Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture

Book excerpt: Anti-migrant populism is on the rise across Europe, and diversity and multiculturalism are increasingly presented as threats to social cohesion. Yet diversity is also a mundane social reality in urban neighbourhoods. With this in mind, Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture explores how we can live together with and in difference. What is needed for conviviality to emerge and what role can research play? This volume demonstrates how collaboration between scholars, civil society and practitioners can help to answer these questions. Drawing on a range of innovative and participatory methods, each chapter examines conviviality in different cities across the UK. The contributors ask how the research process itself can be made more convivial, and show how power relations between researchers, those researched, and research users can be reconfigured – in the process producing much needed new knowledge and understanding about urban diversity, multiculturalism and conviviality. Examples include embroidery workshops with diverse faith communities, arts work with child language brokers in schools, and life story and walking methods with refugees. Studying Diversity, Migration and Urban Multiculture is interdisciplinary in scope and includes contributions from sociologists, anthropologists and social psychologists, as well as chapters by practitioners and activists. It provides fresh perspectives on methodological debates in qualitative social research, and will be of interest to scholars, students, practitioners, activists, and policymakers who work on migration, urban diversity, conviviality and conflict, and integration and cohesion.