This research investigated the training needs of South Asian male adults in Hong Kong. It aimed at understanding the social forces behind the social exclusion and the disadvantageous employment conditions being faced by them, with a view to designing appropriate training programmes for improving their employment prospects and integration into the Hong Kong society. The literature review suggested the view that there were gaps between our existing knowledge about the training needs of South Asian male adults in achieving economic and social integration and the reality. A mixed-method approach of qualitative research was adopted, in which first stage data were collected by questionnaire survey, and qualitative data were obtained by subsequent face-to-face interviews. In general, the South Asian male adults who participated in this study faced problems to various extents in job seeking, employment and receiving training. They considered language barriers, unfair treatments, cultural and religious differences, and racial discrimination as problems which hindered their economic and social integration into the Hong Kong society. The social policy recommendations drawn from the research findings to improve the economic and social positions of South Asian male adults in Hong Kong included: provision of dedicated training services, equal education opportunities, formulation and implementation of Chinese language enhancement policies, fostering of mutual help among ethnic minorities and the ethnic enclave economy, and last but not least, promotion of multiculturalism and interculturalism for achieving racial harmony and mutual understanding.

This thesis explores the lived experience of race as told through narratives of the city. It draws on photo diaries, observations and qualitative interviews with 32 people aged between 20 and 30 years old in three areas of Manchester. It examines how discourses, which construct UK cities as tolerant and multicultural spaces, are reproduced by the respondents and yet are contradicted by their everyday experiences. It argues that narratives that actively silence race, for example through notions of tolerance and colour-blindness, obscure the ways that people are differentially positioned and makes it difficult to name difference and name racism. The thesis explores a series of dilemmas that form part of the struggle to reconcile multiple and often contradictory levels of experience and situates these within the broader political context. The thesis engages with discussions around what have been broadly defined as ideas of ‘post-race’. It argues that the city becomes a useful avenue through which to direct this discussion, because it acts as a location in which race is imagined in conflicting ways; simultaneously as a site of segregation and conflict and cosmopolitanism and ‘mixing’.The thesis explores how people talk race through their representations of different spaces of the city. It argues that people’s stories about their relationship to place help make perceptible the different ways that they deal with difference. Race is silenced in narratives of place, emerging primarily through coded references to class and criminality, except when it is articulated with exotic and ‘sympathetic’ representations of the ‘ethnic’ or ‘migrant’ neighbourhood, or with a white underclass. It also examines how, within these narratives, people talk about knowing others that they emphasise are racially or ethnically different. Notions of tolerance and colour-blindness are invoked throughout these narratives and used to suggest that they are emblematic of a new generation. The thesis argues that the respondents' narratives resonate with national discourses of multiculture that imagine liberal spaces of cosmopolitanism and, simultaneously, silence inequalities and exclusion. The central problem is that these discourses and processes of silencing do not take account of the meanings of race and how people are differentially positioned. Consequently, they disable questions about the significance and the effects of race. This has implications for how racism can(not) then be named. People subjected to racism are, instead, under pressure to assimilate and conform to the behavioural norm. The thesis argues that respondents’ narratives of the everyday can, therefore, be interpreted as a form of orientalism (Puwar 2004). They are indicative of the kind of multiculturalism that ‘tolerates’ and ‘bestows rights’ on the racialised Other, but does nothing to demythologise the Other, or engage with the needs of minorities (Amin, 2010). The façade of ‘racial etiquette’ when it is constructed as such, thus implies a ‘refusal to understand’ (Foucault 1978), because to do so would necessitate confronting the currency of racism and the fact of white privilege.

This thesis sets out to critically interrogate the contemporary relevance of integration and, in turn, develops a more useful theoretical framing for understanding the experiences of ethnic minorities in Stockholm and London. I argue that the concept of integration remains so normatively loaded that it obscures its advocates’ own stated ideal – the fluent sharing of lives on a daily, mundane basis. I also argue that processes of integration are the self-same processes that produce and reaffirm racialised differentiation. My analysis is empirically situated in interviews with 23 young research participants from Stockholm and London, as well as observations from shared time – at sites ranging from commercial high streets to the squares of council estates. Much of my critique targets the tendency of sociological commentary to trade in a series of analytic reductions, whereby: a) ethnic identification is too heavily tied to expectations about culture and value-orientations; b) identity performance is too often read as denoting a subjective internalisation of that particular identity position, whereby the subject is seemingly of the identity she refers to; and c) close social ties are seen as more meaningful to people’s experiences than the negotiation of fleeting urban encounters. The recurring emphasis of this critique is that routines of fluent multi-ethnic cohabitation rest on an ability to disturb the idea of space, culture and solidarity as ethno-communal properties. The idea of conviviality, borrowed from Paul Gilroy, is developed here as a more accurate heuristic via which one can understand these alternative interactive fields; where markers of difference are neither actively elided (i.e. denied or absorbed into a larger field of community) nor rendered obstructive. Going against a resurgent ‘sociology of ties’, my empirical attention centres here on those myriad and irregular encounters outside of one’s immediate kin and peer networks (what I call ‘second-order’ interaction). I also evidence the ways in which the participants are often involved in an intricate game of ‘identity citation’; wherein, they consent to a sense of their own difference primarily in order to remain intelligible to the dominant social gaze and its normative racial orders. This alternative reading of identity difference, where identity is consented to, but not necessarily internalised, triggers in turn a different kind of lived multicultural politics; a multicultural politics which is more about anti-racism than it is about the ontology of communal difference.

Fondée sur une ethnographie combinant observation et entretiens, cette thèse analyse les expériences migratoires des résident·e·s français·es à Abu Dhabi. Nuançant le portrait d’« expatrié·e·s » fréquemment présenté·e·s comme hypermobiles, elle montre qu’elles et ils empruntent en fait des routes migratoires balisées. Ces routes sont notamment dessinées par la rencontre entre politiques émiriennes et État français transnational, dans un contexte de concurrences postcoloniales qui se traduisent par des stratégies de distanciation vis-à-vis du colonialisme britannique et de l’impérialisme étasunien. La construction du groupe national, encadrée par des institutions migratoires, se déploie dans la délimitation de frontières associant francité et blanchité, au travers des interactions tant avec les nationales et nationaux émirien·ne·s qu’avec d’autres groupes migrants. Si le rapport à la population majoritaire sud-asiatique est marqué par une mise à distance, toutefois perturbée par la fréquence de l’emploi domestique à demeure, le rapport aux citoyen·ne·s émirien·ne·s engage un trouble singulier dans l’ordre postcolonial. Les résident·e·s français·es font ainsi l’expérience d’une vulnérabilité limitée, mais anxiogène, vis-à-vis d’Émirien·ne·s perçu·e·s comme omnipotent·e·s. En cela, les migrations françaises à Abu Dhabi se révèlent le lieu d’une déstabilisation autant que d’une solidification de la blanchité. Mettant en lumière la façon dont ces reconfigurations blanches s’entrecroisent avec un régime de genre où se renforce l’hétéroconjugalité, la thèse apporte une contribution à l’analyse plurielle des rapports sociaux dans les migrations des Nords vers les Suds. / Drawing on ethnographic methods (participant observation and interviews), this research analyses the migratory experiences of French residents of Abu Dhabi – generally referred to as ‘expats’ rather than ‘migrants’. It describes their migratory paths, and explores how migration affects their social positions, relations, and representations. While these ‘expatriates’ have been described as ‘hypermobile,’ they actually proceed along marked trails. Their migratory routes are shaped by the encounter of Emirati public policies and the French transnational state, in a context where postcolonial competition involves complex distancing strategies vis-à-vis British colonialism and U.S. imperialism. While the construction of the national group is supported by those migratory institutions, it also delineates symbolic boundaries and blends Frenchness and whiteness, through interactions with Emirati nationals as well as with other migrant groups. Although there appears to be little contact with the majority, South-Asian population, this remoteness is complicated by the massive institutionalization of ‘live-in’ domestic services. Relations to national citizens trigger an interesting trouble in the postcolonial order: French residents experience a limited, albeit anxiety-ridden, vulnerability vis-à-vis omnipotent-reputed Emiratis. To that extent, French migrations to Abu Dhabi enact an ambivalent social theater where whiteness is both destabilized and solidified. Showing how the reconfigurations of whiteness intersect with a gender regime which bolsters heteroconjugality, this research contributes to the analysis of the plurality of power relations in North-South migrations.

This thesis traces the history of Anglo-Australian racial science between 1850 and 1960, and examines evolving anthropological constructions of interracial marriage, as a lens through which we can re-evaluate gold rush histories and changing attitudes to East Asian migration throughout the British World, the British Empire’s geo-political relationship with China and Japan, and the transnational dissemination and contestation of the ‘‘yellow peril’’ trope. By decentring the histories of racial science and the British Empire from their North Atlantic moorings, and looking to anxious perceptions of East Asians emanating from antipodean Britons of the ‘global south’, the thesis builds a more trans-hemispheric narrative of the rise and fall of racial thinking. It does this by utilising two case studies. One examines the Sydney geographer Professor Griffith Taylor’s interwar problematisation of the White Australia Policy and the ‘transnational biopolitics’ of Asian immigration restriction in the Anglosphere, through his positive pronouncements about Eurasian intermarriage. Secondly, analysing the latter career of outcast former Kings College London racial scientist Professor Reginald ‘Ruggles’ Gates, and his ‘race crossing’ research in 1950s Australia and Japan, the thesis complicates histories of the global decline of racial thinking and survival of marginal scientific racists after the fall of Nazism.

Studies of interethnic integration in Central Eastern Europe have sought to account for the impact that institutional settings, structural conditions and elite-level interaction have on the accommodation of and conflict resolution between ethnic groups. Much existing literature has placed particular emphasis on the importance of institutional factors, both domestically and as a result of international pressure. Simultaneously, scholarship on the issue has left out of focus the contributions of non-dominant minority actors to the dynamics of interethnic relations. Where minorities are taken into account, this happens largely in terms of their failure to recognise structural opportunities for their inclusion into majority society. This study analyses interethnic integration in the Central Eastern European context from the perspective of structuration theory. Structuration theory provides a sound theoretical foundation in order to study non-dominant agency and its impact on the structures of integration, owing to its ability to reconcile dichotomies. The thesis comprises a comparative case study of interethnic interaction in Estonia and Slovakia, focusing on the Russian-speaking and the Hungarian minority respectively. A structuration approach is applied to the empirical findings in order to problematise practices of integration and their constraints that lie in the institutional and interaction context of Estonian and Slovak post-Communist society. I argue that although Russian-speakers in Estonia and Hungarians in Slovakia are constrained by institutional environs and majority-dominated structures, minority members actively participate in and shape institution-building and group formation in their interaction with majorities. Minority integration is analysed in terms of the minorities’ co-operation within, counteraction against and formulation of alternatives to the status quo structures of interethnic relations.

This thesis is based on fieldwork undertaken in a multi-ethnic indigenous organisation, the Native Federation of Madre de Dios and tributaries (FENAMAD), in the Amazonian region of Madre de Dios in Peru. I explore the question “what is a good leader?” and offer a contribution to the literature on indigenous movements by focusing on the significant role that indigenous communities play in the development of leaders. Alterity is at the heart of the Federation as the leaders, who are elected to represent the communities, have to deal with various “others” on a daily basis, both indigenous and non-indigenous. The main focus is on how alterity is managed and made productive by the leaders. By analysing the instrumental use of the term hermano (brother) in indigenous politics I try to understand the way in which the “outside” is constantly defined and redefined in an attempt to produce a stable “inside” space in which indigenous politics can take place. I look at how the native communities affiliated to the organisation actively work towards establishing leaders who fulfil certain roles and expectations, which may at times be different to those promoted by the state. My ethnography shows that communities expect good leaders to be consecuente (consistent, trustworthy). I look at the process of “becoming a leader” and how the experience of these new leaders is understood as both performative and authentic, as an expression and outward display of their values and identity. By problematising authenticity, I explore how leaders not only tap into indigenous discourses, as performance of an identity for Western audiences, but use strategic markers (such as indigenous dress) and discourse to establish themselves as legitimate representatives in their own communities, as the base from which they draw power. Llegando bien a la comunidad (doing right by your community) is seen to be a motivating factor in a leader’s actions and choices, and this highlights the importance given by leaders to being seen in a good light by their home communities. In analysing the importance of presencia en las comunidades (presence in the communities), I show how this helps to embed leaders in community life, both during their time as leaders and afterwards. I also relate the leadership role to its function in “producing people”, as empowered and able to act. The role of the Federation in the production of knowledge is explored to uncover the links between power and knowledge, whereby knowledge becomes significant for constituting power in leaders and communities. An analysis of the language used during important events such as the triannual congress offers insight into how both leaders and communities are producing each other. It is through language that leaders work to produce a trustworthy, reliable social body, necessary for the continuance of the Federation and for furthering its aims of indigenous autonomy and self-determination.