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Developing the critique of notions of the “integration of immigrants”, twelve propositions are advanced to diagnose the methodological nationalism of mainstream approaches. The concept of “integration” contains assumptions about the nature and functioning of modern society which, in a post-industrial and post-colonial context, are falsely trapped within the normative bounds of thinking for the nation-state. An alternate empirical operationalisation is suggested that would render traditional types of assimilation and integration research obsolete.

On March 14, 2008, the Center for Study of Women at UCLA sponsored a special talk at the Hammer Museum by curator Hiromi Nakamura on recent trends in “Girl Photography” from Japan. The talk was part of three days of events at UCLA looking at the growing influence of Japanese pop culture in the West. Later that same day, works by two of the artists featured in the talk, Mika Ninagawa and Mikiko Hara, were displayed at a reception at the Anderson School of Management. The show was the first time that the work of these two emerging women artists had been publicly shown on the West Coast.

A rejoinder to the critical reviews of The Integration Nation: Immigration and Colonial Power in Liberal Democracies by Janine Dahinden, Sara Wallace Goodman, Paul Statham, and Willem Schinkel. The Integration Nation lays out a manifesto for critical migration studies, that builds on a critique of the mainstream literature and its normative linear notions of immigration, integration and citizenship. Two readers see the argument and its conceptualization of the field as almost self evident, while two read it as a frustrating provocation that elicits a strong, critical reaction. The rejoinder responds to these reflections, and reiterates the book's goal of laying the foundations of a new political demography. Conventional thinking on international migration, minorities and diversity, it argues, sustains the colonial power of advanced liberal democracies in the North Atlantic West, built on vast global inequalities in citizenship status, and mechanisms of selection, extraction, exclusion and effacement of non-national populations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Julian Go's BJS annual lecture is discussed in reference to his landmark OUP text Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (2016). Go is one of the most prominent names in a "third wave" of post‐colonial thought, now spearheading a post‐ (or de‐) colonial turn in sociological theory, something that has professionally revived the sub‐field of "grand" social theory in mainstream US sociology. While endorsing the aims and substantive themes of this turn, the review raises questions about the delayed timing of this post‐colonial wave in the discipline, both relative to the humanities more generally, and to the impact of post‐colonialism in other national contexts. Go's challenge is, in effect, something quite particular to teaching social theory in the US sociology context. The review goes on to question how effectively the critique speaks to mainstream empirical practitioners, given its lack of focus on transforming technical methods. It concludes by raising concerns about the relationship of Go and other "third wave" decolonial theorists to Marxism and Marxist politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our contribution to this special issue brings the theoretical and empirical orientations of the Becoming a Minority (BaM) project into dialogue with the complex and charged post-Brexit geography of the North of England. We present findings from the UK ESRC funded project Northern Exposure: Race, Nation and Disaffection in 'Ordinary' Towns and Cities after Brexit, drawing upon a period of co-productive and ethnographic work with local authority stakeholders, voluntary sector practitioners and community actors in two urban locations in the English North: Halifax and Wakefield. We report on how shifting patterns of diversity and population change interlock with deindustrialised economies, fiscal austerity, the coronavirus crisis, and the predations of ethno-nationalist politics and policy. Amid these dislocations and risks, we find delicate, differentiated, and predominantly informal infrastructures of community governance and intervention attempting to build alliances and resolve tensions: a grounded, local-view that belies the kind of image of the North established in mainstream national understandings of the dramatic politics of Brexit and after. Taking a productive cue from the BaM study, we offer some fine-grained reflections on localised dynamics of diversity experience and the negotiation of inter-ethnic relations albeit in a sprawling urban region beyond the West-European metropolitan core. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]