Kaveri Qureshi

Diversity, urban space and the right to the provincial city

Using three vignettes of the same physical space this article contributes to understanding of how the right to the city is contested in provincial England in the early twenty-first century. Oral history and ethnographic material gathered in Peterborough between 2010 and 2012 are drawn on to shed new light on the politics of diversity and urban space. This highlights the multiple place attachments and trans-spatial practices of all residents, including the white ethnic majority, as well as contrasting forms of active intervention in space with their different temporalities and affective intensities. The article carries its own diversity politics, seeking to reduce the harm done by racism through challenging the normalisation of the idea of a local, indigenous population, left out by multiculturalism. It simultaneously raises critical questions about capitalist regeneration strategies in terms of their impact both on class inequality and on the environment.

Indian Punjabi skilled migrants in Britain: of brain drain and under‐employment

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the careers of skilled migrants from Indian Punjab. This study complicates the normalization of skilled migration as a “win‐win” situation by examining the career trajectories of skilled migrants from the Indian Punjab who are trying to establish themselves in Britain.Design/methodology/approach – The paper examines 20 life history interviews undertaken with skilled migrants from the Indian Punjab to Britain, in IT, media, law and hospitality industries, health and welfare professionals, and student migrants.Findings – Skilled migrants were able to migrate on their own auspices through migration economies in Punjab. Once in Britain, however, they were directed to universities and labour markets in which they were not able to use their skills. They experienced under‐employment, devaluation of their qualifications and downward mobility, which forced them into ethnic and gendered markets within their home networks and created ambivalence about migrant success...

It's not just pills and potions? Depoliticising health inequalities policy in England

In England, health inequalities policy shifted during the Labour term (1997–2010) from initially strong commitments to tackling the ‘upstream’ social determinants of health to a technically-driven emphasis on lifestyle risk factors and healthcare access. This multi-sited study, based in and around Westminster (2006–2007), extends our understanding of how political context influences policy-making by drawing from anthropological studies of policy. Qualitative material from central government is put into conversation with theory concerning policy as zones of practices. The paper explores the bristly process through which public health, healthcare and corporate interests vied to shape the political agenda for health inequalities; the selective use of evidence by civil servants in accordance with their perceptions of what politicians conceive to be electorally palatable; the silencing of critique of the dominant narrative about evidence-based policy; and how technical aids developed a life of their own – as a result of which, health inequalities policy ended up being depoliticised.

Sabar: body politics among middle‐aged migrant Pakistani women

This article explores the relationship among suffering, Islamic moral concepts, subjectivity, and agency within a cohort of middle-aged women who migrated from Pakistan to Britain in the 1960s and 1970s as the wives or daughters of industrial workers. These women were preoccupied with their ageing bodies and complained about the cumulative assaults on their health they had experienced, and which they felt had been neglected by health professionals and family alike. By examining how these women bear chronic illness through a discourse of sabar (patience or silent forbearance), I show how women were able to transform their illness into a selfless and virtuous consequence of shouldering the burdens of kinship. Sabar suggests passive acceptance or fatalism to some observers, but attending to how women situate their illness in a religious and eschatological frame, we see that they actively appropriate rather than passively imbibe the norm of sabar. Moreover, turning from narratives to everyday contexts of friendship, family, and inter-generational relations, we see that there are tensions between self-sublimation and self-assertion in the practice of sabar. It is argued that ethnographic attention to subjectivity and reflexivity are crucial to understanding sabar as an agential capacity.

Migration, Transnationalism, and Ambivalence: The Punjab–United Kingdom Linkage

This chapter investigates developments in the Punjab–UK transnational space, a long-standing and extensive migration corridor. Within India’s diverse migration history, Punjab’s specificity is its particular historical connection with the UK, despite criss-crossing colonial and postcolonial migrations across the globe. We juxtapose field research in the UK and Punjab and show that transnationalism appears and works differently when viewed from either location—highlighting the differentially empowered nature of transnational space, as well as irresolvable ambivalences that are worked into transnational relationships. We reconsider the transnationalism paradigm through five interrelated arguments. We demonstrate the complexity of transnational space, which exceeds the binary sending–receiving country relationship that characterizes the literature. We find that transnationalism is not merely produced “from below” by the activities of migrants and diaspora, but is orchestrated and formalized by various arms of the Indian and British states. Moreover, illicit flows of people are also produced by the governance of migration. Transnational connectivity does not diminish individuals’ desire for a single, solid citizenship and nationality beyond the pragmatism attached with citizenship. Finally, we argue for historicizing of transnational networks and appreciation of the social relations of gender, generation, class, and caste by which they are cleaved.

Shehri (city) brides between Indian Punjab and the UK: transnational hypergamy, Sikh women's agency and gendered geographies of power

ABSTRACT This paper explores Sikh transnational marriages contracted between the UK and Indian Punjab. Ethnographic and statistical studies have found that transnational marriage is less popular among UK-born Indian Sikhs than Pakistani and Bangladeshi Muslims. Those who marry transnationally tend to be less educated than those who marry in the UK, and there is an apparent pattern in transnational marriages wherein UK-born men are likely to marry women from India who are more educated than themselves, or shehri (city) women as they are called in Punjabi. The paper explores two shehri brides’ lived experience of marriage and explores the constraints on their agency and the forms that it takes at a number of ‘geographies’ or scales: in their relationships with their natal families, with their in-laws, husbands, the labour market and the state. The paper argues that state discourses problematising marriage migration in socio-economic and integration terms must be critiqued, not only because the shehri brides go against classed policy framings of the migrant wife but also because such framings deny the agency of all migrant women as they struggle to move on with their lives over time.

Sending children to school ‘back home’: Multiple moralities of Punjabi Sikh parents in Britain

This article explores how Punjabi Sikh parents in Britain try to produce ‘good children’ through moral reasoning about their schooling. Parents compare schooling in Britain with India and sometimes wonder about sending their children to school ‘back home’, in the hope of immersing them in Indian culture, traditions and language. The ethnographic material comes from a study of Indian Punjabi transnationalism involving fieldwork in the West Midlands and 72 interviews with parents, grandparents and young people. I first explore the views of parents and grandparents who advocate sending children to school in India. Then, focusing on two mothers, I explore the moral dilemmas that resulted from sending their children ‘back home’. The article demonstrates the value of Zigon’s theories on moral pluralism, and explores dynamics of gender, generation and class.

Long-term ill health and the social embeddedness of work: a study in a post-industrial, multi-ethnic locality in the UK

Against the background of an increasingly individualising welfare-to-work regime, sociological studies of incapacity and health-related worklessness have called for an appreciation of the role of history and context in patterning individual experience. This article responds to that call by exploring the work experiences of long-term sick people in East London, a post-industrial, multi-ethnic locality. It demonstrates how the individual experiences of long-term sickness and work are embedded in social relations of class, generation, ethnicity and gender, which shape peoples formal and informal routes to work protection, work-seeking practices and responses to worklessness. We argue that this social embeddedness requires greater attention in welfare-to-work policy.

British Muslims, British soldiers: Cultural citizenship in the new imperialism

The discursive positioning of Muslims as a ‘security threat’ or ‘enemy within’, in government policies and the media, has cast young Muslim men in particular as criminalized anti-citizens. Meanwhile, since the inception of the Afghanistan campaign, the soldier has become increasingly prominent as a figure of militarized citizenship in the public sphere. This article juxtaposes accounts from Pakistani Muslim youth in the West Midlands with those of soldiers and family members involved with the Hero Net online community, attending to the notion of cultural citizenship – namely, the everyday subjective experience of national belonging beyond its legal–political aspects. Our research suggests that, for both groups, mindful critique or dissent are central to the process through which individuals are brought into being in relation to the nation-state. However, we demonstrate that formations of cultural citizenship in Britain continue to be informed by the logics of race and orientalism. The article offers insights into how gendered and racialized formations of citizenship conjoin with imperialism and militarization.

Culture shock on Southall Broadway: re-thinking ‘second-generation’ return through ‘geographies of Punjabiness’

This paper explores geographies of Punjabiness within Britain in order to engage critically with the recent literature on diasporic return. I begin by drawing attention to the established geographies of Punjabi settlement in Britain, as illustrated by the Thandi coach route maps. This paper considers the significance of these inter-connected hubs of Punjabiness for the multiple identities of the ‘second generation’. I examine life history interviews with ‘second-generation’ Punjabis who grew up in provincial cities and towns off the Thandi route maps – an increasing quantity among Punjabis in Britain. I explore how they construct places like Southall Broadway and Soho Road as Punjabi and go on day trips to these places, as part of their quest for a more authentic identity in the context of their own lives. I show that these places, too, can be crucibles of diasporic nostalgia, exploration of identity and a phenomenological sense of Punjabiness, at times pleasurable and at times unsettling. I suggest that these experiences are akin to diasporic return, speaking to a wider critique about the fetishizing of national borders and the need to decouple diaspora from the idea of originary homelands.