Everyday Multiculturalism Research Articles

The “Light of Grammar”. Learning to Read between State School and Religious Education for Muslim First Italian-born Children of Migrants in Lonato del Garda (Italy)

The article analyses Muslim first Italian-born children of migrants’ experiences of learning to read in both religious and school contexts in Lonato del Garda, a small town in the north of Italy. Based on ethnographic observation, the article focuses on reading as a social practice where the issue of identity is critical. For Muslim first Italian-born children of migrants, learning to read is also about the experience of their hybrid identity. In a context where state school and the Islamic Centre fail to build an effective dialogue and strategies to connect the different learning experiences, children end up learning also to deal with the “boundary work” that will characterise their life in the peculiar everyday multiculturalism of contemporary Italian society. However, practices are not impermeable to each other. The state school model has an impact on religious education and several changes were made to adapt the learning practices. On the other hand, children can use religious learning habitus, such as memorisation, as a way to deal with the learning to read in school.

People and Nature: Xuefeng Chen's Cross-Cultural Garden

Xuefeng Chen, a Chinese-born artist who settled in France in 2003, is currently constructing the installation ‘Bô – le jardin imaginaire’ in a disused quarry near Dijon. She has so far created six of the planned twenty-one sculptures which will populate the main arena of the open-air site. An art gallery without walls, it epitomises Chen’s view of her aesthetic and personal philosophy of going beyond boundaries. Drawing on the transmedial, we provide, firstly, some historical and cultural context to her work by considering the long-established connections between Chinese gardens/landscapes and the arts, notably painting. As well as being a transnational artist in terms of her life trajectory, her works convey elements of both Western influences and Chinese culture and this is the focus of the remainder of the study. Correspondences between traditional Chinese gardens, in particular those created and enjoyed by the Chinese literati, may be detected and are integral to the artist’s principal objectives. Additionally, she creates a space that embodies the Chinese idea of you (‘wandering’), a complex term denoting both physical and/or spiritual movement that expresses her playful nature, along with her eagerness to interact with others and to bring others into contact with each other, resulting in a freedom that transcends boundaries. Consequently, we propose that her imaginary garden provides a site and opportunity for cross-cultural encounters and ‘everyday multiculturalism’ (Ang 2001, Wise 2010, Watson and Saha 2012) that have social, cultural and aesthetic purposes.

A bus as a compressed public space: Everyday multiculturalism in Milan

The article contributes to understanding public transport as a public space by exploring diversity and the city through mobility. It investigates the compressed and mobile space of the 90/91 trolleybus in Milan. Due to its itinerary and extended schedule, this bus is intensively used by citizens with different ethnic, economic, social and cultural backgrounds. Literature on planning and transport has recently started exploring qualitative issues through individual ethnographic research on transport means. Research on everyday multiculturalism, despite recognising the role of public transport as a promising space to study the negotiation of difference, rarely adopts this specific focus and does it mainly from a socio-anthropological point of view. Against this background, the work investigates the compressed space of a bus through an ethnographic exploration of people, spaces and practices onboard. Notably, the article is is grounded on direct observation carried out by three classes of students in the Urban Ethnography course offered in the MSc in Urban Planning and Architecture at Politecnico di Milano, and presents a post-hoc reflection on the outcomes of the teaching project. Grounding on this experience, the article argues that the compressed and mobile space of public transport is an excellent observation point to investigate everyday negotiation of difference and a privileged observatory of broader city dynamics. Additionally, the multiplication of points of view embedded in the observations and experiences of students has proved how, in the face of increasingly diverse cities, pluralisation may be a key methodological approach.

Digital geographies of everyday multiculturalism: ‘Let’s go Nando’s!’

ABSTRACT As UK cities and towns become increasingly ethnically and culturally diverse, researchers have tuned into how people inhabit multiculturalism. Ethnographic approaches have focused on the kind of togetherness that people generate as they go about their everyday lives, observing the affective textures of interactions and happenings of the here and now in granular detail. Missing from these accounts is what crowdsourced data might add to understandings of how multicultural places are experienced. What is vital about this kind of data is that it is ‘big’, involving a diversity of voices similarly intent on messaging their experiences, presenting opportunities to scale up the affect of encounters and to quantify what is difficult to qualify. This paper brings Digital Geographies into conversation with research on everyday multiculturalism to examine qualitatively and quantitatively how social media use folds into and expresses various practices of sociality and connection. Our paper involves Twitter, Nando’s and the city of Leicester in the UK to challenge and advance ways of understanding everyday multiculturalism in an era of global migration and ethnically complex populations.

Conditional citizenship in the UK: Polish migrants’ experiences of diversity

This paper explores Polish experiences of lived diversities in the UK through the lens of their precarious socio-economic status and ambivalent racial identity. Using the concept of conditional citizenship, the article explores how being only tentatively accepted in British society affects Polish migrants’ understandings of British diversity. Drawing on qualitative data from a study of Polish migrants’ lived diversities, this paper exposes the repertoires of actions that individuals apply in different social contexts in the process of learning to live with diversity. It advances the academic debate on everyday multiculturalism through an exploration of the relationship between conditional citizenship and lived diversities and contributes to an understanding of migrants’ racism by contextualising it within national hierarchies of belonging.

Inner-city possibilities: using place and space to facilitate inter-ethnic dating and romance in 1960s–1980s Leicester

AbstractApplying a spatial lens to the oral histories of heterosexual women who had intercultural romantic relationships in Leicester from the 1960s to the 1980s provides an alternative perspective on their experiences. This article examines these women's movements into and around the inner city, eliciting discussion about the concept of ‘safe’ places and spaces and the factors that determined the transient nature of these spaces. It illustrates opportunities created for intercultural mixing, away from familial gaze and public hostility. Utilizing such spaces to develop and sustain their relationships reveals a previously unacknowledged female agency that also enabled an ‘everyday multiculturalism’ in the British city.

Navigating diversities: experiences of youths in one Singapore school

ABSTRACT Singapore has established a reputation as a country with social harmony. But in recent times, increasing reports on issues of social cohesion have begun to emerge in the media about tensions among its citizenry and between foreigners and migrants. Yet, little is known about youths’ lived experiences of everyday multiculturalism amidst this changing demographic landscape. The discourses on diversities in Singapore classrooms have remained largely within the State’s narrative of race-based harmonious multiculturalism based on inherited colonial racialised categories. This paper investigates the understanding and lived experiences of multiculturalism of students in one secondary school, situating the analysis of everyday multiculturalism within the complexities of local diversities and the structure of schooling in a postcolonial multilingual society.

Pragmatic Belonging: Migrant Young People Making Claims on the Nation

ABSTRACT Multicultural Youth Australia is a national ‘census’ of migrant youth in Australia aimed at tracking their social, cultural and economic status. The findings from this study highlight strong feelings of national belonging among migrant young people, despite significant experiences of racism. This article unpacks this paradox. It asks what migrant youth mean when they say they belong in the face of persistent racialised exclusion. In Hage's account of liberal multiculturalism, these feelings of belonging despite national rejection are explained as an acquiescence to the structures of white nationhood. This article develops an alternative analysis by drawing on place-based, reflexive accounts of youth belonging and scholarship on everyday multiculturalism. It extends these approaches by proposing a pragmatic analytics of belonging, foregrounding the practical and political contexts in which migrant young people's statements of belonging are put to work. It understands these belonging claims as practices of provisional citizenship, and aligns these claims with Arendt's notion of ‘action’ to highlight their potential as open-ended, critical engagements with the nation.

Everyday Multiculturalism on Ice: Observations from Hockey-free Outdoor Urban Public Ice Rinks

Everyday Multiculturalism on Ice: Observations from Hockey-free Outdoor Urban Public Ice Rinks

The right to the city: outdoor informal sport and urban belonging in multicultural spaces

ABSTRACT Studies on ‘everyday multiculturalism’ and ‘lived multiculture’ have advanced knowledge on the kinds of inclusive everyday spaces and practices that characterize our culturally complex, mobile and superdiverse cities. This paper expands this agenda by exploring informal sporting and leisure interactions amongst migrant and ethnically diverse urban populations. Embedded in a larger comparative city project that examines how urban environments and wider social structures mediate inclusions and exclusions of urban dwellers, this paper presents a case study of temporary migrant workers in Singapore and their participation in outdoor informal sport. It deploys Lefebvre's notion of ‘Right to the City’ to understand city dwellers’ access to urban resources and their collective ability to democratically inhabit the city. Despite structural constraints imposed on marginalized migrants, the nature of informal sport, the spontaneous coming together to play, creative use of public space and a range of convivial practices, generate a sense of urban belonging.

Contributions to social sustainability through the sensuous multiculturalism and everyday place-making of multi-ethnic festivals

While previous research has addressed the potential for multi-ethnic festivals to contribute to sense of belonging and instill multicultural values and place identities in urban areas, many are critical of how festivals and events contribute to social capital, justice, and social sustainability. As cultural phenomena, festivals can feed into the practices and networks of people’s everyday lives rather than be perceived as exotic, aesthetic and isolated events. Responding to Canada’s new multi-ethnic realities, new multiculturalism policies have addressed these criticisms and foster social justice, civic participation, and identity-creation. This study investigated the role of multi-ethnic festivals in contributing to social sustainability through everyday place-making and sensuous multiculturalism. Ethnic community group members as festival exhibitors through their narratives acknowledged bonding rituals of festival preparation, sensuous encounters during festival performances, and opportunities to bridge with other ethnic groups through socio-cultural exchange. The everyday place-making and sensuous multiculturalism of festival experiences engenders everyday multiculturalism in outwardly diverse ways, providing opportunities for bonding and bridging social capital and thus contributing to social sustainability.

Complex but ordinary: intercultural negotiations among mixed families in Australia

ABSTRACT How do mixed migrant families negotiate their cultural differences? Using in-depth data from 30 interviews with 13 families of mixed Asian and other backgrounds who have settled in Australia, we explore how habitus is generated and modified through these negotiations. Adding complexity to the experience of acculturation for migrant families from a single culture of origin, mixed families must engage two cultures of origin plus the new host culture, to create a unique familial environment supportive of cultural difference, but also adaptive within the new context. We apply Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field, and an interest in emotion, to interrogate the transformations focussing on themes that arose inductively, namely food, education and children’s socializing. We find evidence of care and compromise, pragmatism and apprehension, adaptability and rigidity, within the context of assimilative and integrative social forces. We also note the significance of gender roles. Mixed migrant families see themselves as no different from other families in the day-to-day negotiation of differences of opinion and practice. But they offer an insight into the complexity of living ‘everyday multiculturalism’, creating confluence from diversity.

Centring settler colonialism in rural Australian multicultures: race, place and local identities

ABSTRACT In the current age of rural mobilities and economic restructuring, the ethnic and racial compositions of rural towns across Anglosphere nations of the Global North have significantly transformed. As a result of these changes, the conditions which support rural multicultures are increasingly relevant to scholarship and policy-making. ‘Everyday multiculturalism’ and ‘convivialities’ have become key approaches within such research in rural environments. These perspectives offer important insights into understanding complex social relationships, reciprocities and circumstances of belonging in rural places. However, as UK-based critiques argue, a focus on ‘everyday multiculturalism’ and ‘convivialities’ may also risk obscuring how colonial legacies have shaped and informed racialised and classed hierarchies of belonging in distinct contexts. In this paper we turn these critiques to settler colonial Australia and its increasingly diverse rural towns. We bring together emerging literature in the study of rural migration with scholarship from Indigenous studies and anthropology on Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal rural social relations. Working at the intersection of these bodies of works, we argue that the histories and structures of settler colonialism be centred in research on rural multicultures, as these legacies and ongoing conditions shape social relationships in contemporary rural Australia.

The Polemical Rhetoric of Jack Neo’s Ah Boys to Men and Repertoires of Filmic Masculinity as Sacrifice in Singapore

ABSTRACT In Singapore, a strict policy of male conscription or national service (hereafter, NS) that transforms boys into men is carefully calibrated to maintain support from the civilian sector. I argue that, in the widely acclaimed Ah Boys to Men film series directed by Jack Neo, cinematic scripts of military masculinities are inflected by class and ethnicity. While Neo’s film series does not depart from the realities of everyday multiculturalism in Singapore as celebratory, the film is a rhetorical resource of the patriarchal state, albeit one that lacks finesse, which prepares teenage males for their indelible rites of passage into manhood. The film represents the symbolic power of the state in communicating the necessity of conscription as a proving ground of masculinity. In counteracting rhetorical fears of training fatalities and injuries to disarm questions about the relevance of male conscription, the state is careful not to undermine its militarised ambitions. Instead, it deploys curious narratives of masculinised sacrifice to propagate ideological control of the citizenry.

Recomposing Aesthetic Anxiety and Perforating Suburban Infrastructures: Informal Religious Meeting Places in Melbourne

ABSTRACT A permit for a Buddhist place of worship in suburban Melbourne was rejected by the local Planning Committee. The application by the Mirror of the Dhamma Society to hold small religious gatherings in a semi-detached single storey house in an area zoned General Residential was deemed inappropriate. The paper focuses on this event that circulated contagious global white affects of anxiety and fear in response to potential changes in the Australian suburban infrastructure. What escaped scrutiny, however, was state-sanctioned aesthetic judgements of appropriate suburban infrastructures that were underpinned by invisible but dominant social and cultural norms. This paper calls for undoing these norms, recomposing white affects, and remaking Australian suburbia in ways that veer away from stigmatising or exoticizing material expressions of cultural diversity in the built landscape. Responding to Felix Guattari’s call for a new aesthetic paradigm with ethico-political implications, I explore the possibilities for new suburban ecologies that transcend the secular/sacred binary. The paper is written from my shifting positionality as a first-generation migrant woman and Australian of Indian heritage who arrived in Melbourne 19 years ago. It is informed by my broad research agenda on everyday multiculturalism, grounded religiosity, and belonging in cities with white majority cultures.

Rejoinder: Clamour of Nationalism symposium

ABSTRACTThe generous contributors to this symposium all reiterate a certain resignation to the suffocating ubiquity of today's nationalism as surveyed in the Clamour of Nationalism. But also implicit in their searching commentary is a wider call to continue to reckon with the contradictions that live amidst the nationalist closure and its constitutive racisms. This rejoinder tries accordingly to cleave open those elements of popular political formation that might remain unmoved by the overtures of nation. My attempt at wilfully optimistic critique also maps some potentially generative openings presented by the right's overdetermined capitulation to ‘disaster nationalism’. Finally, much of the symposium rightly cautions against an excessive extolling of multiculture's political possibilities. The rejoinder concludes herein with a duly caveated account of the everyday multiculture that might furnish us with the resources to dream against and beyond nationalism’s ability to monopolize the terrain of political community.

Teaching difference: global citizenship education within an elite single-sex context

ABSTRACT This article employs the concept of ‘everyday multiculturalism’ to examine what students at an elite school in Australia are taught about working with and across difference through global citizenship education within a single-sex classroom model. The authors explore the ways in which larger social cohesion agendas are reinforced through the meanings and practices of global citizenship education to facilitate increased interactions between different groups around a set of shared values and common practices. The authors illustrate how this approach to global citizenship education and the school’s single-sex classroom model both maintain racial, ethnic and gendered divisions within the student body. Within this schooling context, students are not provided the kinds of instructional spaces that promote interdependence and habitual engagement necessary for productively working with and across difference.

Dreaming Diversity: Second Generation Australians and the Reimagining of Multicultural Australia

Dreaming Diversity: Second Generation Australians and the Reimagining of Multicultural Australia

Everyday Multiculturalism in the Public Library: Taking Knitting Together Seriously

This article brings recent discussions of everyday multiculturalism into a context which has had little sociological attention – the public library. Focusing on a south London library’s newly established knitting group, made up of predominantly older women from racially and ethnically diverse backgrounds, I show how the library’s framing of multiculturalism, limited to either celebratory occasions or targeted interventions for vulnerable groups, was unable to recognise the knitting group as an everyday multicultural space. Using an ethnographic approach which ‘takes seriously’ the ordinariness of knitting together, I show how the library setting provided the group with a reliable foundation, and attend closely to how, for its participants, the group became a space of multicultural recognition. I argue that the public library has capacity to anchor vital spaces of everyday multicultural conviviality which are not curated as special projects, and that the ordinary positioning of these spaces is integral to their formation.

Introduction: everyday multiculturalism in/across Asia

ABSTRACTThis article introduces the special issue, Everyday Multiculturalism in/across Asia. It provides an overview of the international and inter-disciplinary research papers included in the special issue which all speak to the concept of everyday multiculturalism by critically engaging with the extent to which core aspects relate to different contexts in and across Asia. Papers in this collection encompass research undertaken in Australia, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore and South Korea and which include issues of intraregional movement and labour mobility particularly regarding the experiences of migrants from Burma, China, Nepal, The Philippines and India. A key contribution of this special issue is that the papers engage with empirical, theoretical and methodological questions which consider the potential transferability of ideas related to everyday multiculturalism, especially in the context of expanding trans-Asian mobilities.