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This paper draws on original empirical research to investigate popular understandings of prejudice in two national contexts: Poland and the United Kingdom. The paper demonstrates how common-sense meanings of prejudice are inflected by the specific histories and geographies of each place: framed in terms of ‘distance’ (Poland) and ‘proximity’ (United Kingdom), respectively. Yet, by treating these national contexts as nodes and linking them analytically the paper also exposes a connectedness in these definitions which brings into relief the common processes that produce prejudice. The paper then explores how inter-linkages between the United Kingdom and Poland within the wider context of the European Union are producing – and circulating through the emerging international currency of ‘political correctness’ – a common critique of equality legislation and a belief that popular concerns about the way national contexts are perceived to be changing as a consequence of super mobility and super diversity are being silenced. This raises a real risk that in the context of European austerity and associated levels of socioeconomic insecurity, negative attitudes and conservative values may begin to be represented as popular normative standards which transcend national contexts to justify harsher political responses towards minorities. As such, the paper concludes by making a case for prejudice reduction strategies to receive much greater priority in both national and European contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Multiculturalists’ often advocate national identities. Yet few study the ways in which ‘multiculturalists’ do so and in this article I will help to fill this gap. I will show that the Commission for Multi-Ethnic Britain's report reflects a previously unnoticed way of thinking about the nature and worth of national identities that the Commission's chair, and prominent political theorist, Bhikhu Parekh, had been developing since the 1970s. This way of thinking will be shown to avoid the questionable ways in which conservative and liberal nationalists discuss the nature and worth of national identities while offering an alternative way to do so. I will thus show that a report that was once criticised for the way it discussed national identities reflects how ‘multiculturalists’ think about national identities in a distinct and valuable way that has gone unrecognised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the concept of national belonging by drawing on the theoretical framework of affective citizenship. Our aim is to show how, on the one hand, the national remains at the forefront of the political and cultural debates in the age of super-diversity and, on the other, how affective ties can be considered as a means of triggering the process of re-definition of national belonging. Relying on a critical reading of selected works of contemporary Italian migrant literature, the article explores the plurality of meanings associated with the national, thus challenging mainstream interpretations which sees it as a cultural, ethnic and religious homogenous register. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Skilled immigrant professionals are being aggressively recruited by once-exclusionary Western nation-states as crucial for their long-term national prosperity. Recent scholarship reads this as a rupturing of national identity and national membership due to the instrumental concerns of a global knowledge regime. In contrast, this paper argues that the welcome extended to skilled immigrants is provisional on their potential to secure nation-states’ interests in knowledge economies. Drawing on recent Canadian skilled labour policies, this paper shows how Canadian/Western experience is ideologically constructed as essential for immigrant professionals to succeed in the Canadian labour market. I argue that such a move enables the simultaneous functions of a ‘proactive state’, procuring necessary immigrant labour and a ‘defensive state’, shoring up the traditional, historically and culturally formed imagination of the nation. These contradictory functions of the state are anchored on a racialized discourse of skill, in which immigrants are typically cast as lacking, redeemable only through Canadian/Western education/training. I read this as a conditional welcome. Reinstating the contested figure of the Canadian as the desirable worker subject is how the nation form reasserts itself when identity-based nationalism is ideologically untenable and practically unsustainable. I thus contest the argument that national identity and national membership are decoupled in the context of the global race for skills, and instead welcome a dialogue between scholarships on skilled immigration and nationalism to facilitate better understanding of the enactment of nationalist ideologies in the site of the high skilled labour market. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a time when urban space is considered central to understanding how multicultural societies cohere, this paper examines how the urban and the nation are related. To do so, the paper focuses upon Birmingham, UK, which has been presented as a testing ground for national responses to difference and as a model for other European cities. Drawing on narratives of city boosterism, urban policy, local and national news articles, academic writing and resident accounts, the paper deals with three inter-related concerns. First, with discussions on how the city responds and adapts to national framings of diversity and its socio-political conditions of possibility, second, with claims that the city might be understood as epitomising the state of the nation and third, with questions concerning how Birmingham might actively work to shape, challenge or re-write understandings of the nation. Drawing on recent work urban experimentation, the paper asks what Birmingham's position as a laboratory for new social imaginaries and ways of belonging might mean, both for the city and its residents, and for national policy on cultural diversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how middle-aged and older post-Soviet immigrants in eastern Berlin navigate the neoliberalized landscape of work-based integration in face of their long-term unemployment. I first show how these immigrants' own insistence on the centrality of paid work for their feeling integrated contributes to their experience of collective despondency and enrollment in exploitative quasi-markets, including workfare. Focusing on this insistence, I examine how it draws strength primarily from their continued subscription to the conceptions of self as deeply socially embedded, and of work as a practice of such an embedding, adopted through their Soviet-era socialization into the culture of dispersed personhood and obligation to work, rather than from their adoption of neoliberal concepts of citizenship in Germany. Contributing to geographies of post-socialist experience of neoliberalized regimes of citizenship and immigrant integration, this paper thus highlights how some of the aspects of post-socialist subjectivities dovetail unexpectedly with the neoliberal project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corrigendum: Editorial introduction and Arizona: National Tea Party Headquarters—A comparative review of three books Authors: Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres & Gilbert G. Gonzalez, respectively Published in Ethnicities 2015, Volume 15 Issue 2, pages 157–164 and 302–318, respectively. DOI: 10.1177/1468796814557657 and 10.1177/1468796814557656, respectively. Link: http://etn.sagepub.com/content/15/2/157.full.pdf+html and http://etn.sagepub.com/content/15/2/302.full.pdf+html [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]