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This article studies the life-stories and identity narratives of Turks of Western Thrace (Greece) focusing on the role of the Turkish–Greek border and its changing permeability. It suggests that people who have strong attachments to both sides of a national border experience spatial liminality and the border is a place of passage between not only territories, but also lived identities. For young Turks of Western Thrace, travelling to Turkey to work or study is an established strategy that is intertwined with major life events. Drawing on ride-along interviews and focusing on five participants, who travelled to Turkey during the Cyprus crisis, the article identifies the disciplinary power of bordering on identities and life-stories. By examining how different individuals dealt with this power, and how their circumstances affected the outcomes, it explores the tensions between agency and structure, state power and resistance, and categorisation and liminality during life-planning and identity construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In July 2012, major changes to the family migration rules were made in the UK, severely restricting British and settled residents' rights to sponsor non-EEA family members. However, little is known about how they have been experienced in practice, particularly by the South Asian families they target. Our article draws on policy and media analysis alongside original qualitative research to shed light on how the 2012 family migration rules have impacted British Bangladeshis, and with what consequences for their experiences of citizenship and the possibilities of them leading transnational lives. We argue that the rules amount to a raced, gendered, and classed 'attack' on both transnationalism and citizenship and suggest that, while transnationalism and citizenship are often analysed separately, they are in fact deeply intertwined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the convivial turn in migration and diversity studies, and some of its silences. Conviviality has been conceptualised by some as the ability to be at ease in the presence of diversity. However, insufficient attention has been paid to considering who is affectively at ease with whose differences or, more particularly, what the work of conviviality requires of those marked as other vis-a-vis European white normativity. Drawing on in-depth qualitative interviews with British Bangladeshi Muslims in London, Luton and Birmingham, we argue that a focus on 'ease in the presence of diversity' obscures the 'burden of conviviality' carried by some, but not others. We discuss three key types of burden that emerged from our data: the work of education and explanation, the work of understanding racism, and quite simply the work of 'appearing unremarkable'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has inequitably impacted the experiences of people living with ill health/impairments or from minoritized ethnic groups across all areas of life. Given possible parallels in inequities for disabled people and people from minoritized ethnic backgrounds, their existence before the pandemic and increase since, and the discriminations that each group faces, our interest is in understanding the interplay between being disabled AND being from a minoritized ethnic group. Objective: The overarching aim of the Coronavirus Chronic Conditions and Disabilities Awareness (CICADA) project, building on this understanding, is to improve pandemic and longer-term support networks, and access to and experiences of care, services, and resources for these underserved groups, both during the pandemic and longer term, thereby reducing inequities and enhancing social, health, and well-being outcomes. Methods: This mixed methods study involves three "sweeps" of a new UK survey; secondary analyses of existing cohort and panel surveys; a rapid scoping review; a more granular review; and qualitative insights from over 200 semistructured interviews, including social network/map/photo elicitation methods and two subsequent sets of remote participatory research workshops. Separate stakeholder cocreation meetings, running throughout the study, will develop analyses and outputs. Our longitudinal study design enables the exploration of significant relationships between variables in the survey data collected and to the assessment of changes in variables over time, including consideration of varying pandemic contexts. The qualitative data will provide more granular detail. We will take a strengths and assets-based approach, underpinned by the social model of disability and by intersectional considerations to challenge discrimination. Our exploration of the social determinants of health and well-being is framed by the social ecological model. Results: The CICADA project was funded by the Health and Social Care Delivery Research (HSDR) Programme of the United Kingdom (UK) National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) in March 2021 and began in May 2021. Further work within the project (84 interviews) was commissioned in March 2022, a substudy focusing on mental health, specifically in Northeast England, Greater Manchester, and the Northwest Coast of the United Kingdom. Data collection began in August 2021, with the last participants due to be recruited in September 2022. As of January 2022, 5792 survey respondents and 227 interviewees had provided data. From April 2022, the time of article submission, we will recruit participants for the substudy and wave 2 of the surveys and qualitative work. We expect results to be published by winter 2022. Conclusions: In studying the experiences of disabled people with impairments and those living with chronic conditions who come from certain minoritized ethnic groups, we are aiming for transformative research to improve their health and well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'reactive transnationalism hypothesis' posits a relationship between discrimination and transnational practice. The concept has generally been studied using quantitative methods, but a qualitative approach augments our understanding of two context‐specific dimensions: the nature of the discrimination involved, and the types of transnational behaviour that might be affected. Drawing on in‐depth interviews with Bangladesh‐origin Muslims in London, Luton and Birmingham, in the UK, we demonstrate how anti‐Asian and anti‐Muslim racism have been conflated with intensified anti‐migrant racism in the context of 'hostile environment' immigration policies and the EU referendum (Brexit), producing an amplification of racist discourses associated with purging the body politic of its non‐white bodies. The insecurity generated is altering some people's relationships to Bangladesh, incentivizing investment in land and property 'back home'. While this represents an example of 'reactive transnationalism', we argue that 'protective transnationalism' might be a more appropriate way of describing the processes at work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of sustained interest in the mobilization of diasporic identities, I consider how and why diasporic identities might be demobilized over time. I use the case of an Indian Pakistani community in the UK and the USA (sometimes referred to as 'Bihari') to examine how historical memories of conflict are narrated in diaspora and the impact this has on the presence or absence of 'diasporic consciousness'. The significance of memory in diasporic and transnational communities has been neglected, especially where the narration of historical events is concerned. The impact of forgetting has received particularly scant attention. I argue that, in the absence of this story, important lessons about the role of history in the formation of community are obscured. In this example, the 'latent' identities created on diaspora's demobilization help us to unpick the dyadic relations of 'home' and 'away' at the heart of essentialist conceptualizations of the concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defining the relationship between displaced populations and the nation state is a fraught historical process. The Partition of India in 1947 provides a compelling example, yet markedly little attention has been paid to the refugee communities produced. Using the case of the displaced ‘Urdu-speaking minority’ in Bangladesh, this article considers what contemporary discourses of identity and integration reveal about the nature and boundaries of the nation state. It reveals that the language of ‘integration’ is embedded in colonial narratives of ‘population’ versus ‘people-nation’ which structure exclusion not only through language and ethnicity, but poverty and social space. It also shows how colonial and postcolonial registers transect and overlap as colonial constructions of ‘modernity’ and ‘progress’ fold into religious discourses of ‘pollution’ and ‘purity’. The voices of minorities navigating claims to belonging through these discourses shed light on a ‘nation-in-formation’: the shifting landscape of national belonging and the complicated accommodations required. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The articles in this volume reflect upon a very specific moment in the social architecture of British society: a moment that brings financial meltdown together with some sizeable shifts in the racial and ethnic landscape of the UK. As a ‘neo-liberal revolution’ heralds the end of public services and the end of the welfare state, it proclaims ‘the end of race’ as well. But cultural retrenchment and coded xenophobia have also been sweeping the political terrain, accompanied by ‘new racisms’ and ‘new racial subjects’ that only close contextual analysis can unpick. Against those who suggest that we live in a post-racial time, the research presented offers friction. By focusing on particular locations in Britain at a particular moment, the articles explore local stories of ‘race’ and racism across changing sociopolitical ground. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The ‘Urdu-speaking population’ in Bangladesh, displaced by the Partition in 1947 and made ‘stateless’ by the Liberation War of 1971, exemplifies some of the key problems facing uprooted populations. Exploring differences of ‘camp’ and ‘non-camp’ based displacement, this article represents a critical evaluation of the way ‘political space’ is contested at the local level and what this reveals about the nature and boundaries of citizenship. Semi-structured and narrative interviews conducted among ‘camp’ and ‘non-camp’ based ‘Urdu-speakers’ found that citizenship status has been profoundly affected by the spatial dynamics of settlement. However, it also revealed the ways in which ‘formal’ status is subverted – the moments of negotiation in which claims to political being are made. In asking how and when a ‘stateless’ population is able to ‘access’ citizenship, through which processes and by which means, it reveals the tension, ambiguity and conceptual limitations of ‘statelessness’ and citizenship, unearthing a reality of partial, shifting and deceptively permeable terrain. In doing so, it also reveals the dissonance and discord (constitutive of an ‘us’ and ‘them’ divide) upon which the creation of ‘political space’ may rely. Citizenship functions to exclude and, therefore, it is very often born of contestation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]