The Construction and Understanding of Mixed-Race Identities at a Superdiverse Youth Football Club: Hybridity, Confusion and Contra-fusion

Using the findings of two years’ ethnographic fieldwork, the article examines the construction and understanding of mixed-race identities at a football club situated in a superdiverse area of London. It describes how the characteristics of superdiversity together with the dynamic between parents/guardians, children, coaches and scouts shape people’s perceptions of the ethnic options available to mixed-race young people. I try to show how assertions relating to these ethnic options are consistent with understandings of hybridity. More specifically, there is a tension between fusion and preservation and in some instances a slippage between discourses of biology and culture. This reflects confusion about mixedness and leads to what I have called ‘contra-fusion’: a way of reasoning that resists the formation of integrated mixed identities by emphasising the preservation of raced and gendered inheritances in the constitution of mixedness

The Disproportionality Project: Addressing issues relating to the disproportionately high representation of Islington’s and Haringey’s BAME young people in the Criminal Justice System

This report presents the findings and recommendations from the second partnership project involving Islington Borough Council and criminologists at City, University of London. The first project, Enhancing the work of the Islington Integrated Gangs Team, was published in 2019. This second project involved evaluating a programme designed to tackle key issues and outcomes relating to the disproportionate representation of Black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) young people in the Criminal Justice System and beyond

Flannery O'Connor's letters and fiction: A corresponding identity

This thesis attempts to demonstrate the way in which Flannery 0' Connor uses the personal letter as vehicle for negotiating her involvement with the world. It begins by examining the way in which O'Connor's letters function as a form of self-writing. Discussing her letters as an autobiographical text highlights the significance of detachment in the creation of a self-identity responsive to ""cultural"" and ""essential"" impulses simultaneously. This leads inevitably to the identification of the ways in which O'Connor, in her letters, repeatedly adopts perspectives that facilitate her disengagement from immediate surroundings. It is evident that her experience of the world is mediated through her use of two responses - comedy and resoluteness. O'Connor's comic sense allows her an individual, complex response to the discursive cultural influences in her life. Her use of comedy in her letters foreshadows the function of humor in her stories: in her fiction, O'Connor develops further the possibilities of a comic engagement with life. O'Connor's resoluteness testifies to her involvement in something ""essential"". It is an integral part of her religious consciousness and reflects the long-range, expansive dimensions of her personal vision. In that it allows her to disengage with irrelevant or distracting considerations, resoluteness becomes invaluable for ensuring the integrity of O'Connor's vocation as a writer. It is evident that resoluteness describes both O'Connor's own response to life and the operation of truth in her stories. The detachment intrinsic to communication by letter fosters the detachment that, for O'Connor, becomes the means for an intense engagement with life and a positive self-construction. This is crucial for the maintenance of an individual, authentic perspective and is therefore essential both for O'Connor's personal autonomy and for her success as an artist

Enhancing the work of the Islington Integrated Gangs Team: A pilot study on the response to serious youth violence in Islington

This report is the result of research conducted by the Centre for City Criminology at City, University of London, in partnership with Islington’s Integrated Gangs Team (IGT) and the Metropolitan Police Service (MPS). The research was co-funded by MPS and the School of Arts and Social Sciences, City, University of London. Following a collaborative research event in October 2017, City Criminologists were commissioned to carry out a small-scale research project to capture the work of the IGT and to make recommendations regarding its operations, coherence, effectiveness and sustainability. The research team conducted semi-structured interviews over several months with 23 practitioners across the services that constitute the IGT. This report presents the findings and recommendations

Legitimacy, urban violence and the public health approach

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Respectability and boundary making on a superdiverse housing estate: The cross-racial deployment of intra-ethnic stereotypes

This article examines how white British residents of a superdiverse London housing estate learn about—and subsequently deploy—the intra-ethnic stereotypes used by their British Pakistani and British Bangladeshi neighbours/flatmates. Building on recent attempts to bring together conviviality and boundary making, along with insights into intra-ethnic othering, we show how, for white British residents, these stereotypes offered the chance to add detail and authenticity to judgements about the “unrespectable” behaviour of British Asian residents and/or visitors. Ultimately, however, white British residents' inappropriate and/or imprecise deployment of these stereotypes in relation to British Bangladeshis and British Pakistanis led to the misidentification of low-status people and the unfair extension of discrimination faced by low-status individuals and families. Furthermore, the combination of clumsy application and the positioning of “respectable” British Bangladeshis and British Pakistanis as purveyors of “insider knowledge” about intra-ethnic stereotypes led to the reinscribing of boundaries between racial groups. We conclude that studying the cross-racial use of intra-ethnic stereotypes allows for a subtler appreciation of the complex dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in superdiverse areas

The Sense of an Ending: Ageing and Coping in the Words of the Boys

In this paper we explore the lived realities of ageing through the experiences of a small group of men, all in their 60s, in “superdiverse” London. The group, which gathers regularly in a local pub, engages in certain ritualised behaviours which reflect the group’s sense of propriety in an area that has changed drastically during its members’ adult lives. The changes, common to many superdiverse urban areas, are bound up with demographics and associated structural and material shifts registered in the cityscape. As we seek to show, the group has a complex and differentiated stance on urban change; some changes are embraced, others negotiated, and others resisted. Documenting the rituals and moments pertaining to the group’s illness, leisure and routine meaning-making in tandem with the transformation of their locality underlines the significance of place vis-àvis processes of ageing