Researching Multicultural Community

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Researching Multicultural Community

• Les Back
• Goldsmiths

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Community as a moral/political project

• Hyper diversity and the Death of
  multiculturalism
• Sociology as racisms accomplice?
• The sensorium of racialised sense

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Diversity and Social Solidarity

• Robert Putnams Thesis
• Trust in others and social solidarity is high in
  socially homogeneous settings
• Diversity and social capital are inversely
  correlated
• Diversity leads to social isolation for all groups

Robert Putnam U Pluribus Unum Diversity and
community in the 21st century The 2006 Johan
Skyette Prize Lecture, Scandinavian Political
Studies, Vol 30, 2, 2007 137-174.
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Diversity or multiculture?

• Demography is not social formation
• What quantitative surveys admit and ignore
• Is community neighbourhood?
• Is diversity itself incompatible with social
  solidarity?
• Is a socially cohesive society always a good one?

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• If diversity does compromise solidarity, it is a
  fact that should be brought out into the open,
  not dismissed for ideological reasons
• Putnams work is based mainly on statistical
  correlations rather than actual local
  neighbourhoods. As he recognises, it has no time
  dimension. The next step is to look at specific
  areas as they change over time.

Anthony Giddens Doubting Diversitys value
Foreign Policy Nov/ Dec 2007 pp.87-88

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Community as a narrative achievement

• New Ethnicities and Urban Culture (London UCL
  Press, 1996)
• Our area semantic system
• - Harmony discourse
• - Black community discourse
• White flight semantic system
• Swamped by difference
• Death of community
• Being forced out

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Enacting community

• The Limits of what is said - Bauman
• Thin description
• An inventory of multiculture
• Multicultural sensorium
• Redefining the observer
• Social sciences limited attentiveness - John Law
  and John Urry

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• They deal, for instance, poorly with the
  fleeting - that which is here today and gone
  tomorrow, only to reappear the day after
  tomorrow. They deal poorly with the distributed
  - that is to be found here and there but not
  between - or that which slips and slides between
  one place and another. The deal poorly with the
  non-causal, the chaotic, the complex. And such
  methods have difficulty dealing with the sensory
  - that which is subject to vision, sound, taste,
  smell with the emotional - time-space compressed
  outburst of anger,pain, rage, pleasure, desire,
  or the spiritual and the kinaesthetic - the
  pleasures and pains that follow movement and
  displacement of people, objects, information, and
  ideas
• John Law and John Urry Enacting the social
  Economy and Society, 33, 3 (2004) pp. 403-404

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London Routes

• Multi-media Method/ Multiple Observers
• Taking Cameras for a walk
• Soundscape recording
• Multicultural enactment within a democracy of the
  senses
• Metropolitan paradoxes Deptford Market

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Photography by Dawn Lyon
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Photography by Dawn Lyon
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Photography by Dawn Lyon
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Photography by Dawn Lyon
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• If methods methods are not innocent then they
  are are also political. They help make
  realities. But the question is which realities?
  Which do we want to help make more real, and
  which less real?
• John Law and John Urry Enacting the Social p.
  404

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Representing Multicultural Community

• The limits of number and word
• Lessening the addiction to the spectacular
• Developing an inventory of the elsewhere in the
  close at hand
• Attending to the rhythms of recognition and
  coexistence