Nigerian London: re-mapping space and ethnicity in superdiverse cities

This paper explores the idea of ‘superdiversity’ at the city level through two churches with different approaches to architectural visibility: the hypervisible Universal Church of the Kingdom of God and the invisible Igbo Catholic Church, both in North London, guide our exploration of invisible Nigerian London. Although Nigerians have lived in London for over 200 years, they live beneath the radar of policy and public recognition rather than as a vital and visible element of superdiversity. This paper argues that we can trace the journeys composing Nigerian London in the deep textures of the city thus making it visible, but this involves re-mapping space and ethnicity. It argues that visibility is vital in generating more open forms of urban encounter and, ultimately, citizenship

Sorting bodies: race, affect, and everyday multiculture in a mill town in northern England

This paper examines how race might be understood differently when social interaction is taken as the starting point of analysis. I argue that dominant modes of theorising race as a biological construct or epistemological marker remain insufficient for understanding the multiple, contingent, and devious ways in which race takes form in, and gives shape to, encounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Keighley—a former mill town in northern England—the paper assembles narrative fragments that reconstruct encounters with difference (that vary in intensity from the mundane to terror alerts). In each of these encounters I return to the question: what does race do? The paper offers a reconsideration of race and racism. I theorise race as a technology of differentiation that sorts human difference in ways that acknowledge the malleability of race and the more-than-human composition of social relations. I go on to outline an understanding of racism—a racism of assemblages—that recognises that the sorting of human difference is also accompanied by judgments that prefigure encounters. The racism of assemblages offers an opportunity to address the operation of race at the level of nonconscious thinking and the affective intensities through which the sorting and judging of human differences are performed. The work of gathering fragments to reconstruct encounters also generates insights into the microsociality of multicultural life in Keighley, disrupting narratives that argue that white and Asian communities lead ‘parallel lives’ in northern mill towns.

Pandemic peak SARS-CoV-2 infection and seroconversion rates in London frontline health-care workers

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The Transformation of Social Institutions in the North American Southeast

Corporate institutions, which transformed in the American Southeast over some 14,000 years, include social heterarchies and hierarchies that arose within the institutional contexts of descent groups, ritual sodalities, and social houses. The strategic and tactical actions of competitive and cooperative agents contributed to differing expressions of organizational changes through a variety of forms, including feasting, feuding/warfare, inalienable goods circulation, indebtedness, monumental constructions, mortuary events, processions/rogations, strategic marriages, and additional ritual and social practices. The nexus of social institutions that evolved along these pathways served as a catalyst for social changes, including the ways through which social institutions became transformed. Such social processes inform archaeologists of the agency, organization, and practice of people who not only invented and manipulated cosmologies, ideologies, institutions, and resources to achieve varying degrees of inequality, power, and wealth, but also those who resisted the efforts of aggrandizers. The author’s arguments focus on aristocratic social actions and actors, and the practices that enabled them to gain power and wealth through exclusive and restrictive corporate institutions