Books by Ben Gidley
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Across Europe, multiculturalism as a public policy has been declared ‘dead’ but, everyday multicu... more Across Europe, multiculturalism as a public policy has been declared ‘dead’ but, everyday multiculture is alive and well. This book explores how people live with diversity in contemporary cities and towns across Europe. Drawing on ethnographic studies ranging from London’s inner city and residential suburbs to English provincial towns, from a working-class neighbourhood in Nuremberg to the streets of Naples, Turin and Milan, chapters explore how diversity is experienced in everyday lives, and what new forms of local belonging emerge when local places are so closely connected to so many distant elsewheres. The book discusses the sensory experiences of diversity in urban street markets, the ethos of mixing in a super-diverse neighbourhood, contestations over the right to the provincial city, diverse histories and experiences of residential geographies, memories of belonging, and the ethics and politics of representation on an inner city estate. It weaves together ethnographic case studies with contemporary social and cultural theory from the disciplines of anthropology, sociology, geography, cultural studies, and migration studies about urban space, migration, transnationalism and everyday multiculture.
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The first book-length study of contemporary British Jewry , Turbulent Times: The British Jewish C... more The first book-length study of contemporary British Jewry , Turbulent Times: The British Jewish Community Today examines the changing nature of the British Jewish community and its leadership since 1990.
Keith Kahn-Harris and Ben Gidley contend that there has been a shift within Jewish communal discourse from a strategy of security, which emphasized Anglo-Jewry’s secure British belonging and citizenship, to a strategy of insecurity, which emphasizes the dangers and threats Jews face individually and communally. This shift is part of a process of renewal in the community that has led to something of a ‘Jewish renaissance’ in Britain.
Addressing key questions on the transitions in the history of Anglo-Jewish community and leadership, and tackling the concept of the ‘new antisemitism’, this important and timely study addresses the question: how has UK Jewry adapted from a shift from monoculturalism to multiculturalism?
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Diaspora Studies, 2017
As diaspora continues to impact the world in multiple ways, given the recurring instances of forc... more As diaspora continues to impact the world in multiple ways, given the recurring instances of forced migrations spurred by political, economic and environmental impetus, it has become imperative to ...
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This is the first book to examine the relationship between European antisemitism and Islamophobia... more This is the first book to examine the relationship between European antisemitism and Islamophobia from the Crusades until the twenty-first century in the principal flashpoints of the two racisms. With case studies ranging from the Balkans to the UK, the contributors take the debate away from politicised polemics about whether or not Muslims are the new Jews. Much previous scholarship and public discussion has focused on comparing European ideas about Jews and Judaism in the past with contemporary attitudes towards Muslims and Islam. This volume rejects this approach. Instead, it interrogates how the dynamic relationship between antisemitism and Islamophobia has evolved over time and space. The result is the uncovering of a previously unknown story in which European ideas about Jews and Muslims were indeed connected, but were also ripped apart. Religion, empire, nation-building, and war, all played their part in the complex evolution of this relationship. As well as a study of prejudice, this book also opens up a new area of inquiry: how Muslims, Jews, and others have responded to these historically connected racisms.
The volume brings together leading scholars in the emerging field of antisemitism-Islamophobia studies who work in a diverse range of disciplines: anthropology, history, sociology, critical theory, and literature. Together, they help us to understand a Europe in which Jews and Arabs were once called Semites, and today are widely thought to be on two different sides of the War on Terror.
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The essays presented in this collection arise from the presentations made at a symposium held at ... more The essays presented in this collection arise from the presentations made at a symposium held at the House of Commons on 8 May 2013, hosted by the All Party Group Against Antisemitism and planned jointly by the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism, based at Birkbeck, University of London, and by the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS), University of Oxford. Its aim was to reflect on the government’s integration strategy and its Prevent strategyand to do so in the light of both contemporary developments and recent scholarship.
Contents:
Foreword - John Mann MP 07
Introduction - David Feldman and Ben Gidley 09
If integration is the answer, what was the question? - Rob Berkeley 13
Muslim integration and disadvantage - Anthony Heath 16
Finding common ground against disadvantage: 21
challenging the ethnicization of class - Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor
The drivers of far-right extremism in Britain - Vidhya Ramalingam 25
Integration, extremism and Britain’s Muslims - Nasar Meer 30
Antisemitism and extremism - Dave Rich 35
Integration policy beyond localism - Ben Gidley 39
Integration, disadvantage and extremism – a legal perspective - Maleiha Malik 43
Afterword - The Right Hon Baroness Warsi 46
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This project set out to explore communities’ own views about their experiences of small area rege... more This project set out to explore communities’ own views about their experiences of small area regeneration programmes. It draws on qualitative case studies of: Aston/Newtown in Birmingham, Barnsley in South Yorkshire, Kings Cross in London, and the Deptford/Greenwich riverside in London.
Authors: Jean Anastacio, Ben Gidley, Lorraine Hart, Michael Keith, Marjorie Mayo and Ute Kowarzik
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by Josef (Yousef) Meri, S. Boustani, Aomar Boum, Umar Ryad, Judith Frishman, Shari Lowin, Ben Gidley, Ivan Kalmar, Edwin Seroussi, Matthew Wilkinson, Akbar Ahmed, Judith L. Goldstein, David Waines, Peter Wien, and Daniel Schroeter Edited by Josef Meri
The Routledge Handbook of Muslim-Jewish Relations invites readers to deepen... more Edited by Josef Meri
The Routledge Handbook of Muslim-Jewish Relations invites readers to deepen their understanding of the historical, social, cultural, and political themes that impact modern-day perceptions of interfaith dialogue. The volume is designed to illuminate positive encounters between Muslims and Jews as well as points of conflict within a historical framework. Among other goals, the volume seeks to correct common misperceptions about the history of Muslim-Jewish relations by complicating familiar political narratives to include dynamics such as the cross-influence of literary and intellectual traditions. Reflecting unique and original collaborations between internationally renowned contributors, the book is intended to spark further collaborative and constructive conversation and scholarship in the academy and beyond.
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Journal special issues by Ben Gidley
Volume 20, Issue 4, 2013 ISSN 1070-289X (Print), 1547-3384 (Online), Sep 2013
Special issue of Identities reconceptualising the ethnographic study of diversity in urban space,... more Special issue of Identities reconceptualising the ethnographic study of diversity in urban space, with articles on sites from Hackney to Naples.
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Peer reviewed journal articles by Ben Gidley
Patterns of Prejudice, 2024
Ben Gidley (2023) Postcolonial hauntings in riverine London: conviviality and melancholia, Patter... more Ben Gidley (2023) Postcolonial hauntings in riverine London: conviviality and melancholia, Patterns of Prejudice, 57:1-2, 61-81, DOI: 10.1080/0031322X.2023.2268400
In his 2000 book, Between Camps, and its 2005 follow-up, Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy described postcolonial melancholia – a failure to mourn the loss of imperial prestige – and conviviality – the messy and banal navigation of fractally complex but increasingly less meaningful lines of difference in the city – as two opposing but related characteristics of the British urban experience at the dawn of the century. Nowhere is the more evident than in the neighbourhoods of riverine East London, whose identity and urban morphology have been shaped by the river running through them: upriver to the heart of the imperial metropolis and downriver to Britain’s extensive colonies and postcolonies. In these long-standing arrival quarters, two structures of feeling exist in tension with each other: a mode of lament expressing a form of morbid attachment to the perceived greatness of the imperial age, whose ghostly afterlife is etched in the monumental architecture of London’s boroughs and inscribed in the names of its streets and buildings – and on the other hand a fragile emergent form of convivial co-existence, which finds resonance in alternative narratives of the imperial past. This article addresses these issues through data from long-standing research engagement with Bermondsey and Deptford on the Thames’ southern shore and Barking on its northern shore.
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BRILL eBooks/Annual Review of the Sociology of Religion, Jul 9, 2022
Researching Muslim-Jewish encounters always risks reifying categories and foregrounding faith-bas... more Researching Muslim-Jewish encounters always risks reifying categories and foregrounding faith-based identities over other – for instance ethnic or class – identities. The “diversity turn” in scholarship provides one way to address this, highlighting multiple and intersecting lines of identity, but risks erasing the dynamic role of race’s power geometries and of the state in shaping emic identifications. This interview with urban scholar Michael Keith focuses on his research in in East London, a site conventionally narrated as the point of arrival for Eastern European Jewish and later South Asian Muslim migration to the UK, and now represented in some sensationalist media and pseudo-scholarly discourses as an “Islamised” “no-go zone” for Jews. Keith argues that a rigorous commitment to the empirical, granular attention to space’s productivity, and openness to the fragility and contingency of all identity categories of can help avoid such lachrymose caricatures as well as de-politicised versions of the “diversity” frame.
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Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2019
This article argues for the importance of the role of the national and local state, and of increa... more This article argues for the importance of the role of the national and local state, and of increasing socio-economic inequality for understanding urban super-diversity in a time of austerity. Using a methodology and conceptualization that avoids the methodological ethnicism and “methodological neighbourhoodism” inherent in some diversity research, we draw on quantitative analysis and ethnographically produced material from south London to ask what differences make a difference. Examining interactions in “welfare micropublics”, including maternity services, schools, and elderly social care, we show that residents and service providers, often following an “ethos of inclusion”, routinely engage with difference in encounters, allowing the potential for conviviality to emerge. We argue that only by considering diversity together with inequality, can we develop more textured and nuanced accounts of super-diverse urban areas, including a fuller understanding of the social production of dif...
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Francosphères, 2018
This article offers a comparative lens on intercultural and interreligious encounter in urban con... more This article offers a comparative lens on intercultural and interreligious encounter in urban contexts in France and the UK, focusing on the commonalities and specificities of different national and municipal contexts. It offers an account of three forms of encounter, based on extensive fieldwork in two neighbourhoods of Paris and London: commercial interdependencies embedded in early phases of immigration; voluntaristic ‘interfaith-from-above’ policies shaped by state agendas developed since the beginning of the twenty-first century; and still emerging ‘interculturalism-from-below’ generated by second- and third-generation children of immigrants, which is marked by nostalgia and selective reading of local heritage. In doing so, it bypasses the sharp disciplinary and methodological divides that separate research on Jewish histories and cultures, Muslim communities, immigrant quarters, and postcolonial/minority ethnic contexts. It aims instead to show how intercultural and interfaith encounters often occur in mundane spaces, and operate through and despite forms of ambivalence, and in this respect offer a context in which to displace the terms of spectacular accounts of racial and civilizational conflict.
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Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2015
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Identities Global Studies in Culture and Power , Sep 2013
Three tower blocks and three low-rise blocks: nearly a hundred languages and over a hundred count... more Three tower blocks and three low-rise blocks: nearly a hundred languages and over a hundred countries of origin. A council estate in a super-diverse neighbourhood is not only a space of concentrated difference and division, but also an intercultural space where new modes of living together emerge. At the same time, it is connected in an increasing number of ways with various outsides which make its internal space more complex. This article is based on a long-term collaborative research programme that included commissioned local policy research, academic ethnography and an artistic visual collaboration. It argues that multiple research strategies, including radically collaborative modes of inquiry, are required to represent the multiple, incommensurate perspectives co-present in the dense urban space of the estate.
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Journal of Intercultural Studies, May 7, 2013
This article explores the associational politics and diasporic memory of Jewish migrant workers i... more This article explores the associational politics and diasporic memory of Jewish migrant workers in early twentieth century East London. It examines the ways in which associational activity, and specifically landsmanshaftn (hometown associations), tied migrants to sending contexts in both material and affective ways. This meant that diasporic memories were woven into the day-to-day political practices of these migrants, and were mobilised politically in response to the call to identification represented by traumatic events ‘back home’, as is illustrated in two examples, the protests at the 1903 Kishinev pogrom and solidarity with the civilian victims of the First World War. The article also shows that these mobilisations exemplify the ways in which such processes made a difference to the forms of identity and identification available to Jewish migrant workers in this period.
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The Sociological Review, 2009
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Books by Ben Gidley
Keith Kahn-Harris and Ben Gidley contend that there has been a shift within Jewish communal discourse from a strategy of security, which emphasized Anglo-Jewry’s secure British belonging and citizenship, to a strategy of insecurity, which emphasizes the dangers and threats Jews face individually and communally. This shift is part of a process of renewal in the community that has led to something of a ‘Jewish renaissance’ in Britain.
Addressing key questions on the transitions in the history of Anglo-Jewish community and leadership, and tackling the concept of the ‘new antisemitism’, this important and timely study addresses the question: how has UK Jewry adapted from a shift from monoculturalism to multiculturalism?
The volume brings together leading scholars in the emerging field of antisemitism-Islamophobia studies who work in a diverse range of disciplines: anthropology, history, sociology, critical theory, and literature. Together, they help us to understand a Europe in which Jews and Arabs were once called Semites, and today are widely thought to be on two different sides of the War on Terror.
Contents:
Foreword - John Mann MP 07
Introduction - David Feldman and Ben Gidley 09
If integration is the answer, what was the question? - Rob Berkeley 13
Muslim integration and disadvantage - Anthony Heath 16
Finding common ground against disadvantage: 21
challenging the ethnicization of class - Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor
The drivers of far-right extremism in Britain - Vidhya Ramalingam 25
Integration, extremism and Britain’s Muslims - Nasar Meer 30
Antisemitism and extremism - Dave Rich 35
Integration policy beyond localism - Ben Gidley 39
Integration, disadvantage and extremism – a legal perspective - Maleiha Malik 43
Afterword - The Right Hon Baroness Warsi 46
Authors: Jean Anastacio, Ben Gidley, Lorraine Hart, Michael Keith, Marjorie Mayo and Ute Kowarzik
The Routledge Handbook of Muslim-Jewish Relations invites readers to deepen their understanding of the historical, social, cultural, and political themes that impact modern-day perceptions of interfaith dialogue. The volume is designed to illuminate positive encounters between Muslims and Jews as well as points of conflict within a historical framework. Among other goals, the volume seeks to correct common misperceptions about the history of Muslim-Jewish relations by complicating familiar political narratives to include dynamics such as the cross-influence of literary and intellectual traditions. Reflecting unique and original collaborations between internationally renowned contributors, the book is intended to spark further collaborative and constructive conversation and scholarship in the academy and beyond.
Journal special issues by Ben Gidley
Peer reviewed journal articles by Ben Gidley
In his 2000 book, Between Camps, and its 2005 follow-up, Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy described postcolonial melancholia – a failure to mourn the loss of imperial prestige – and conviviality – the messy and banal navigation of fractally complex but increasingly less meaningful lines of difference in the city – as two opposing but related characteristics of the British urban experience at the dawn of the century. Nowhere is the more evident than in the neighbourhoods of riverine East London, whose identity and urban morphology have been shaped by the river running through them: upriver to the heart of the imperial metropolis and downriver to Britain’s extensive colonies and postcolonies. In these long-standing arrival quarters, two structures of feeling exist in tension with each other: a mode of lament expressing a form of morbid attachment to the perceived greatness of the imperial age, whose ghostly afterlife is etched in the monumental architecture of London’s boroughs and inscribed in the names of its streets and buildings – and on the other hand a fragile emergent form of convivial co-existence, which finds resonance in alternative narratives of the imperial past. This article addresses these issues through data from long-standing research engagement with Bermondsey and Deptford on the Thames’ southern shore and Barking on its northern shore.
Keith Kahn-Harris and Ben Gidley contend that there has been a shift within Jewish communal discourse from a strategy of security, which emphasized Anglo-Jewry’s secure British belonging and citizenship, to a strategy of insecurity, which emphasizes the dangers and threats Jews face individually and communally. This shift is part of a process of renewal in the community that has led to something of a ‘Jewish renaissance’ in Britain.
Addressing key questions on the transitions in the history of Anglo-Jewish community and leadership, and tackling the concept of the ‘new antisemitism’, this important and timely study addresses the question: how has UK Jewry adapted from a shift from monoculturalism to multiculturalism?
The volume brings together leading scholars in the emerging field of antisemitism-Islamophobia studies who work in a diverse range of disciplines: anthropology, history, sociology, critical theory, and literature. Together, they help us to understand a Europe in which Jews and Arabs were once called Semites, and today are widely thought to be on two different sides of the War on Terror.
Contents:
Foreword - John Mann MP 07
Introduction - David Feldman and Ben Gidley 09
If integration is the answer, what was the question? - Rob Berkeley 13
Muslim integration and disadvantage - Anthony Heath 16
Finding common ground against disadvantage: 21
challenging the ethnicization of class - Ben Rogaly and Becky Taylor
The drivers of far-right extremism in Britain - Vidhya Ramalingam 25
Integration, extremism and Britain’s Muslims - Nasar Meer 30
Antisemitism and extremism - Dave Rich 35
Integration policy beyond localism - Ben Gidley 39
Integration, disadvantage and extremism – a legal perspective - Maleiha Malik 43
Afterword - The Right Hon Baroness Warsi 46
Authors: Jean Anastacio, Ben Gidley, Lorraine Hart, Michael Keith, Marjorie Mayo and Ute Kowarzik
The Routledge Handbook of Muslim-Jewish Relations invites readers to deepen their understanding of the historical, social, cultural, and political themes that impact modern-day perceptions of interfaith dialogue. The volume is designed to illuminate positive encounters between Muslims and Jews as well as points of conflict within a historical framework. Among other goals, the volume seeks to correct common misperceptions about the history of Muslim-Jewish relations by complicating familiar political narratives to include dynamics such as the cross-influence of literary and intellectual traditions. Reflecting unique and original collaborations between internationally renowned contributors, the book is intended to spark further collaborative and constructive conversation and scholarship in the academy and beyond.
In his 2000 book, Between Camps, and its 2005 follow-up, Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy described postcolonial melancholia – a failure to mourn the loss of imperial prestige – and conviviality – the messy and banal navigation of fractally complex but increasingly less meaningful lines of difference in the city – as two opposing but related characteristics of the British urban experience at the dawn of the century. Nowhere is the more evident than in the neighbourhoods of riverine East London, whose identity and urban morphology have been shaped by the river running through them: upriver to the heart of the imperial metropolis and downriver to Britain’s extensive colonies and postcolonies. In these long-standing arrival quarters, two structures of feeling exist in tension with each other: a mode of lament expressing a form of morbid attachment to the perceived greatness of the imperial age, whose ghostly afterlife is etched in the monumental architecture of London’s boroughs and inscribed in the names of its streets and buildings – and on the other hand a fragile emergent form of convivial co-existence, which finds resonance in alternative narratives of the imperial past. This article addresses these issues through data from long-standing research engagement with Bermondsey and Deptford on the Thames’ southern shore and Barking on its northern shore.
Ziauddin Sardar argues why Islamic reform is necessary, Bruce Lawrence sees Muslim cosmopolitanism as the future, Parvez Manzoor declares jihad on the idea of ‘the political’, Samia Rahman gets to the root of Muslim misogyny, Michael Muhammad Knight explains his taqwacore beliefs, Soha al-Jurf has problems with orthodoxy, Carool Kersten suggests that critical thinkers and reformers are often seen as heretics, and Ben Gidley on what keeps Muslims and Jews apart and what can bring them together.
Gidley B. (2018) Spaces of Informal Learning and Cultures of Translation and Marginality in London’s Jewish East End. In: Nichols S., Dobson S. (eds) Learning Cities. Cultural Studies and Transdisciplinarity in Education, vol 8. Springer, Singapore
Book abstract: The Routledge Handbook of Muslim-Jewish Relations" invites readers to deepen their understanding of the historical, social, cultural, and political themes that impact modern-day perceptions of interfaith dialogue. The volume is designed to illuminate positive encounters between Muslims and Jews, as well as points of conflict, within a historical framework. Among other goals, the volume seeks to correct common misperceptions about the history of Muslim-Jewish relations by complicating familiar political narratives to include dynamics such as the cross-influence of literary and intellectual traditions. Reflecting unique and original collaborations between internationally-renowned contributors, the book is intended to spark further collaborative and constructive conversation and scholarship in the academy and beyond.
'This volume [is] an important contribution to the growing literature on Muslim-Jewish relations'
- Mark R. Cohen, Khedouri A. Zilkha Professor of Jewish Civilization in the Near East, Emeritus, Princeton University, USA
'Josef Meri and thirty-five other scholars lift a reader’s imagination above the current quagmire to the richness and complexities of Muslim-Jewish Relations over 13 centuries. This text is a post-modern exercise confronting the absolutes of power rhetoric with multiple perspectives from an ancient narrative.
- ProfessorJoseph T. Kelley, Center for the Study of Jewish-Christian-Muslim Relations, Merrimack College, USA
Jensen O., Gidley B. (2016) They’ve Got Their Wine Bars, We’ve Got Our Pubs’: Housing, Diversity and Community in Two South London Neighbourhoods. In: Pastore F., Ponzo I. (eds) Inter-group Relations and Migrant Integration in European Cities. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham
The politics of space, we will argue, is central to this process. Existing sociological and cultural geography literature hints at the active role of the spatial imaginary in classing people. We will argue that particular spaces and places – housing estates, and places described as ‘chav towns’ – are used discursively as a way of fixing people in racialized class positions. "
The story of the Kishinev massacre has become familiar within Jewish collective memory. It was coming up to the Russian Orthodox Easter in 1903. In the Russian empire, the Easter weekend was traditionally a focus of blood libels, combining the representation of the Jews as the murderers of Christ with images of sacrifices and other bloody rituals associated, in the antisemitic imagination, with the Jewish festival of Passover. A violently antisemitic campaign had been circulating in the regional newspaper in Bessarabia, where the town of Kishinev lay, including an inflammatory article by the local police chief.1 On the eve of the Easter weekend, the body of a Christian child was found and a Christian young woman patient committed suicide in a Jewish hospital, giving rise to a blood libel story. There followed, over 19–20 April, a weekend of violence: according to official statistics, 49 Jews lost their lives and more than 500 were injured, some of them seriously; 700 houses were plundered and destroyed and 600 businesses and shops were looted. About 2,000 families were left homeless. One feature of the pogrom (the violent anti-Jewish riot) seemed to be an official collusion, with the police involved, a garrison of 5,000 soldiers taking no action to quell the violence, and local theological seminary students playing a leading role.
'This stimulating collection helps us to better understand the colonialism in Zionism as a phenomenon of its day.' - Toby Lichtig, TLS
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Book details:
INCLUSION THROUGH MEDIA was a timely and critical examination of the use of digital media as a means of working with, and empowering marginalized people in their communities.
This practice has emerged strongly in recent years, nurtured by three main factors impacting on young peoples lives:
• the extraordinary growth and increasing availability of digital media technologies, from the internet to iPods, camcorders to mobile phones
• the highlighting of social divisions and increasing anxieties about young peoples’ behaviour, particularly those seen as ‘socially excluded’
• the identification and promotion of the ‘creative economy’, and of ‘creativity’ more generally, as key sites for economic regeneration in the UK
In response to these factors, government agencies, ngos and charities at local and national levels, have been funding an ever expanding number of youth media projects. These are often evaluated, if at all, in the crudest, most quantitative ways (for instance by ‘measuring’ the numbers of young people who find some sort of employment after the project). INCLUSION THROUGH MEDIA will take a more ‘qualitative’ approach, seeking to understand this work as part of the wider social, cultural and economic circumstances in which young people operate. The book will mix detailed case studies of projects with more analytical contributions to produce a useful and rigorous picture of the current ‘state of the art’ of youth media work. Much of the case study material will derive from work undertaken by the Inclusion Through Media Partnership, led by Hi8us Projects and funded by EQUAL/European Social Fund.
The full book can be downloaded from https://www.academia.edu/878368/Inclusion_Through_Media
More Info: The Inclusion Through Media development partnership involved 26 Action Research Projects delivered by 37 partner organisations.This book explores the work through the eyes of academics, policy makers and practitioners.
Publisher: Open Mute
Publication Date: Jan 1, 2007
This chapter focuses on the practice of mainstreaming, more specifically on the implementation of mainstreaming at the street level. The chapter shows that on the one hand mainstreaming helps street-level bureaucrats to make use of their policy discretion to address the complexity of the situation that immigrants face. On the other hand, the broad mainstreamed policy frame can also lead to airbrushing or ‘denial’ of diversity issues and challenges, both at the level of policy making and policy implementation. While the implementation of mainstreaming at the street level can turn out more inclusive due to the custom work street-level bureaucrats deliver, without political leadership and support for a more inclusive mainstreaming approach, the priorities and expertise at the street-level are prone to a risk of dilution.
Book synopsis: "From Sure Start to healthy workplaces, health action zones to community regeneration, this volume makes the leap from research to action."
Professor Richard Parish, Chief Executive, The Royal Society for the Promotion of Health
What is public health and how has it changed over time?
What is the social context of public health and what are the dominant 21st century issues?
What strategies are in place to address population health?
This important book makes a significant contribution to the emergent body of public health knowledge by examining debates around the social context of health, including key socio-economic, environmental and cultural factors. In doing so, the text locates within a social context the theoretical debates and problems surrounding public health, and analyzes the practical public health strategies and solutions that have been developed to address them.
The book moves beyond traditional theoretical discourse to include coverage of:
The thinking, frameworks and processes that are actively shaping public health in the 21st century
Provides tangible examples of public health strategies that have recently been introduced to tackle the social determinants of health
The use of media strategies to promote health
Public Health is key reading for students undertaking courses in health studies, health promotion, nursing, public health, social policy, social work and sociology. In addition to a wide student readership, the book’s focus on public health action and current practice also makes it highly relevant to professionals.
The text brings together a distinguished group of practitioners, social scientists and public health experts who contribute their ideas and research.
Summary
This chapter contains sections titled:
-The South was the South Before it Became the South
-Native Experience and Representation in the Post-Conquest South
-Native Southern – and National – Myths (1): Roanoke
-Native Southern – and National – Myths (2): Pocahontas
-Native Histories (1): The Earliest Southerners
-Native Histories (2): Contact Episodes in the Southeast Culture Area
-Native Histories (3): Creoles
-Natives Represent the South
1.3. Deptford? Regeneration?
by Ben Gidley
The regeneration of Deptford has been one of the main research topics of
the Centre for Urban and Community Research at Goldsmiths University of
London, since its formation out of the Deptford City Challenge Evaluation
Project in the mid-1990s, one of the largest-scale single area-based regeneration
evaluations in the UK. My own involvement in the Centre, and in
Deptford, goes back to 1997, and since then I have been engaged in several
research projects in the area. 1
This chapter is a personal take on some of the
aspects of what I’ve seen of regeneration in Deptford over the last decade.
Or, perhaps, it is not so much about the regeneration of Deptford as
the “regeneration” of “Deptford’.’ That is, not so much about the actual changes
that the area has seen, as the stories of change and of place that have been
acted out here. Deptford, to borrow the phrase Richard Sennett uses about
Manhattan, is a ‘place full of time’. 2 Over the years, there has been a buildup
here, a sedimentation, of memories and stories. Each building, each street
corner contains countless narratives – public or personal, shared or jealously
guarded, celebrated or repressed, invented or half-forgotten. Sir Francis
Drake and the Golden Hinde, Joseph Conrad and The Heart of Darkness,
Olaudo Equiano and his dream of freedom, the New Cross Massacre and
the Black People’s Day of Action, Peter the Great and the shipyard, Jeremy
Bentham and his panopticon, Samuel Pepys and his garden, John Evelyn and
his diary, Sniffing Glue and Deptford Fun City, Dire Straits and Love Over
Gold – all these stories jostle together here, making Deptford the place it is.3
Or, rather, they make Deptford the places it is. But similarly, the word ‘regeneration’
has many meanings for different people.
I approach the issue of faith communities and racism from the perspective of having done historical and sociological research on British Jews. Jews are one of the oldest ‘minority ethnic’ populations in Britain, although their presence in the country was interrupted for a few centuries when they were expelled in 1290. The modern Anglo-Jewish community dates from the period of ‘resettlement’under Oliver Cromwell in the 1650s. Its long history has meant that it is both a useful lens for examining faith communities in Britain, and that it has been treated, in different ways, as a model minority by both sociologists and in public discourse. And because of the long history of racism against Jews in Britain,it provides a useful optic for understanding British racism and its changing nature.
Integration – the stuff that happens after migration –
has an ambivalent relationship to migration studies. The
integration question has historically been posed in relation
to the context of reception and, therefore, within the
disciplinary boundaries of the sociological tradition. The
sociological tradition was born with the emergence of
the modern city; the question of the stranger within the
city – the stranger who comes today and stays tomorrow,
as Georg Simmel put it (1950) – has been one of its
constitutive problems.
However, after the project was completed, it struck the authors that their work on identity, belonging and citizenship - undertaken before the general election of 2015, before the referendum on UK European Union membership went to ‘leave’ and the whole subject became a white hot cipher in ‘Brexit’, and before the general election of June, 2017 - had a much wider use on a changing British landscape.
It strikes us that precisely because of what came after the Foresight Future of Cities programme, identity, belonging and citizenship is going to be one of the key intellectual sites for British researchers of all kinds in the next five to ten years. The work on Englishness now seems almost prophetic.
We have therefore taken steps to have this work updated and then to have it published in the hope that it might inaugurate necessary ongoing debates about identity, belonging and citizenship in Britain, as the island morphs into new subjective shapes.
There is no better place for this work to emerge at the start of 2018 than the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR) at Goldsmiths. To connect this work to their roots, emerging somewhere between the Chicago and Frankfurt School, via crucial figures such as Paul Gilroy and Michael Keith, is to give the research a much needed politics. Many thanks are due to Les Back, Director of the CUCR, for considering the report and providing a home for it.
- Ali, Gidley and Hanson, January, 2018.
This report explores how identities, belonging and citizenship might change in the cities of the future. It starts by setting out how we are using our key terms. As a baseline, it traces the tectonic shifts that have structured these terms in the period from 1965 to the present. It then sets out some of the “known unknowns” that will affect their future unfolding, before tracking what we know about trends that are likely to shape future urban forms of citizenship, belonging and identity. Drawing on an inventory of key future threats and opportunities, we set out a series of scenarios for future cities in relation to our three key terms. In thinking this through, we have foregrounded the role that citizenship, belonging and especially identity might have in rethinking notions of resilience in both imagining and planning for cities of the future.
All three of the keywords in our paper title – identity, belonging and citizenship – are contentious terms for which social scientists and others find hard to agree definitions. The three terms also closely relate to each other, sometimes reinforcing each other while at other times in a more tense or contradictory relationship.
There is a need for renewed emphasis on the politics of cohesion. To be countered effectively racism and intolerance must be understood in their social context. This means understanding how social disadvantage and racial injustice, alienation and disempowerment lead to divisive social relations.
Main authors: Irene Ponzo and Ben Gidley
With: Emanuela Roman, Francesco Tarantino, Ferruccio Pastore, Ole Jensen
Three conclusions come out of the research.
• It shows that applicants for British citizenship are well integrated in British society: more likely to be engaged in the labour market, more active in civic life, feeling more British and more likely to have friendship across ethnic lines than either the foreign-born population as a whole or, significantly, the UK population as a whole.
• It shows broad satisfaction from those who have experienced it of the Life in the UK learning materials and test, the ESOL with Citizenship path to naturalisation, and citizenship ceremonies.
• It shows that integration into British society cannot be understood as a single, one-dimensional process. Instead it is a multi-dimensional set of processes, occurring in different domains of life, and consequently there are several possible pathways to integration.
It suggests that Islamist and far-right extremism are often two sides of the same coin with radical ideologies being embraced by people who feel marginalised as they appear to offer an explanation for, or an answer to, a sense of grievance or lack of opportunity.
The report, which offers new insights from ten leading academics and thinkers, says extremism and integration cannot be tackled at a local level alone. Nor can they be addressed in isolation from tackling issues of disadvantage and inequality. It suggests a unified national strategy is required to build community cohesion and integration, incorporating legal and policy responses, and with a renewed commitment to improving social mobility and racial justice.
Professor David Feldman, Director of the Pears Institute for the study of Antisemitism at Birkbeck, University of London, who co-edited the report, said: 'Xenophobia, Islamophobia and antisemitism are promoted by leaders and ideologues to drive many different forms of extremism. Their appeal to followers is rooted in social and political grievances. Intolerance and racism cannot be understood or fought in isolation from tackling their underlying causes.'
Report co-editor Dr Ben Gidley, Associate Professor in the Centre on Migration, Policy and Society (COMPAS) at the University of Oxford, said: ‘Integration – or a lack of it – is experienced at a local level on the streets of Britain’s towns and cities. This research suggests a more effective national strategy is needed to overcome barriers to integration; otherwise, there is a risk that we create conditions within which extremism can flourish.’
There is a persistent claim that new migrants to Europe, and specifically migrants from the Middle East and North Africa (MENA migrants), carry antisemitism with them. This assertion is made to different degrees in different countries and can take different forms. Nevertheless, in Europe, the association of rising antisemitism with migrants from the Middle East and North Africa is widespread and needs to be evaluated.
MENA migrants have been symbolically central to the migration debate since 2011. These years have been framed by the Arab spring and its aftermath and by Europe’s crisis of refugee protection. This research project has focused specifically on MENA migrants, in response to the intensity of this debate, and in accordance with the brief from Foundation EVZ. The central concern of the research project has been to investigate whether the arrival of MENA migrants since 2011 has had an impact on antisemitic attitudes and behaviour in Western Europe. This report deals with the case of the United Kingdom. The report also considers whether government and civil society agencies have identified a problem of antisemitism among MENA migrants. The findings are based on an extensive survey of existing quantitative and qualitative evidence. Additionally, new qualitative research has been undertaken to investigate the experiences and opinions of a range of actors.
This national report contributes to a larger research project conducted in 2016/2017 across five European countries – Belgium, France, Germany, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom. A final report, Antisemitism and Immigration in Western Europe Today: is there a connection? Findings and recommendations from a five-nation study, draws out common trends, makes comparisons and provides recommendations for civil society organizations and for governments.
The research questions which this report attempts to address are:
• What were the predominant discourses in the UK protests relating to Operation Protective Edge?
• Were antisemitic discourses present? If so, how prevalent were they?
• Are UK protests relating to Operation Protective Edge comparable in scale and in discourse to protests relating to other conflicts?
• How do these issues relate to mainstream and Jewish media reporting on the conflict and on the demonstrations?
• How do these issues and their media representation affect Jewish feelings about antisemitism?
The last two decades have seen the demographic transformation of Europe, driven primarily by international migration. The current historical moment is defined by economic crisis, by a changing relationship between Europe and its neighbours, and the unprecedented scale of mobility within, into and now once again out of the continent. This transformation has manifested primarily in Europe’s cities. As the world becomes more connected and concentrated in the cities of the 21st century, populations, cultures, economies and values in any one metropolis become more diverse.
The European city is marked by the “metropolitan paradox”: the most brutal forms of exclusion and conflict alongside the most profound forms of conviviality and co-existence. It is in cities where diversity is experienced most intensely, to which the majority of migrants move, and where mobilisations against diversity are symbolically rooted. And it is also at local level where the possibility for new forms of identification and belonging emerge. A challenge for the European future is consequently not only the classical moral imperative to generate the good city but also to generate a sense of metropolitan cohesion and to govern diversity justly.
The challenge we are taking up here is this: How can Europe’s cities manage diversity dynamics for urban liveability and urban sustainability under the force of massive economic, social, cultural and political change? How can we learn to build inclusive cities and inclusive urban citizenship?
More specifically, as cities become more diverse and more unequal, municipalities face the challenge of how to ensure that all citizens feel they have a stake in a common civic culture. Local authorities increasingly recognise their “place-making” role alongside their statutory service delivery functions. A city in which all residents feel they are valued increases residents’ wellbeing and satisfaction, and creates a climate in which municipal measures are more effective. This background paper sets out some of the key issues around building a common civic culture in Europe’s cities. The first section sets out the field which the paper addresses and discusses some of the key terms and concepts. The second section explores some of the evidence around the issues. The third section introduces the areas of intervention where cities can make a difference, illustrated by examples of promising or functioning practices.
This report aims to present a picture of migration in London and the key issues around migrant integration. It draws together the state of the academic and policy literature with as recent as possible primary data provided by the GLA and UK Border Agency and original data analysis conducted by COMPAS. It presents the broad contours of the contemporary migration landscape in London, before looking at each of the Mayor’s integration strategy core themes in terms of barriers and factors to successful integration and policy implications arising. It concludes with a framework of interventions, noting the policy priorities arising from the evidence for each of the themes.
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In 2009, the GLA (Greater London Authority) commissioned COMPAS to provide a comprehensive report on the role of economically active migrants in London’s economy. London stands out from the rest of the UK in the number of residents born overseas, but also as the favoured UK destination for young and economically active migrants.
But London’s migration picture is characterised by polarity: many at the top end of the scale in terms of income and skills, and many among the most disadvantaged. The report begins with a literature and demographic review presenting a picture of migration in London and the key issues around migrant integration, showing the changing nature of migration in the city. This draws together the state of the academic and policy literature with as recent as possible primary data provided by the GLA and UK Border Agency and original data analysis conducted by COMPAS. The report also presents the broad contours of the contemporary migration landscape in London, before looking at each of the Mayor’s integration strategy core themes in terms of barriers and factors to successful integration and policy implications arising. It concludes with a framework of interventions, noting the policy priorities arising from the evidence for each of the themes.
What forms of mainstreaming can be identified in the United Kingdom?
How have these mainstreaming policies come about? What factors contributed or obstructed the mainstreaming of integration governance?
Why has or has not integration governance been mainstreamed in the various cases? What explanations can be found for the mainstreaming of integration governance?
In the report, these questions are discussed in relation to the more recent British migration and integration history, and they are subsequently be pursued with particular reference to the policy areas of ‘education’ and ‘social cohesion’. In answering these questions, we focus on England and Wales, as integration and education policy have been devolved competences for much of this time in Scotland and Northern Ireland, where there have been some departures to the general picture in England and Wales. In order to set the scene for the next work package, which will address the local level, we will also outline the policy areas in relation to two selected local government authorities in England – the London Borough of Southwark and Bristol City Council.
large native-born ethnic minority population. UK integration policy has made considerable
effort to address ethnic minority needs—with an emphasis on antidiscrimination and good
race relations. However, there has been less policy activity for immigrant integration.
Britain’s new citizens, what are their attitudes to Britishness
and how are they integrating into British society?
Enlightenment in the Colony is an important, original book, whose contribution is likely to be felt across a range of disciplines and sub-disciplines. The book is about European modernity, and the racialised political subjects it produced and continues to produce. Mufti argues that the “Jewish question” was not only a central problem for the post-Enlightenment world, but that it was modernity's constitutive question. The “Jewish question” is essentially the question of the presence of – and production of – minorities within the space of the nation-state, as it emerged in modern Europe: “the terrorized and terrifying figures of minority” who indicate the limits of liberal conceptions of nationhood, citizenship, secularism and tolerance. Mufti then proceeds to show that “communalist” conflict in the three successor states to the British Raj is a postcolonial variant of that question.
billing. In fact, the book consists of a concise and highly readable thirty-three-page introduction by Sand to ‘the unclassifiable Renan’ (in Sand’s trademark writing style of
charming, breezy hyperbole), followed by two important texts (both originally public lectures) by Renan: the well-known ‘What is a Nation?’ from the 1880s and the little-known ‘Judaism as Race and Religion’.
The French edition, published by Flammarion, gives the author as Renan, with Sand, his name in much smaller letters, described as ‘presenting’ the texts. This makes explicit the recent publishing industry fashion for intellectual celebrity endorsement of cultural products, of which Verso has been at the forefront, with Leninist classics ‘presented’ by Slavoj Zizek and so on. The celebrity endorsement and pleasing design offset the poor value for money, made poorer by the easy availability in English of Renan’s classic which takes up the middle third.
Jacqueline Rose’s The Last Resistance is a fascinating, erudite, often dense, frequently insightful work. It is a collection of Rose’s recent public addresses and occasional
writings, from periodicals such as the London Review of Books and the New York Review of Books, on a cluster of topics to do with psychoanalysis, Jewishness, Zionism, the legacy of the Holocaust and the power of literature. There are three outstanding pieces: ‘Born Jewish,’ on the great Belgian socialist, Marcel Liebman, [1] ‘Continuing the Dialogue,’ on the late Edward Said, [2] and ‘On Gillian Rose,’ a moving tribute to her sister. [3]
describes it as ‘the most theoretically
informed and conceptualized account of
the modernisation of the Labour Party
that we have’—and indeed it is an
intelligent, thorough, well-structured,
well-written and closely argued piece of
analysis. However, it is also written with
a powerful moral urgency. Completed
shortly after Blair’s election victory, its
worst fears have been confirmed and its
pertinence has not diminished.
Oxford Diaspora Programme | Keywords in Ethnicity seminars
COMPAS, Oxford | 12 November 2013
http://www.compas.ox.ac.uk/events/forthcoming/key/
What are their attitudes to Britishness? Are they integrating into British society?
This thesis is about citizenship and belonging: how citizenship has articulated with or against different forms, practices and spaces of belonging. It examines Jewish East London in the period from 1903 to the end of the First World War and is based on original archival research. It argues that this period saw the emergence of a new form of racialized biopolitical citizenship, which was normalized in the “state of emergency” that was the war. This citizenship was framed by the imperial context, was based on singular “either/or” identities and was defined against the figure of alien. The thesis also argues that, in the same period, an alternative space of political belonging existed in East London, based on different forms of political rationality and threaded through with multiple loyalties and identifications, that challenged the either/or logic of the nation-state. Consequently, Jewish radicals who operated in this alternative public sphere developed understandings of political belonging which cut against the grain of the nation-state, and thus offer resources for thinking about citizenship today.
The thesis seeks to unsettle some of the conventional languages of citizenship and political belonging by historicizing them: by concentrating on the specific way in which modern citizenship emerged in imperial Britain, and on the material processes by which this citizenship was policed and mapped. The thesis examines a series of different spaces and scales of political belonging. It attempts to keep in focus regimes of visibility, subjectification and governmentality that produce these spaces and the practices of belonging and cultural traditions that wove through them.
(updated signatories added on last page, next updates at https://leftrenewal.net/signatories/)