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This article argues that the idea of multicultural tools is the best way to approach the understanding of conviviality. This argument is made through two discrete steps. The first offers a critical review of how issues of urban life and diversity have been theorised focusing on recent debates about ‘culture loss’ and ‘super- diversity’. The discussion, we suggest, elides historical and present racism, in the making of urban diversity in cities like London. The second step develops the notion of conviviality by identifying the ways in which young adult migrants living in London make convivial worlds emphasising the idea of tools, returning to Ivan Illich’s early formulation, and the capability to make multiculture. The article’s conclusion is that understanding urban multiculture requires equal weight being given to the paradoxical co-existence of both racism and conviviality in city life.

The article argues for fostering sociable forms of dialogue in qualitative research. Conventional research shares an emphasis on extracting narratives with judicial and invasive state modes of enquiry rather than on learning from a genuine two-way dialogue between participants and researchers. Using a study of young migrants, we show how involving participants as observers and shapers of analytical dialogue can produce circulations of communication oscillating across the researcher’s and participant’s horizons of understanding. This produces new insight, beyond the limits of qualitative investigation, that extracts information from participants, and in so doing, has the potential to affect shifts in perception that animate and enchant experience. It has consequences for rethinking authorship that share, credit and specify responsibility. Developing such an approach opposes the ‘ethical hypochondria’ characterising qualitative research culture, where ‘automatic anonymity’ is limiting the potential of research to travel, connect people and engage the public imagination.

Para la gente joven que llega al Reino Unido en busca de asilo, su movilidad y el acceso a la seguridad y a las oportunidades vienen determinadas por la legislación y las prácticas institucionales del Estado.

Migrant City tells the story of contemporary London from the perspective of thirty adult migrants and two sociologists. Connecting migrants’ private struggles to the public issues at stake in the way mobility is regulated, channelled and managed in a globalised world, this volume explores what migration means in a world that is hyper connected – but where we see increasingly mobile, invasive and technologically sophisticated forms of border regulation and control.\ud \ud Migrant City is an innovative collaborative ethnography based on research with migrants from a wide variety of social backgrounds, spanning in some cases a decade. It utilises recollections, photographs, poems, paintings, journals and drawings to explore a wide range of issues. These range from the impact of immigration control and surveillance on everyday life, to the experience of waiting for the Home Office to process their claims and the limits this places on their lives, to the friendships and relationships with neighbours that help to make London a home.\ud \ud This title will appeal to students, scholars, community workers and general readers interested in migration, race and ethnicity, social exclusion, globalisation, urban sociology, and inventive social research methods.