory strategists hoped to 'make (a) difference' given that they tended to view previous campaigns to have been executed in an amateur and disorganized fashion. Through the sheer scale of their production and distribution throughout Dumfries and Galloway, it was hoped that the In Touch leaflets would produce social as well as electoral effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at questions of Britishness, identity and difference that have arisen as the UK has changed over the last 65 years, drawing on a range of source materials from the social, political and cultural spheres. It considers how racism and white ethnocentrism have helped shape both public debate and British black and South Asian experience as depicted in popular culture, literature and film, emphasising the role of this cultural practice in changing Britain. It addresses the ongoing debate about Britishness, cultural diversity and social cohesion with particular reference to developments since 9/11. The paper begins with a brief account of the history of migration and settlement in the post-Second World War period and looks at social and cultural responses to the issues that were raised by increased diversity in the UK. The paper argues that similar themes and issues continue to inform the cultural politics of race and ethnicity in the twenty-first century. The final section of the paper looks at how the cultural political agenda has responded to questions of diversity and social cohesion since 2001. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the political and historical antecedents of the absent presence of 'race' in successive policies for citizenship education in contemporary Britain. It questions the possibility of embracing an emerging cosmopolitanism and politics of difference, within the limiting frame of the nation state and its overarching appeal towards common values and goals. In that schools are widely regarded as important repositories of social and moral values, the paper moves to consider how policy tensions can be productively employed by teachers to produce a re-articulation of equality and difference in order to enhance education, citizenship and social justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the written accounts detailing the 'scandals of 1753', the Jewish Naturalization Bill and the Elizabeth Canning case, and in the images produced in their wake, Jews and Gypsies are depicted as both utterly different and terrifyingly similar to the English, their proximity and apparent indistinguishability from the English the source of their threat, the mutual imprinting or syncretic combination the source of the greatest anxiety. While the pamphlets warn of the assimilability of each group and their mutual dependence, the images emerge as the medium in which difference could be marked on the bodies, facial features and clothing of all the groups in question in an attempt to reassert and reinscribe the distinctions between them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the biggest challenges that confront Black people living in the UK is how to assess the veracity of the macro and micro contexts in which our lives are lived. In a country whose indices for what constitutes normality and acceptability are predicated on notions of "Whiteness," Black people have always needed to possess an armoury of experiential and psycho-social tools in order to discern how to live as a potent symbol of "otherness" within the body politic of the nation. This essay, which arises from engagement with a group of Black Methodists, seeks to demonstrate how the use of personal experience and the role of the spirit in Black life can lead to ways of being able to discern one's positionality within the broader world of White dominated Britain. The essay brings together reflections on Black theology, pneuma-tology and experiential learning in order to great a practical/participative Black theology for seeing and reinterpreting the reality of being Black in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The impact of a difference in social class on the therapeutic relationship has received less attention than other differences between counsellor and client, such as gender, race and sexual orientation. In this qualitative research study six clients who identified as working class were interviewed about their experience of a therapeutic relationship with a middle class counsellor and one middle class client was interviewed about a therapeutic relationship with a counsellor whom she identified as working class. Implications for counselling practice are discussed. These include the importance for therapists, supervisors and trainers of exploring their own class background and acknowledging the frame of reference from which they operate; the results show that counselling does not exist in an ideological vacuum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates about the incompatibility of different ways of living are occurring in the UK as in most multicultural societies. These debates, which include diverse voices among both majority and minority ethnic populations, may be observed in public policies, the speeches of politicians and religious leaders, printed media, radio, television, the Internet, in novels, plays and films, and ethnographically in everyday conversations. One point of view, now widely expressed in Europe, is that multicultural countries have become 'too diverse', and the presence of communities adhering to values at odds with those of 'Western' secular society threaten cohesion. Focusing on the UK, the article examines what has been called a 'cultural-diversity skeptical turn' or 'backlash against difference', emphasizes the 'fuzziness' of the concepts involved, and proposes that the backlash should be understood inter alia in terms of the problems of the governability of what are, in a neo-liberal, transnationalized ecumene, increasingly fragmented societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper situates late modern Anglo-Indian lifeworlds in Australia in a dialogue with the theoretical templates of globalisation and postcolonialism. More particularly it deploys contemporary Anglo-Indian life stories to challenge theoretical positions in the domain of globalisation studies that announce either the demise of postcolonial theory (by suggesting that it has outlived its historical viability) or subsume its varied articulations under the rubric of "globalisation". Both positions find their voice in Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri co-authored Empire (2000). I take up the challenge posed to postcolonialism by Hardt and Negri by asking how they would theorise a mode of hybrid belonging in a globalised world that has a long colonial history of racial and cultural mixing and that is not just a by-product of late capitalism's global generation of difference. Such a mode of belonging is manifest in the Anglo-Indian community now residing in the Anglophone countries of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and the UK. The Anglo-Indian narratives deployed in this analysis are seen as exemplary in addressing the theoretical links between postcolonialism and globalisation. They also unravel global capital's false rhetoric of an even playing field of ever proliferating difference and mixedness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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New Labour has paid considerable attention to citizenship. In this paper I explore the different ways in which citizens have been addressed and affected by New Labour policies, concentrating on four processes: activation, empowerment, responsibilization and abandonment. I argue that these different processes are not just the effect of looking at New Labour from different perspectives. Rather they need to be seen as linked in a political and governmental project that seeks to construct the unity of the nation and manage its internal diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Summary: The article begins by exploring the engagement of social work in Britain with ideas bound up with the creation of what might be termed the just society. This is followed by a critical discussion of diversity, difference and division. In conclusion, how social work in Britain might become more poverty-focused is briefly explored. Findings: In the context of globalization and 'savage capitalism', social work should seek to connect its analysis of oppression to mass poverty. However, current approaches, focused on notions of diversity and difference, are failing to produce a rounded analysis because the impact of poverty and material hardship is not acknowledged. Applications: Various themes can be related to the sequestration of poverty from social work's dominant discourses. Five ways in which social work theory and practice could become more poverty-focused are tentatively identified. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The events in Britain since the beginning of the new millennium starkly and dramatically reflect the continued salience of racial and ethnic difference. In media, political and academic discourse, the struggles over nationhood and multiculturalism, the duties of citizenship and the right to cultural expression, similarity and difference have been played out against global and national backdrops, and across many local stages. The articles in this volume aim to explore the contours of this changing terrain, and suggest new avenues for research and theorization. They are primarily an engagement with British debates and events, but seek to place these within a broader global and diasporic context. The aim of this introductory article is to sketch the background to the events that surround the production of these articles, to outline a broad conceptual overview of the current academic debates and to explore the links between each contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contemporary migration has spurred reconsideration of the theoretical concepts used to explain immigrant-host society relationships. Traditional conceptions of assimilation have been an important topic of debate. Some urban sociologists question whether timeworn assimilation models 'fit' contemporary circumstances. Others challenge assimilation theories on a more fundamental level, abandoning notions of 'group adaptation' and focusing instead on social difference and cultural identity. Thus far, there has been very little dialogue between different theoretical perspectives. I attempt to bridge this gap by conceptualizing assimilation as observable, material processes of accommodation of and conformity to dominant norms. Assimilation, in this respect, is profoundly political rather than ecological or 'natural', and is relevant across geographical and historical contexts. Drawing on interviews with Arab immigrants in London, I shall illustrate the ways in which the construction of sameness (as well as difference) is central to immigrant experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how issues of Irish identity and difference expressed themselves in a range of group analytic settings. This Irish dimension has been largely absent in therapy literature. Work on the impact of cultural difference and racism, while very relevant, has not addressed itself to the specific dynamics of the Irish experience in Britain and how this manifests itself in therapy settings. Irishness was understood in a number of different ways in the groups described. For the Irish members, their cultural identity was used both to generate a genuine exploration of difference and the interweaving of personal and cultural events, and, in other circumstances, it was used to create division and to deny early painful family experiences. For the non-Irish members, the Irish experience was simultaneously acknowledged and denied. Acts of apparent inclusion led instead to an experience of exclusion. These experiences reflect the reality of social, political and historical power relations between cultures and how these manifest themselves in groups. A countertransference reaction on the part of the group therapist when identified as Irish, and the impact of this on the group, is also considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses the (re)construction of black identity as a multiracial signifier(n1) shared by African, Asian and Caribbean women in Britain, from the framework of recent social movement theory. The collective identity approach calls attention to naming as a strategic element of collective action, but has overlooked the experiences of black women at the intersection of multiple systems of oppression. A focus on the process of constructing black womanhood allows us to move beyond static and unidimensional notions of identity to question how and why gendered racialized boundaries are created and maintained. I argue that multiracial blackness should be viewed as an oppositional identity, strategically invoked by black women activists in order to mobilize collective action. Drawing on everyday theorizing by black women, the article examines the shift from the policing of authenticity claims, to a more open and fluid collectivity, and suggests that explicit interrogations of identity are a prerequisite for effective and sustainable alliances between diverse movement participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT: This paper argues that, despite over 15 years of reports on ethnic minorities and the environment, the environmental movement, recreational countryside access and heritage, rural racism and the shortcomings of the planning system, ethnic minorities in Britain are routinely short-changed by a systematic indifference to their environmental and planning needs. The paper focuses on two aspects of this indifference. First, it describes the tension between environmentalists' historical pursuit of environmental quality at the expense of what is argued as the equally necessary pursuit of human equality and argues, amongst other things, that this indifference to ‘difference’ is a factor in the whiteness of the movement. Second, it offers observations on ethnic minority communities' own responses to sustainable development, including the results of round table discussions with a diverse range of ethnic minority interests. It shows that ethnic minorities are engaging with sustainable development (mostly outside the environmental movement), although they do not name it as such. In conclusion, it suggests a more proactive role in local sustainable development for local government within an emergent environmental justice debate and within the context of Local Agenda 21 (LA21), the implications of the Local Government Act 2000, and the government's recent focus on social exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nasta's piece forms part of an oral contribution to the plenary session of the conference in which a variety of speakers discussed the many questions that the conference had raised. It focuses specifically on the location and history of black women's writing in Britain and attempts to address issues that have dominated critical and theoretical discussion for some years. The question as to how far we have moved on in our reading and assessment of these literatures is discussed; also the fact that perhaps debates we now see as being contemporary were also current in the experiences of earlier representations of Britain from a black or Asian perspective. Nasta makes some tentative suggestions in terms of how we might move forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spatial data of regional populations are indispensable in studying the impact of human activities on resource utilization and the ecological environment. Because the differences between datasets and their spatial distribution are still unclear, this has become a puzzle in data selection and application. This study is based on four mainstream spatialized population datasets: the History Database of the Global Environment version 3.2.000 (HYDE), Gridded Population of the World version 4 (GPWv4), Global Human Settlement Layer (GHSL), and WorldPop. In view of possible influences of geographical factors, this study analyzes the differences in accuracy of population estimation by computing relative errors and population spatial distribution consistency in different regions by comparing datasets pixel by pixel. The results demonstrate the following: (1) Source data, spatialization methods, and case area features affect the precision of datasets. As the main data source is statistical data and the spatialization method maintains the population in the administrative region, the populations of GPWv4 and GHSL are closest to the statistical data value. (2) The application of remote sensing, mobile communication, and other geospatial data makes the datasets more accurate in the United Kingdom, with rich information, and the absolute value of relative errors is less than 4%. In the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, where data are hard to obtain, the four datasets have larger relative errors. However, the area where the four datasets are completely consistent is as high as 84.73% in Tibet, while in the UK it is only 66.76%. (3) The areas where the spatial patterns of the four datasets are completely consistent are mainly distributed in areas with low population density, or with developed urbanization and concentrated population distribution. Areas where the datasets have poor consistency are mainly distributed in medium population density areas with high urbanization levels. Therefore, in such areas, a more careful assessment should be made during the data application process, and more emphasis should be placed on improving data accuracy when using spatialization methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]