Transcript researching multicultural britain

RESEARCHING
MULTICULTURAL BRITAIN
PROF JOHN EADE
CRONEM
ROEHAMPTON/SURREY
Reformism and Empirical
Research: 1850-1945
Victorian pioneers – Mayhew, Booth
and empirical study of urban social
and economic inequality
The Labour Party – Fabians,
municipal socialism, LSE, Mass
Observation, sociology and
anthropology create their empires
Decolonisation and Welfare State,
1945-1960
collapse of the old empires and the
triumph of the new empires:
managing decline in Britain, welfare
state and university elite autonomy
Disciplinary boundary maintenance
and applied social science
MARX, WEBER AND MODERN
URBAN SOCIETY: 1960-1980
SOCIOLOGY TAKES THE LEAD
– Modernity and
Industrial Society: John Rex on housing-classes,
race and urban politics in Birmingham; Ray Pahl
and urban managers
Responding to Culture: New Commonwealth
settlement and the move from race to ethnicity,
from anti-racism to the politics of cultural identity
The Empire Strikes Back: 1980Cultural Studies takes over –
constructing new boundaries and
categories, new ethnicities, cultural
hybridity, counter-culture
Sociology and Anthropology engage –
transnationalism, diaspora, scapes,
imagined communities
Expansion of Policy Research:
Universities Face Competition,
1990University policy centres, think-tanks, NGOs and
government in-house research
Fieldwork methods – focus groups and opinion
poll organisations; the continuing tension
between quantitative and qualitative research
ESRC and auditing research; AHRC and
relevance of arts to policy
Global Flows of Elites and Servants
Move from national industrial society to
globalised conditions dominated by
services
Urban revival, flows of capital, images and
information and global hotspots (legal and
illegal)
Control of those servicing hotspots and
super-diversity
Cultural Difference and Class
Established minorities lie broadly
between the global elite and their
servants in urban working and middle
class neighbourhoods
Creation of new cultural traditions
shaped by class difference (income,
education, occupation)
Meeting across Boundaries
to understand the complexity of these
contemporary processes we need to
work across disciplinary boundaries
At CRONEM we are trying to do this
through five research projects
Meeting across Boundaries
1. psychiatry and sociology/anthropology –
ethnicity and class through narrative and
everyday practice
2. psychology and sociology/
anthropology – qualitative and quantitative
study of British Bangladeshi and mixed
heritage identity
Meeting across Boundaries
3. economics and sociology/
anthropology -Polish migrant workers in London
4. a community project on collective
memory and cultural heritage with
Shadinata in Tower Hamlets
5. a mentoring project with Georgie
Wemyss on the re-imaging of place and
people in Tower Hamlets
Challenge
Our challenge will be to link these
local developments to transnational
and global processes through working
both across disciplinary boundaries
and within our particular disciplinary
traditions and debates