Cohesion, Multi-faithism and the Erosion of Secular Spaces in the UK: Implications for the Human Rights of Minority Women

This article explores the erosion of secular public culture in the UK and its implications for minority women whose bodies have become the battleground for the control of community representation. It argues that struggles for equality and secularism now overlap and have taken on a sense of urgency because it is the human rights of women that are being traded in the various social contracts that are emerging between state and the religious right minority leaderships in the UK. The increasing communalisation (involving religious and community groups mobilising solely around religious identities) of South Asian populations, in particular Muslims, reflects a form of instrumentalisation of religion by the state which has severely constrained the public space available for women to mobilise around a rights?based agenda and has also significantly narrowed the choices of women of faith

Narratives of ethnic identity among practitioners in community settings in the northeast of England

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 overethnicizing 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

A moral economy of whiteness: behaviours, belonging and Britishness

This article outlines the complex stories through which national belonging is made, and some ways in which class mediates the racialisation process. It is based on fieldwork on the ways in which white UK people in provincial cities construct identities based on positioning vis-à-vis other groups, communities and the nation. I argue that this relational identity work revolves around fixing a moral-ethical location against which the behaviour and culture of Others is measured, and that this has a temporal and spatial specificity. First, attitudinal trends by social class emerge in our work as being to do with emphasis and life experience rather than constituting absolute distinctions in attitudes. Second, in an era supposedly marked by the hegemony of ‘new’ or ‘cultural’ racism, bloodlines and phenotypes are still frequently utilised in race-making discursive work. Third, in provincial urban England, there is a marked ambivalence towards Britishness (as compromised by Others) and an openness to Englishness as a more authentic source of identification

Social cohesion and the notion of 'suspect communities': A study of the experiences and impacts of being 'suspect' for Irish communities and Muslim communities in Britain

In this article, we consider how the practice of conceiving of groups within civil society as 'communities' meshes with conceptualisations of certain populations as 'suspect' and consider some of the impacts and consequences of this for particular populations and for social cohesion. We examine how Irish and Muslim people in Britain have become aware of and have experienced themselves to be members of 'suspect communities' in relation to political violence and counterterrorism policies from 1974 to 2007 and investigate the impacts of these experiences on their everyday lives. The study focuses on two eras of political violence. The first coincides with the Irish Republican Army's (IRA) bombing campaigns in England between 1973 and 1996, when the perpetrators were perceived as 'Irish terrorists'; and the second since 2001, when, in Britain and elsewhere, the main threat of political violence has been portrayed as stemming from people who are assumed to be motivated by extreme interpretations of Islam and are often labelled as 'Islamic terrorists'. We outline why the concept of 'suspect communities' continues to be analytically useful for examining: the impact of 'bounded communities' on community cohesion policies; the development of traumatogenic environments and their ramifications; and for examining how lessons might be learnt from one era of political violence to another, especially as regards the negative impacts of practices of suspectification on Irish communities and Muslim communities. The research methods included discussion groups involving Irish and Muslim people. These demonstrated that with the removal of discourses of suspicion the common ground of Britain's urban multiculture was a sufficient basis for sympathetic exchanges. © 2012 Taylor and Francis Group, LLC

Cohesion as ‘common sense’: Everyday narratives of community and cohesion in New Labour’s Britain

The final, definitive version of this paper has been published in Politics, Vol. 36(3) July 2016, DOI: 10.1177/0263395715620811 published by SAGE Publishing. All rights reservedThis article engages with popular narratives of community and cohesion, explored through a series of focus groups in Bradford and Birmingham. This article argues that the participants interviewed used discourses propagated by government to make sense of these narratives in their neighbourhoods and communities. The use of these discourses constructs what Gramsci calls a ‘common sense’ position, which legitimises a specific and targeted notion of cohesion. However, participants can contaminate these discourses, which can lead to subtle changes or explicit challenges to dominant discourses on community and cohesion in the United Kingdom.Peer reviewe

Religion, Resources and Representation: three narratives of engagement in British urban governance

Faith groups are increasingly regarded as important civil society participants in British urban governance. Faith engagement is linked to policies of social inclusion and “community cohesion,” particularly in the context of government concerns about radicalization along religious lines. Primary research is drawn upon in developing a critical and explicitly multifaith analysis of faith involvement. A narrative approach is used to contrast the different perspectives of national pol- icy makers, local stakeholders, and faith actors themselves. The narratives serve to illuminate not only this specific case but also the more general character of British urban governance as it takes on a more “decentered” form with greater blurring of boundaries between the public, private, and personal

The Rise of the Resilient Local Authority?

The term resilience is increasingly being utilised within the study of public policy to depict how individuals, communities and organisations can adapt, cope, and ‘bounce back’ when faced with external shocks such as climate change, economic recession and cuts in public expenditure. In focussing on the local dimensions of the resilience debate, this article argues that the term can provide useful insights into how the challenges facing local authorities in the UK can be reformulated and reinterpreted. The article also distinguishes between resilience as ‘recovery’ and resilience as ‘transformation’, with the latter's focus on ‘bouncing forward’ from external shocks seen as offering a more radical framework within which the opportunities for local innovation and creativity can be assessed and explained. While also acknowledging some of the weaknesses of the resilience debate, the dangers of conceptual ‘stretching’, and the extent of local vulnerabilities, the article highlights a range of examples where local authorities – and crucially, local communities – have enhanced their adaptive capacity, within existing powers and responsibilities. From this viewpoint, some of the barriers to the development of resilient local government are not insurmountable, and can be overcome by ‘digging deep’ to draw upon existing resources and capabilities, promoting a strategic approach to risk, exhibiting greater ambition and imagination, and creating space for local communities to develop their own resilience

'Community cohesion' : reflections on a flawed paradigm

This paper interrogates a concept at the core of a social policy agenda that has dominated thinking in the UK over the past decade. It argues that the notion of ‘community cohesion’ is based on a fundamentally flawed interpretation of the sources of tension and conflict in Britain’s towns and cities. It overly ethnicizes societal divisions and essentializes ethnicity. Examining the development of government policy since 2001 the paper shows that the result has been a predominantly culturalist agenda that obscures key sources of division, most notably those related to social class and material inequality. It is argued that the hegemonic status of this policy stream has also undermined the equalities agenda. The paper concludes with a reflection on the implications of the emergence of a Conservative-led coalition government in May 2010