RESEARCHING MULTICULTURAL BRITAIN

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RESEARCHING MULTICULTURAL BRITAIN

• PROF JOHN EADE
• CRONEM
• ROEHAMPTON/SURREY

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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

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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

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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

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The Empire Strikes Back 1980-

• Cultural Studies takes over constructing new
  boundaries and categories, new ethnicities,
  cultural hybridity, counter-culture
• Sociology and Anthropology engage
  transnationalism, diaspora, scapes, imagined
  communities

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Expansion of Policy Research Universities Face
Competition, 1990-

• University 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

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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

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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)
  

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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

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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

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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
  

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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