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The academy in Britain has witnessed the rise of a "decolonial turn", which ironically is set against the backdrop of persistent racial disparities amongst staff and students within higher education. Taking the cases of the disciplines of history and geography and drawing from qualitative interviews and focus groups among students and academics in these disciplines, this paper examines "decolonising" as– (a) a "new" language being articulated by various actors within the neoliberal university; and (b) an emergent praxis at the levels of learned societies, university departments and beyond, to address racialized inequalities and coloniality. This paper outlines some key tensions and challenges faced by "decoloniality" at both conceptual and practical levels, and overall suggests the need for an anti-racist collaborative effort to make meaningful "decolonial" changes within higher education in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using multilevel modelling, this paper investigates ethno-religious penalties in unemployment and inactivity among men and women using the Understanding Society survey. The paper confirms previous findings of a Muslim penalty and a British labour market hierarchized by colour (ethnicity) and religion (culture). However, by including a greater range of ethnic groups the paper provides a corrective to accounts in the sociological literature that being White is not a protection against the Muslim penalty. Rather, while affiliation with the Muslim White British group does not appear to be associated with penalization, Muslim Arabs who traditionally identify as White are found to experience significant disadvantage. This suggests that the Muslim penalty might also be moderated by a person's country of origin. The paper also finds that considerable penalties remain for Muslims even after adjusting for so-called "sociocultural attitudes", challenging the assumption that value orientations offer a suitable explanation for the Muslim penalty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article centres the testimonies of young hijabi Britons as social landscapes shift toward ideological culturalism. Exploring the idea that culture is the defining element of social life and that individuals are bound to closed cultural categories, it sets out a context of endemic cultural racism, as voices from across the political spectrum marshal the veil to vilify Islam and promote cultural homogenization. The paper reports on a qualitative study privileging the testimonies of 18 hijabi women, aged between 18 and 26. It advances "everyday culturalism", a social standpoint that shapes everyday relations to reflect culturalist ideologies and undermine cultural plurality. Three themes illuminate the young women's experiences of being addressed in ideologically embedded ways: the white scripted hijabi subject; harm, silencing, and exclusion; and resistance through re-narration. Ultimately, participants' reflections reject culture as the organizing force for selfhood, instead, asserting hijabi identities as multi-vocal, contextually contingent and contradictory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a novel contribution to the academic debate on Brexit and racism. It emphasizes the need to distinguish different manifestations of post-racial xeno-racism in the aftermath of the Brexit Referendum as either direct, structural or cultural violence. This distinction of different types of violence is important for everyday and academic contexts, because it affects the ways in which racist behaviour is identified and addressed. Cultural violence in the form of nationalist defensive, anti-immigration statements is the most common type of racist violence that we found in our analysis. Yet, it also tends to be more readily dismissed as "not racist" by its perpetrators and targets, and contributes to feelings of subdual and powerlessness amongst the latter. Our arguments are based on findings from 15 semi-structured interviews that we conducted in 2017 with British and non-British residents of Great Yarmouth, a seaside borough in East Anglia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper details the development and psychometric validation of the Everyday Colourism Scale (ECS), a measure designed to capture perceived skin shade prejudice from the ingroup (ethnic peers) and the outgroup (White people). The ECS was adapted from the Everyday Discrimination Scale using existing research, expert reviews, and acceptability interviews. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis, and reliability and validity analyses were conducted based on responses from 540 people of colour living in the UK. Predictive validity was tested based on data from an additional 201 participants. Results supported a 2-factor model, with good internal and test–retest reliability, and construct validity. Colourism from White people was associated with more frequent experiences of racism, higher internalized colourism, and greater anxiety. Colourism from participants' ethnic peers was associated with lower self-esteem and perceived social support. Findings suggest the ECS is a promising new tool for assessing perceived colourism among a multi-ethnic UK sample. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores how two asylum-seeking women from Eritrea attempt to secure safety and legal status for their children – born and unborn – and themselves by leaving them behind in the settler colonial state of Israel and taking on forged Ethiopian Israeli identities to travel to the UK to facilitate a process of family reunification. Situating the Israeli asylum regime in the settler colonial state and drawing on multi-sited ethnographic research collected between 2016–2018 in Israel and the UK, the article argues that by engaging in acts of refusing militarised border regimes, migration enforcement, and their racialised orderings, the women shape a future for themselves and their children. The article then sheds light on the women's experience of waiting while faced with protracted uncertainty and separation from their children. It also analyses how gendered and racialised legal precarity and motherhood are experienced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Questions remain about nationhood's everyday salience – that is, whether and how nationhood is engaged with by "ordinary people" undertaking routine activities. We present an innovative methodology for investigating everyday nationhood at the international border. We created a social media dataset of 1,083 "tweets" made during British airport border crossings, where nationhood might be expected to be particularly salient – especially during a period corresponding to post-referendum Brexit negotiations. We used content analysis to generate descriptive frequencies, before analysing these broad patterns in further detail via qualitative analysis. Nationhood is found to be largely absent, at least explicitly. A large majority focus on the contingencies of everyday life in highly individualist and consumer-oriented ways. The most common identification – "non-EU" – indicates border-crossing experiences framed by geopolitical inequalities, but only rarely by nationhood. One possible exception to the dominant patterns is a highly individualist, tacit manifestation of Britishness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of studies have shown adverse effects of ethnic diversity on social cohesion routed in ethnic categorical differences, competition and racial threat. We build on previous research by examining the hypothesis that cultural (language) differentiation leads to lower intra-neighbourhood trust through feelings of anomie. Our results, based on data from the 2009–2011 UK Citizenship survey and a multilevel modelling framework, do not offer support for the proposition that diversity lowers trust through linguistic diversity and poor communication. In line with other studies, we find a negative association between ethnic diversity and trust and show that for the white group, this relationship does not depend on migrants' levels of fluency in the majority language. In contrast, in neighbourhoods where migrants cannot speak English well, increases in ethnic diversity are associated with higher levels of neighbour trust among the non-white group. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article demonstrates the ambivalence of diversity in the cultural industries, and racial capitalism more broadly. Based upon an empirical study of the production of writers of colour in UK trade publishing, the article highlights how diversity acts as a form of racial governance but is also a source of anxiety for the dominant culture. Opening with an overview of critical approaches to diversity, we then introduce the study, based upon in-depth interviews with 113 people, which explores how publishers make sense of diversity, which includes moral and economic arguments. While publishers are convinced that both the moral and economic cases for diversity are aligned, we argue that they exist in a tension, which results in mostly reductive outcomes for minoritized authors. But the article also highlights how diversity potentially disrupts the liberal sensibilities of the dominant culture, especially their sense of publishing as meritocratic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues a previously little-discussed policy shift, the individualization of UK immigration control, is key to understanding the Windrush Scandal and the wider governance of racialized immigrants in Britain. Drawing on official records from 1963 to 1973, this article identifies how the UK shifted from an initial aggregate model of governing postcolonial immigrants, deemphasizing individual policing, to a model centred on scrutinizing individual compliance. Through interviews with 1980s–2010s UK policy actors, it identifies three policy legacies of this shift. First, it naturalized increasing individual scrutiny as the mechanism for reducing immigration, making immanent the "hostile environment" logic. Second, it gradually increased expectations of individual immigrant documentation, after many Windrush victims arrived under document-light control systems. Third, centring immigrants' individuality accorded with declining policy deliberation about immigration control's potential impacts on already-settled minorities. Even absent formal changes to their status, this shift eroded the rights of long-settled immigrants in Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whilst it is acknowledged that refugees are more likely to select into self-employment due to discrimination and labour market exclusion, we know little about how their ventures perform over time. To address this gap, we draw upon qualitative longitudinal evidence gathered in 2010 and 2018 in the UK to explore the outcomes of their ventures and what strategies they have put in place. We argue that the trajectories of refugee-owned businesses are explained by their structural position and the strategies, resources, and business support networks, highlighting that refugee entrepreneurs re-work their condition in a manner that is much more proactive and resilient than suggested by extant portrayals of refugee entrepreneurship. Our analysis sheds new light on the dynamics of refugee business development and encourages a more nuanced theoretical approach to evaluate these enterprises as vehicles for integration against the backdrop of neoliberal Britain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This comparative statistical analysis is of tolerance and how it was perceived and experienced by minorities and majorities in the UK and Germany before and after two defining national events that both focused on immigration and national identity. Based on combined sweeps of the European Social Survey (2012–2018), this study applied logistic regression modelling to determine that during the Brexit vote in 2016 and the German Refugee Crisis in 2015, majorities from lower socioeconomic backgrounds were more likely to be intolerant towards minorities, who were more likely to experience discrimination. Majority intolerance and minority perceptions of discrimination increased after both events among less well-off groups. However, majorities from higher socioeconomic backgrounds were less likely to exhibit intolerance towards minorities before these national events and after. This study offers an original perspective on race and ethnic relations at times of national crises over identity and belonging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, over 8,400 people made their way from France to the UK coast using small vessels. They did so principally in order to claim asylum in the United Kingdom (UK). Much like in other border-zones, the UK state has portrayed irregular Channel crossings as an invading threat and has deployed a militarized response. While there is burgeoning scholarship focusing on informal migrant camps in the Calais area, there has been little analysis of state responses to irregular Channel crossings. This article begins to address this gap, situating contemporary British responses to irregular Channel crossers within the context of colonial histories and maritime legacies. We focus particularly on the enduring appeal of "the offshore" as a place where undesirable racialized populations can be placed. Our aim is to offer a historicized perspective on this phenomenon which seeks to respond to calls to embed colonial histories in analyses of the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the literature on diversity. Through a focus on the local government, I enquire if the dominant narrative of Brighton and its community entails the multiple identities encompassed by the concept of diversity. If that is not the case, what significance does effectively lie behind it? And which are the consequences of this? Informed by qualitative research, this article compares the local government's narrative on the city and its community to the oppositional narrative shared by members of grassroots BAME associations. Brighton markets itself as an open-minded city: mainstream sources, such as the University of Sussex, portray it as "the happiest city in England", arguing that it thrives thanks to its diverse community. However, the data gathered reveal how very often representatives of the local government discuss "diversity" while actually referring to gender identity and sexuality and how this selective understanding has overtime generated resentment in racialized communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]