The making and representation of Muslim identity in Britain: conversations with British Muslim elites

The common nomenclature of ethnicity, race and colour has been found wanting in theorising and dealing with the Muslim presence in Britain. This study of 24 prominent British Muslims - including political, policy and academic/intellectual ‘elite’ – explores the making and representation of Muslim identity in Britain. We explore this through three considerations: Muslimness as a ‘master status’; leadership and representation in relation to British Muslims; and the public performance of Muslimness during ‘key moments’

Doing Office Work on the Motorway

This article takes the motorway seriously as a place where the society of traffic can be found and studied. While many kinds of activities are done by drivers and passengers in parallel with driving on the motorway, such as listening to the radio, eating lunch or caring for, or being, children, I focus here on office work. Empirical material from a video-ethnography of one driver doing paperwork and overtaking a slow-moving vehicle ahead is used to examine in detail some of the practices of combining driving and office-duties in the car while in motion. Drawing on the work of Harvey Sacks, the article examines how this mobile society is naturally organized as an architectural configuration brought to life in the practices of driving in traffic. Overlooked phenomena that are orderly stable features of being mobile are analysed, such as ‘overtaking’, ‘tailgating’ and ‘cruising’. Where other writers have used ‘speed’ to theorize the contemporary period, a brief re-specification is offered in the light of the uses, moral and otherwise, of speed within, and as made apprehensible in relation to, traffic

Intentions on desired length of stay among immigrants in Italy

Abstract The decision to emigrate from the country of origin may not be a permanent one: migrants can decide to return home or to emigrate to a third country. This phenomenon, established for some time in certain other European countries, has become an important one for Italy only recently. This paper contributes to the knowledge of migrants’ intentions in two ways: on the one hand, it analyses the factors associated with indecision about future plans; on the other, it focuses on the desired length of stay and its relationship with attachments (family, economic, socio-cultural and psychological) to host and home country. We used two logistic regression models: one for migrants’ indecision and the other for migrants’ desired length of stay. The data were collected by survey, coordinated by the ISMU Foundation and conducted in 2008 and 2009 with more than 12,000 migrants living in Italy. According to our results, indecision seems to be associated with an intermediate phase of migration at the early stage of family development in the case of negative balance of the migration experience, while attachment to the host country is associated with longer stay, and no attachments or attachment to the country of origin are associated with shorter stay

Boundary formations and identity expressions in everyday interactions: Muslim minorities in Greece.

This book chapter was peer-reviewed as part of the New Directions in Anthropology series of Berghahn publishers

Living and caring between two cultures: narratives of Greek women in Britain

Based on work undertaken as part of the Families and Social Capital ESRC Research Group, London South Bank University

Discrimination and Reaction: The Practical Constitution of Social Exclusion

This article explores and extends Blumer's work on race prejudice and discrimination by using empirical data from an ethnographic study of minority communities in Greece. Blumer explains prejudice as the result of an interactional process through which one group defines itself as superior or dominant in relation to the other. His work on race prejudice has often been misinterpreted as emphasizing the individual's subjective imaginary of the "other." Here I illustrate the importance of the intersubjective processes involved in defining a particular social situation as discriminatory. A central point of the article is to elaborate on his analysis by looking at the experience of prejudice and discrimination from the receiving end, through the participants' interpretation of their social interactions with the dominant group. Therefore I focus on how members of the subordinate group interact with the process that Blumer identifies

Discrimination and Reaction: The Practical Constitution of Social Exclusion

This article explores and extends Blumer's work on race prejudice and discrimination by using empirical data from an ethnographic study of minority communities in Greece. Blumer explains prejudice as the result of an interactional process through which one group defines itself as superior or dominant in relation to the other. His work on race prejudice has often been misinterpreted as emphasizing the individual's subjective imaginary of the "other." Here I illustrate the importance of the intersubjective processes involved in defining a particular social situation as discriminatory. A central point of the article is to elaborate on his analysis by looking at the experience of prejudice and discrimination from the receiving end, through the participants' interpretation of their social interactions with the dominant group. Therefore I focus on how members of the subordinate group interact with the process that Blumer identifies

Introduction: some critical reflections on social capital, migration and transnational families

Special Issue on ‘Social Capital, Migration and Transnational Families' edited and introduction by Venetia Evergeti and Elisabetta Zontini