Ben Gidley

Landscapes of belonging, portraits of life: researching everyday multiculture in an inner city estate

Three tower blocks and three low-rise blocks: nearly a hundred languages and over a hundred countries of origin. A council estate in a super-diverse neighbourhood is not only a space of concentrated difference and division, but also an intercultural space where new modes of living together emerge. At the same time, it is connected in an increasing number of ways with various outsides which make its internal space more complex. This article is based on a long-term collaborative research programme that included commissioned local policy research, academic ethnography and an artistic visual collaboration. It argues that multiple research strategies, including radically collaborative modes of inquiry, are required to represent the multiple, incommensurate perspectives co-present in the dense urban space of the estate.

Diasporic Memory and the Call to Identity: Yiddish Migrants in Early Twentieth Century East London

This article explores the associational politics and diasporic memory of Jewish migrant workers in early twentieth century East London. It examines the ways in which associational activity, and specifically landsmanshaftn (hometown associations), tied migrants to sending contexts in both material and affective ways. This meant that diasporic memories were woven into the day-to-day political practices of these migrants, and were mobilised politically in response to the call to identification represented by traumatic events ‘back home’, as is illustrated in two examples, the protests at the 1903 Kishinev pogrom and solidarity with the civilian victims of the First World War. The article also shows that these mobilisations exemplify the ways in which such processes made a difference to the forms of identity and identification available to Jewish migrant workers in this period.

Residential Integration – Towards a Sending Country Perspective

This chapter explores the key issues relating to how housing integration might be understood and further researched from a “country of origin” perspective. Residential integration is a key and perhaps even foundational dimension of the integration of migrants and minorities. Residential integration includes two key elements: the nature and quality of the housing that minorities occupy, assessed in terms of factors such as tenure, overcrowding and disrepair; and the patterns of migrant residence in receiving societies, including clustering or its absence. Residential integration in the second sense is usually seen as opposite to residential segregation, although, as we shall see below, segregation itself is defined in multiple ways, in terms of uneven distribution of settlement and low chances of inter-ethnic contact, as well as concentration, centralization and clustering. “Clustering” itself is a more neutral term, referring to the propensity of specific groups to live together, rather than to their separation from other groups.

They’ve Got Their Wine Bars, We’ve Got Our Pubs’: Housing, Diversity and Community in Two South London Neighbourhoods

This chapter explores how housing policies and the nature of housing stock have conditioned residential geographies and diversity patterns in two south London neighbourhoods, Bermondsey and Camberwell. The key drivers are policy changes to social housing allocation and the post-industrial reconfiguration of urban space expressed in processes of gentrification and the redevelopment of riverside docklands into expensive housing units. These developments have challenged existing narratives of community, but they have also shifted the focus of analytical enquiry towards emerging us-them divides based on class and generation. Within the context of diversity and social cohesion, both neighbourhoods are characterized by a comparatively unproblematic day-to-day muddling along with difference, but also a generally declining level of civic engagement and neighbourhood cohesion, expressed by a sense of ‘living together apart’.

Shifting markers of identity in East London's diasporic religious spaces

ABSTRACT This article discusses the historical and geographical contexts of diasporic religious buildings in East London, revealing – contrary both to conventional narratives of immigrant integration, mobility, and succession and to identitarian understandings of belonging – that in such spaces and in the concrete devotional practices enacted in them, markers and boundaries of identity (ritual, spatial, and political) are contested, renegotiated, erased, and rewritten. It draws on a series of case-studies: Fieldgate Street Synagogue in its interrelationship with the East London Mosque; St Antonys Catholic Church in Forest Gate where Hindus and Christians worship together; and the intertwined histories of Methodism and Anglicanism in Bow Road. Exploration of the intersections between ethnicity, religiosity, and class illuminates the ambiguity and instability of identity-formation and expression within East Londons diasporic faith spaces.

Historicising diaspora spaces: performing faith, race, and place in London’s East End

From the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, there has been a prevailing tendency to orientalise the East End of London. The idioms have changed, but underlying distortions of perspective have remained, from ‘darkest London’ through myths of the Blitz to ‘the new East End’ (Dench et al., 2006; Gidley, 2000; Walkowitz, 1992). This orientalised east London has been framed through (and served as an icon for) two conventional narrative tropes in the history and social science of migration in Britain, one temporal and one spatial. Both narratives are embedded in often-unspoken assumptions about the exercise and practice of citizenship. In particular, east London histories privilege the trajectories of migrant minorities that arrive in London’s lower echelons and are rescued from the abyss through self-improvement and civic engagement. The stories of Huguenot refugees, the Jews of the East End, the Maltese, the Indians, and the Irish are all in some ways redemptively showcased as plot lines of model minority integration. This familiar chronological script is mapped onto an equally familiar cartography as migrants move up, move out of the ghetto and into the suburbs, and leave space for the next wave of settlement. In spatialised Chicago School geography, stories of invasion, succession, and neighbourhood change, as, in chronologies of ladder-climbing minorities, we tend to find cast lists that are relatively unblemished by the presence of traces of difference. The ethnic mosaic is the key metaphor here: it implies social worlds that pass each other by relatively untouched.

Mainstreaming in Practice: The Efficiencies and Deficiencies of Mainstreaming for Street-Level Bureaucrats

This chapter focuses on the practice of mainstreaming, more specifically on the implementation of mainstreaming at the street level. The chapter shows that on the one hand mainstreaming helps street-level bureaucrats to make use of their policy discretion to address the complexity of the situation that immigrants face. On the other hand, the broad mainstreamed policy frame can also lead to airbrushing or ‘denial’ of diversity issues and challenges, both at the level of policy making and policy implementation. While the implementation of mainstreaming at the street level can turn out more inclusive due to the custom work street-level bureaucrats deliver, without political leadership and support for a more inclusive mainstreaming approach, the priorities and expertise at the street-level are prone to a risk of dilution.

Spaces of Informal Learning and Cultures of Translation and Marginality in London’s Jewish East End

This chapter examines some spaces of learning in inner London in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These informal settings were brought into being by immigrant Jews to foster dialogue and exchange. The figure of the organic intellectual is, I will argue, an appropriate description of the role of the men and women who inhabited these spaces. The spaces they created enabled a proletarian pedagogical culture through which emerged a counterculture of modernity. The contemporary relevance of this historical case lies in its anticipation of features typical of the global city today: the dense web of interactions through within mobile, complex diverse populations.

Introduction: The Shared Story of Europe’s Ideas of the Muslim and the Jew—A Diachronic Framework

Twenty days after the beginning of the events that led to the murders in the offices of Charlie Hebdo magazine and the kosher supermarket in Paris, French President Francois Hollande delivered a speech. It is Holocaust Memorial Day, 27 January 2015, and he is standing at a podium by the Memorial de la Shoah surrounded by ministers from his government. His goal: to argue that the recent killings of Jews belonged to an ancient, persistent and singular narrative of anti-Jewish prejudice that, in recent French history, began with the Holocaust, and had not ended—indeed, it was escalating. ‘Three weeks ago’, he pronounced to the gathered throng, ‘four men died in a kosher shop for the same reason that families were rounded up at the Vel d’Hiv in 1942, that the Copernic Road were attacked in 1980, that the young Ilan Halimi was attacked in 2006, that the children of the Ozar HaTorah school were massacred in Toulouse in 2012.’ He went on to contend:

Speaking of the Working Class

Citizenship is inextricably bound up with voice, with the act of speech and the act of listening. At the edges of accounts of the Athenian polis and of the Roman republic, we can faintly hear the clamour of the demos, those with no voice and not counted, insisting on being heard. In the Roman republic, the proletariat were those who were heard last, if at all, in the assembly; it was property that gave weight to voice, that made a voice count, and the proletarians were counted in the census only by their number of offspring (proli) instead of their property.