Today we are launching the first episode of IRiS new Zoomcast series on mobility and immobility. "Conversations with Iris" will be a space where we will be in dialogue with fellow researchers, teachers, writers, migrants, refugees, activists, community organisers, artists and policy makers on issues related to the current pandemic and much more. It is... Continue Reading →
Valeria, Shahadat and Leonardo – an EU family living in London. Francesca MooreNando Sigona, University of Birmingham London is one of the capitals of the EU, home to over 1.1m non-British EU citizens, including a large number of families and children. This, according to my team’s ongoing analysis of data from across the EU, is... Continue Reading →
This photo project is part of the EU families and their children in Brexiting Britain: renegotiating inclusion, citizenship and belonging’s study, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and The UK in a Changing Europe Initiative. The overall research investigates how families with EU27 parents are managing the change and uncertainty brought by the referendum, and... Continue Reading →
The Grenfell Tower is a microcosm of London’s superdiversity and income inequality.
London’s burning, London’s burning.
Fetch the engines, fetch the engines.
Fire fire, Fire Fire!
Pour on water, pour on water.
My son is in Year 1, last term the 1666 fire of London was the core theme of his school activities – he made dramatic fire-related artwork, he learned about fire and wood houses, firefighters and the pain of those who survived. They were read passages of Samuel Pepys diary. He asked a thousand questions. He wanted to know if our home is safe. In his school diary he wrote: People were fleeing like meerkats; the flames were like dolphins jumping on a flat sea. He sang and sang this song.
How do I tell my son, how do we tell our children that in 2017 London is burning again? How can we explain to a 6-year- old that someone like him in London had half of his classmates vanished…
View original post 578 more words
Excellent piece by Ben Gidley originally published in COMPAS blog on a pilot research project exploring patterns and layering of diversity in Elephant & Castle
This is my latest COMPAS blog post. You can read the original here. The photos are by me.
In the 1890s, philanthropist Charles Booth and a team of assistants – the pioneers of sociological research in the UK – walked the whole of London, visually noting the wealth of each street’s inhabitants, to construct their Maps Descriptive of London Poverty. The maps coded streets by colour, with scarlet red and gold marking the “well-to-do” and the “wealthy”, dark blue and black representing the “casual poor” in “chronic want” and the
“vicious and semi-criminal” “lowest class”. Southwark, just across the Thames from the City of London, was a mass of dark colours.
A hundred years later, the New Labour government created an Index of Multiple Deprivation to map new forms of poverty, dark blue for most deprived and gold for least. Again, the northern wards of Southwark were swathed…
View original post 1,062 more words
"You can call that diversity, or even super-diversity, or just life", Aisha Mirza writes in The Guardian
Much current public and political debate about immigration and diversity assumes that there should be tensions on the grounds of ethnic and religious differences. In the London Borough of Hackney, however, diversity is the norm and, as a result of a long history of diversification, cultural and religious differences are rarely issues of contestation. There seem... Continue Reading →
Conversations with Iris
The Age of Superdiversity 