Everyday Multiculturalism Research Articles

Using buzzwords of belonging: everyday multiculturalism and social capital in Australia

This paper examines the concepts of multiculturalism and social capital, their relationship with each other and how these concepts are utilised by different interested parties in Australia. In the context of the United States of America and the United Kingdom, some commentators and scholars have argued that multiculturalism can have a negative impact on the fostering of social capital. These arguments are described before examining the same debate in Australia. However, the emphasis of this article is its description of how ethnic minorities and migrants on the one hand, and community organisations that assist these groups on the other, make use of the notions of multiculturalism and social capital to either legitimise their place in Australia or to effectively advocate for the social and economic utility of investing in programs that address problems faced by these groups. With data gathered through interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Melbourne and Sydney, the authors demonstrate how the debates that scholars and commentators engage in are sidestepped by migrants and by those who seek to assist them and how they use these concepts in a positive manner and in a way in which no other concepts can be used with the same efficacy.

Eat, Swim, Pray

Eat, Swim, Pray

No longer Singaporean

From communal politics and internet governance to language policies, the tiny speck that is Singapore is known for doing things its own way, with an innovative if patriarchal government kneading a hungry, migrant mass into one of the most well-disciplined, efficient, and diligent working populations in Southeast Asia. Much has also been made of its success at multiculturalism though some, like sociologist Chua Beng Huat, argue it to be multiracialism. Using Chua's argument as a platform for departure, and taking a cue from Stratton's notion of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ I argue through a reflexive exploration of Singapore as a lived experience, that rather than conflict, the two theories complement each other with the former paving the way for the latter.

Passing Propinquities in the Multicultural City: The Everyday Encounters of Bus Passengering

This paper examines how intercultural relations are continuously developed, destroyed, and remade in the practice of everyday bus travel. Through an ethnographic study of one bus route across Birmingham, UK, the paper explores the formation of relational practices on the move and the bodily orientations, public codes of conduct, material cultures, habits and affects through which they are formed. In particular, this paper gives specific attention to the tacit obligations of public travel and how such obligations both produce and sustain tolerance of others across a journey, to further reveal the multifaceted nature and workings of multicultural intimacies on the ground. In so doing, the paper responds to recent calls to politically revalorise public mobility spaces as key sites of encounter and identity formation, to position the bus as a crucial site of everyday multiculture through which wider processes of differentiation and exclusion are experienced and further understood.

Pedestrian Crossings: Young People and Everyday Multiculturalism

Young people have been the focus of both hopes and fears about the futures of culturally diverse nations. It has become commonplace to centre youth in debates about the impact on social cohesion of rapid and increasingly diverse global flows of peoples. Concerns proliferate about the capacity of youth of migrant and refugee backgrounds to ‘integrate’, and about the more flexible and critical forms of citizenship and belonging that some youth are forging. Others are idealised as the new cosmopolitans, eager consumers in the global youth market and adept players in the global economy. Paradoxical images emerge. Youth are often simultaneously imagined as at the vanguard of new forms of multicultural nation-building and social cohesion, and as those most inclined towards regressive nationalism, fundamentalism and racism. Images of youth-led interfaith and intercultural harmony projects compete with those of race riots and racist youth violence, deeply complicating the public representation and interpretation of young people's place in multicultural nation-making.

Accepting Prejudice and Valuing Freedom: Young Muslims and Everyday Multiculturalism in Hong Kong

This paper shows how the experiences of young Muslims in Hong Kong reveal an alternative account of multiculturalism to that which is often portrayed in works about young Muslims in the West. It presents the everyday multicultural experiences of young people as an important resource to understand the lived experience of ethnic and religious diversity. This discussion is framed by the experiences of a multiethnic sample of young Muslims in Hong Kong. Their experiences demonstrate a pragmatic negotiation of cultural difference and a disinterested acceptance of popular racism. These attitudes are argued as being an adaptation to the popular racism pervasive in Hong Kong culture. Despite the racism they experience, the young Muslims argue that they are safe and very free in the territory, a matter that influences the perception of the racism they encounter. The fact that Islam is not perceived as a threat in Hong Kong society provides an alternative understanding of young Muslims as minorities in the post 9/11 era. It is argued in conclusion that understanding what young Muslims value about life in Hong Kong enables us to recognise alternative representations of multiculturalism and to consider how a variety of different dynamics influence the everyday lives of religious and ethnic minorities as citizens in multicultural societies.

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.

Interethnic Understanding and Belonging in Suburban Melbourne

Modelling and mapping ethnicity is a methodological approach used to understand the changing socio-spatial structure of the city. Such an approach uses a range of indicators to identify ethnic groups, map them in urban space and explain the changing nature of ethnic concentrations. The unintended consequences, however, are the labelling, marginalisation and exclusion of ethnic minorities. Critical approaches, in contrast, focus on making visible the politics of representation that mark and stereotype ethnic minorities and ethnic concentrations. Within contemporary research on ethnicity such work has drawn attention to the exercise of power in the constitution of ethnic identities, the invisibility of whiteness and the inherent tensions that are likely to arise in negotiating ethnic cultural differences in local places. Although this article draws attention to such tensions in a particular place, Dandenong, it engages in this discussion to argue that the everyday negotiation of cultural difference also provides the potential to blur fixed ethnic boundaries and contribute to interethnic understanding and a sense of belonging. Drawing on in-depth interviews with people who live and/or work in Dandenong, suburban Melbourne, this article underlines that such positive insights from everyday multiculturalism have the potential to inform and broaden policy debates on diversity and social inclusion in the multicultural city.

Shifting the boundaries of cultural spaces: young people and everyday multiculturalism

This paper investigates the significance of everyday intercultural social practice enacted in the mundane sites of young people's daily life to the development of new research directions for multicultural youth studies. It explores the idea of everyday multiculturalism as an appropriate analytical approach for understanding the ways that young people deal with cultural difference in conditions of super-diversity. It considers how this approach gives descriptive and explanatory priority to sites and literacies such as everyday neighbourhood locales, vernacular expressions and popular culture that form an important part of young people's ‘habitus’, and provides insight into how struggles over the decentring of whiteness from the national imaginary occur in quotidian ways.