Robin Mann

‘It just feels English rather than multicultural’: local interpretations of Englishness and non‐Englishness

Who, or what, is English? Drawing on qualitative interviews with white majority interviewees in three locations in England, this article explores local interpretations of English and Englishness. The article investigates the way members view their local environment as being ‘English’, and examines the criteria underpinning such interpretations. While various meanings are identified, it is found that Englishness is more often accomplished through talking about people and ethnicity rather than through the use of geography. That is, members defined the Englishness of place by referring explicitly to people. Rather than moving away from social categorical accounting, the category English was interpreted through the mobilisation of ‘non-English’ others. In this rhetorical context, an English place is antithetical to a multiethnic place. Instead the term English is used to refer to white majority people. Although Englishness was defined in opposition to multiculture, this was not necessarily done in such a way as to exclude non-English ‘others’. Above all, it reflects ambiguity amongst the white ethnic majority about how they can, and should, be named.

Grandfathers in Contemporary Families in Britain: Evidence from Qualitative Research

In recent years, research into grandparenthood has gained considerable momentum, particularly in the United States and increasingly in Europe. However, there has been little research focusing on understanding the contribution of grandfathers. While the perception of grandmothers as more involved than grandfathers remains commonplace, some recent research provides indications of a more changing picture. In attempting to address this knowledge gap, this paper provides evidence from ongoing qualitative research with grandfathers. It focuses on themes of emotionality and caring in mens understandings of being a grandfather. In so doing, it considers whether the salience of these themes points to the emergence of “new” grandfatherhood, particularly among younger cohorts of grandfathers. Finally, the paper explores these findings in relation to the wider policy context around grandparenthood, complementary care, and working families.

The Personal Contexts of National Sentiments

There is an important strand of scholarship which argues that we need to explain ‘ethnicity’ within the social and personal contexts in which ethnic identities and sentiments are created and enacted. But there has been little attempt to consider whether, and if so how, attitudes to the nation may be informed by experiences and events at the personal level. Adopting a case-study approach, this paper focuses upon the lives of four ‘white English’ individuals. Treating each respondents account of his or her social milieu as the analytical starting point, the paper investigates how wider self-understandings and personal experiences inform a particular orientation towards nation, place and the country. In further exploration of this, it argues that the salience of ‘resentful nationalism’ is intensified when articulated through a sense of personal or social decline and failure. This is then demonstrated through reference to those with both ‘resentful’ and ‘indifferent’ orientations.

Reflexivity and Researching National Identity

This article focuses on the reflexive dynamics of interviewing in the context of a recent qualitative investigation of ethnic majority views of national identity in England. There is now an established literature which specifies the routine mobilisations of national identity through the course of everyday social interaction. Discourse studies also have been centrally concerned with the interview-as-topic and there is considerable work here on ethnic and racial categorizations within the interview context. Taking such work as its departure point, this article will illustrate how and why the interviewer also matters in talking about national identity. While the role of the interviewer is increasingly acknowledged in qualitative research, there has been little attempt to consider this particular methodological dilemma in nationalism research. In highlighting this problem, this article argues in favour of a more reflexive approach to the study of nationalism and national identity, one which brings to bear the researchers’ own unwitting assumptions and involvement.

Uneasy being English: The significance of class for English national sentiments

The contemporary forms of English identity and nationalism have received sustained attention since the late 1990s. Much of this attention has been framed in terms of English responses to recent constitutional changes in the UK, particularly Scottish and Welsh devolution in 1997. In this paper, I try to understand contemporary sentiments towards Englishness less in terms of political change, and more in terms of its relationship to class. Drawing on qualitative interviews with the ethnic majority respondents, I demonstrate the associations people make between class, inequality and exclusion and being English. In particular, I identify both a decline in social deference and an increase in contempt towards a so-called underclass in people’s talk about being English. In reflecting on this, I suggest that part of the explanation for why people are uneasy about identifying with ‘being English’ relates to an absence of an equal sense of English national membership.

Variations in Grandchildren's Perceptions of their Grandfathers and Grandmothers: Dynamics of Age and Gender

In this article, we investigate grandchildrens perceptions of their relations with grandfathers and grandmothers. There is very little research examining grandchild-grandparent relationships from the perspective of grandchildren. Research on grandparenthood and multigenerational families has consistently suggested that it is maternal grandmothers and granddaughters who have the closest relationships. We question this finding by pointing to the significant variations by age and gender in grandchildrens perceptions of the grandparents, both with whom they have most contact and with whom they get on best. Matrilineal advantage toward maternal grandmothers is less obvious for the older grandchildren within our sample and even less so for older grandsons. Grandsons ages 12 and over are more likely to perceive maternal grandfathers as the grandparent they get on best. Thus, the perceived salience of grandfathers relative to grandmothers varied significantly by age and gender of grandchild. The findings support the importance of a multidimensional construct of intergenerational solidarity, distinguished in our cases between the associational and affectual solidarity dimensions, as developed by Bengtson and others, which allows us to understand why a grandchild could have more contact with one grandparent, yet feel closer to another.

Grandfatherhood: Shifting Masculinities in Later Life

Drawing on qualitative interview data, this article examines how grandfatherhood relates to the assertion and transformation of masculinities in later life. Recent attention to ageing and masculinities has identified how older men are challenged to succeed in maintaining connections to hegemonic masculinity in light of altered family and life circumstances. We consider men’s engagement with grandfatherhood as a means for so doing, illustrating how men make sense of the role through continuity with hegemonic masculinity. While grandfathers describe emotionally intimate and affectionate relationships with their grandchildren, their accounts reflect desires to re-affirm previous connections to masculinities. Attention to the way individualised masculinities are re-negotiated in later life can help to explain how men are making sense of the new family opportunities that arise from being a grandparent. Such an analysis of grandfatherhood, we argue, also offers significant critique of hegemonic masculinity and its distinction to non-hegemonic masculinities intersected by old age.

‘Our Own People’: Ethnic Majority Orientations to Nation and Country

In this chapter we examine orientations towards nation and country with sole reference to the ‘ethnic majority’ in England. Drawing on extensive qualitative interview data collected as part of the Leverhulme Programme, we examine the nuanced ways in which majority people orientate to concepts of nation, country and multiculturalism. We illustrate the linkages between these specific national sentiments and the broader context of change in British1 society, and changes in the life circumstances of our respondents as told in individual narratives. In doing so, we will argue that attitudes to ethnic or national identity and multicultural Britain are not traced solely through specific questions on those topics. These ideas, in themselves, we find to have little purchase amongst ‘ordinary’ people. We did ask respondents about ‘national identity’ and ‘Englishness’. But we also asked people about their work and neighbourhoods, their sense of opportunity, merit and reward, and what they thought of Britain as a place to live. These questions and their responses allowed us to contextualise peoples’ ‘national orientations’ within a wider set of social orientations to, for example, a sense of entitlement, security and stability in everyday life, and civility.

Introducing the Majority to Ethnicity: Do They Like What They See?

Relatively little is known about what the ‘ethnic majority’ think about ethnicity and ‘national identity’ and indeed about whether they think about those things at all. Baumann (1996) has shown, in his study of Southall, that in a multi-ethnic social space where ‘white’ groups are numerical minorities, those communities (white English, Irish) do develop a consciousness of ethnic difference, including their own ‘ethnicity’. In many British and English social spaces this conscious majority identity will not be found in such an explicit way. It is difficult to be precise about what has prompted ‘awareness of ethnicity and nation’ (insofar as it can be detected) among the majority. Of course there is a visible multi-ethnic presence in most English/British cities and immigration is persistently debated in public political discourse; there is also a politics of multiculturalism, which includes a reactionary antimulticulturalist discourse. But in general how the majority public views ‘multiculturalism’ is little understood. Even if we acknowledge these factors (multi-ethnicity, immigration debates), it is not obvious that the majority will begin to view daily life, and national political life through a predominantly ethnic lens, and certainly not that they will see themselves as ‘ethnic’.

English Nationalism and Britishness: Class and the ‘Sub-state’ National Identities

Our aim in this paper is to assess the evidence for the emergence of an English nationalism. To do this we must take account of the British setting of English national sentiments, and the allied cases of Scotland and Wales. There is growing evidence of a drift away from British identification (Tilley and Heath 2007). But the consequences of this for the ‘sub-state’ identities are much different in the English case from the other two, leaving aside the case of Northern Ireland. This is because English identities are bound up with British identity in a way that the other two, Scotland and Wales, are not. Indeed, whilst devolution has problematised the characterisation of Wales and Scotland as ‘sub-state’ nations (see Brubaker 2004, p. 157, on ‘degrees of state-ness’), this only serves to emphasise the curious status of England as the dominant nation in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and yet without any semblance of statehood.