Yunis Alam

Social cohesion and counter-terrorism: A policy contradiction?

This book examines the intersection between the Prevent strand of the UK’s counter-terrorism strategy and the Community Cohesion policies that had emerged after civil disturbances in several northern towns including Burnley and Oldham in 2001. The discourses surrounding these two policies are contextualised with reference to British race relations and immigration policies in the postwar period. Based on interviews with senior management, operational staff and local councillors responsible for the management and implementation of community cohesion and counter-terrorism policies in West Yorkshire, the authors address and add to understanding of many issues of interest to urban studies and related disciplines.

Islamophobia, community cohesion and counter-terrorism policies in Britain

ABSTRACT Alam and Husband explore the ways in which two policies of central government, in both conception and expression, have operated in such a way as to promote the growth of Islamophobia in Britain. Policies of community cohesion developed in response to the riots in northern British cities in 2001, while the counter-terrorist polices that emerged following the bombings on mainland Britain in 2005 were targeted at Britains Muslim populations. The rhetoric employed in the public sphere to legitimate these policies had the effect of making Islamic identity salient, and aberrant, in the context of twenty-first-century Britain. The scapegoating of Muslims, as essentially an alien wedge in British society with a deep resistance to entering into ‘the British way of life’, was attached to an interpretation of their demographic location in British cities so as to present them as both ‘self-segregating’ and ‘living parallel lives’. The emergence of ‘home-grown bombers’ resulted in the state maintaining a sense of risk to terrorist assault that fed off and into the existing securitization of urban life, consolidating a policy environment defined by the sense of an essentially permanent state of crisis. These exceptional circumstances permitted a suspension of previously sacrosanct principles of human rights and freedoms. The empirical evidence underpinning this paper reinforces the notion that these policies were mutually contradictory in practice, and that the penetration of social cohesion initiatives by the logics of surveillance resulted in a breakdown of trust between large sections of the British Muslim population and the agents of the state.

Lived diversities : space, place and identities in the multi-ethnic city

Introduction Bradford and Manningham: historical context and current dynamics Walking Manningham: Theorizing the reading of Manninghams physical terrain: Streetscapes, soundscapes and the semiotics of the physical environment Migratory waves and negotiated identities: The polish population of Bradford Manningham: Lived Diversity The Car, The Streetscape and Inter-ethnic Dynamics Conclusion: Recognising Diversity and Planning for Co-existence.

Automatic transmission: ethnicity, racialization and the car

ABSTRACT This article is based on ethnographic research carried out in Bradford, an ethnically diverse city situated in the north of England. The sample of over 60 participants mostly comprises males of British Pakistani Muslim heritage but varies in terms other markers of identity such as social class, profession and residential/working locale. The article analyses the cultural value and meaning of cars within a multicultural context and how a consumer object can feed into the processes which refine and embed racialized identities. Small case studies reveal the concrete and discursive ways through which ideas around identity and ethnicity are transmitted and how, in particular, racialization continues to feature as a live, active and recognizable process in everyday experience.