Managing Multiplicity: Adult Children of Post-Independence Nigerians and Belonging in Britain

Migration remains a contentious and divisive topic, particularly with the rise of xenophobia and far right ideologies, which seek to demonize migrants as neither belonging nor welcome in the host society. This reduction leaves the realities of postcolonial migrants as misunderstood and misrepresented. Particularly misunderstood are the children of post-colonial migrants, who were born and raised in the UK by families seeking to better themselves in the ‘Mother land,’ while also aiming to maintain connectivity to traditions and practices from homelands. For some children born in the UK to Nigerian émigrés, family crises precipitated the need for alternative care arrangements, entailing recourse to fostering, boarding schools, or institutional care for periods of time during childhood. Conflicts between British society’s and parents’ cultural values, overt racism and hostility from host society, and differential experiences of extra-family care have impressed upon these children, now adults, both their multiple exclusions and potential belongings. As a result of their traumatic experiences, these adults, now in their 50s and 60s, embody multiculturalism in their abilities to embrace, navigate, and endure in a host country that expresses unwillingness at best and outright hostility at worst toward their presence as UK nationals and progeny of the project of Empire. While continuing to be framed by harsh micro- and macro-conditions, these adult children reveal that belonging can be self-determined through choices on how and with whom they choose to live and grow

Reflections on Teaching Anthropologically and Fostering Belonging as Anti-Racist Allies in a ‘Widening Participation’ University: An Ecological Approach

This article critically reflects on anti-racist and anthropological teaching practices in a widening participation university. It argues that to make meaningful change to entrenched racism and awarding gaps in higher education lecturers must take action and work towards embedding anti-racism into every level of the university structure. We propose using an ecological model with lecturers at its heart as a practical tool to support this work. Lecturers can begin by examining themselves and bring their vulnerabilities and openness to change to their different fields of connectivity – with students, with the curriculum, with academic structures, and with colleagues, across the institution. Such work helps challenge sedimented beliefs and practices and moves the institution toward becoming a more inclusive or pro-belonging university for students and staff alike

Machine-made lace, the spaces of skilled practices and the paradoxes of contemporary craft production

This article inspects a set of paradoxes that appeared in an investigation of contemporary industrial craft in the last remaining factory making machine lace in the United Kingdom. Its focus on a single site, set against a now global industry, means it can build on work in cultural and economic geography to understand this setting as a heterogeneous space, with links to a range of material and immaterial lineages, practices and networks. Ethnographic fieldwork on the factory floor at Cluny Lace threw up three paradoxes inherent in the firm’s continued survival in a context of industrial decline. The first of these paradoxes is the reconcentration of material and immaterial resources in the factory both despite and as a result of the global restructuring of the textile industry. The second is the embodiment of knowledge, and therefore craft skill, both within persons and istributed through the worker’s material environments. Third, is the recognition that the skilled practice the workers carry is not uniform but is multiple, resulting from an unequal distribution of opportunities within the lace industry and different versions of practice that result from the re-concentration of human capital in the factory. This article demonstrates that skill is not uncontested, but is power-ridden and value-laden, and transcends scale. It shows that knowledge and skill are not bound within an individual but are distributed among social actors, material objects and locales, where an attention to each is necessary for understanding the spaces of skilled practices and the ongoing survival of contemporary industrial craft production

Ethnic Minority Students in the UK: Addressing Inequalities in Access, Support, and Wellbeing in Higher Education

This chapter focuses on UK higher education and how structural racism is perpetuated through inadequate attention to access, support, and wellbeing. Inequalities in higher education correspond with those in health, where there are marked disparities between ethnic majority and ethnic minority populations, as COVID-19 revealed. The research employed a qualitative methodology to explore students’ experiences of higher education at a widening participation university during lockdowns resulting from COVID-19. Twenty undergraduate students participated in focus groups and semi-structured interviews across the academic year 2020–2021. These were audio recorded, transcribed, and coded using thematic analysis. The findings reveal that ethnic minority students suffered from inadequate access to technology, insufficient attention to child-care responsibilities, a dearth of peer-to-peer interactions, and limited institutional support for mental wellbe- ing. Inclusive support services and welcoming learning environments, including space for peer-to-peer learning, however, were emphasised as enablers for effective learning and emotional wellbeing. This study has shown that inequalities in access, support and wellbeing in higher education remain. Overcoming these inequalities requires equitable access and support provisioning for ethnic minorities so that all students can fulfil their potentials, at university and after

Exploring the physical activity of Iranian migrant women in the United Kingdom: a qualitative study

Purpose: This article explores the role migration has on the physical activity of Iranian migrant women living in the United Kingdom. Method: This qualitative study includes 22 first-generation Iranian migrant women, aged 24–64, residing in London. Data was collected through in-depth, semi-structured, individual interviews and was analyzed thematically. Results: The findings show that for those women from traditional backgrounds, migration corresponds with liberation from social and cultural pressures experienced in Iran and greater motivation to adopt a physically active lifestyle. However, for Iranian women who had arrived in the UK more recently and had a higher social standing in Iran, migration was associated with the loss of their careers, sources of income, and social networks. These issues were compounded by a lack of cohesion in Iranian migrant communities and poor access to local physical activity resources. This resulted in diminishing motivation and the subsequent de-prioritisation of the women’s physical activity, even though they had regularly engaged in physical activity in Iran. Conclusion: Despite migration leading to improving physical activity for some Iranian women, for others, migration leads to marginality in Britain. Local authorities and Iranian community organizations need to adopt innovative strategies to reach out to recent Iranian migrant women

From documentation to dialogue: exploring new ‘routes to knowledge’ through digital image making

This article considers the mediating role of digital photography for eliciting embodied and dialogical processes of knowledge sharing and knowledge making in the course of ethnographic fieldwork. Based on research in the last remaining Leavers Lace factory in England, the article details examples of how the visual is linked with the aural, gestural, performative and discursive in attempting to reveal know-how and understanding around machine made lace. The article shows that in spite of multisensory engagements, both knowledge transmission and knowledge uptake remain partial. However, through multisensory means to communicate and comprehend, researcher and participants create new ways of understanding, relating and representing the practice under study

Animating representations of industrial heritage

The lace industry in the East Midlands of the UK was a major feature of the local, and wider, economy from the invention of the ‘Leavers’ process in 1813 to the end of mass manufacturing of lace early in the 21st century. The industry grew out of innovations in machine knitting technology that date back to William Lee’s invention of the stocking frame in 1589. In 1816 it was exported to northern France, under conditions of trade embargo, where the industry grew in the towns of Calais and Caudry. In both Nottingham and northern France it generated parallel industries in machine manufacture and textile finishing

Engaging Many Voices for Inclusivity in Higher Education

This article describes an intervention that challenges the hegemony of white curricula and educator ignorance outside a Euro-American perspective. It offers personal reflections on the process, content and reception of that intervention. Following a Freirean model of dialogue combined with person centred experiences as theory, Many Voices Reading Group was set up to use texts, dialogues, experiences and empathic encounters to enable black African and Caribbean students at a widening participation university to bring their wisdoms and strengths into the university space. This article suggests that with a pedagogy that validates the range of students’ experiences and the diversity of cultural capitals these generate, multiply voiced environments can enable higher education to become more meaningful, inclusive, and expansive, for students and educators alike

Doing the ‘Dirty Work’ of the Green Economy: resource recovery and migrant labour in the EU

Europe has set out its plans to foster a ‘green economy’, focused around recycling, by 2020. This pan-European recycling economy, it is argued, will have the triple virtues of: first, stopping wastes being ‘dumped’ on poor countries; second, reusing them and thus decoupling economic prosperity from demands on global resources; and third, creating a wave of employment in recycling industries. European resource recovery is represented in academic and practitioner literatures as ‘clean and green’. Underpinned by a technical and physical materialism, it highlights the clean-up of Europe’s waste management and the high-tech character of resource recovery. Analysis shows this representation to mask the cultural and physical associations between recycling work and waste work, and thus to obscure that resource recovery is mostly ‘dirty’ work. Through an empirical analysis of three sectors of resource recovery (‘dry recyclables’, textiles and ships) in Northern member states, we show that resource recovery is a new form of dirty work, located in secondary labour markets and reliant on itinerant and migrant labour, often from accession states. We show therefore that, when wastes stay put within the EU, labour moves to process them. At the micro scale of localities and workplaces, the reluctance of local labour to work in this new sector is shown to connect with embodied knowledge of old manufacturing industries and a sense of spatial injustice. Alongside that, the positioning of migrant workers is shown to rely on stereotypical assumptions that create a hierarchy, connecting reputational qualities of labour with the stigmas of different dirty jobs – a hierarchy upon which those workers at the apex can play