No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis is based on a qualitative study of a black voluntary organisation, the Sheffield Black Justice Project. The purpose of the organisation is to offer practical advice to local black people about any aspect of the criminal justice process and the main part of its work involves operating a Help On Arrest Scheme. The thesis sets out to explore significant gaps in sociological knowledge about the participation of black people in voluntary organisations, the racialisation of identity and criminal justice issues. The research was concerned with an investigation of how volunteers from a variety of racialised groups understood the meaning and role of 'race' as they participated in the Black Justice Project. It assessed how far a successful collective response was possible in this specific social context and evaluated the extent to which the project was able to balance the needs and interests of local black people with those of supporting statutory organisations. Three central research questions have been addressed. Firstly, the research has examined the nature of and reasons for the volunteers' involvement in the Black Justice Project. Secondly, it has considered how volunteers perceived their identity to be racialised in relation to other black and white people both within the project and more widely. Thirdly, it has compared and contrasted the understanding of the volunteers with that of custody officers working in South Yorkshire Police, to provide detailed information about the ways in which each group interprets both the relationship between black people and the police and black people's experiences of criminal justice. The fieldwork consisted of two methodological elements. Firstly, a series of semistructured interviews was conducted with the three main groups involved in the research. A sample of thirty volunteers of varied racialised origin was interviewed. Those involved with the management of the project were also interviewed as well as various police officers, including one-third of custody officers in Sheffield. Secondly, informal participant observation of the project was undertaken over a period of two years. Overall, the thesis demonstrates that the Black Justice Project's apparent success resulted from a careful management of its image rather than a comprehensive implementation of the black perspective defined by the volunteers. However, it was found that the black perspective itself was based on the highly questionable notion of an essentialised black identity. The thesis demonstrates how racialised identity is always a process of accommodation, negotiation and transformation involving both group identification and categorisation by others. The research also revealed that the job-related objectives of the volunteers were thwarted by the custody officers who, it was found, effectively adhered to their job related priorities and so racialised the project's Help On Arrest Scheme. It was found that these two groups had a very different interpretation of the nature of police-black relations to the extent that the volunteers regarded raciaIised policing as the norm whereas the officers regarded it as an extremely infrequent deviation from it.

The purpose of this research was to study educational provision for isolated bilingual learners through a development project and reflection on the project. The development project was carried out, with hiatuses, over a three year period in a large shire Local Education Authority in the U. K. The aims of the development project were to work with teachers to meet the needs of isolated bilingual learners in four primary schools and one secondary school. The aims of the research were to establish the extent to which bilingual learners were submersed in the schools and to reflect on ways in which the educational needs of isolated bilingual learners could be met within a "curriculum framework common to all pupils". My data was drawn from responses to a questionnaire to advisory teachers in Local Education Authorities similar to the one in which the development project was carried out, from minutes of meetings with project heads and teachers, from semi-structured interviews with project teachers, from a response to a questionnaire to project heads, from shadowing notes and subsequent notes on discussion with teachers on shadowing process, from notes on conferencing with pupils, from notes on discussion with teachers during and following collaborative teaching and from a research diary. All the data was qualitative. The research showed that teachers were initially willing to invest in multicultural education rather than specific provision for bilingual learners. It showed that class and subject teachers were not prepared to invest in action research on provision for isolated bilingual learners by themselves. Neither raised awareness of multicultural issues nor reflection on what I observed during a period of shadowing impinged markedly on practice in the project schools. A more important factor in shifting provision appeared to be the ongoing change within schools whereby other specialist support teachers began to work within classes. When I, as a specialist teacher, worked with a class or subject teacher in a collaborative way we were able to ensure that isolated bilingual pupils were supported because the class or subject teacher had an investment in the reflection process that was not apparent with other development project vehicles. The willingness to invest was not dependent on awareness raising in the area of multicultural education or previous commitment to action research but hinged on the teachers' responsibility for all pupils. Because the intrinsic investment in one or two bilingual pupils is likely to be less in an isolated situation I concluded that collaborative work with teachers is even more vital there than in areas with larger numbers of bilingual learners.

This thesis makes a contribution to three areas of sociological thought. First, it is concerned with the elaboration and extension of the political economy approach to migration as it is represented in the work of Stephen Castles and his various co-authors. It suggests that the work of Castles, et al., is relatively silent on the role of the state, and ideological relations in the structuration of migration. In seeking to further refine the political economy framework as it is applied to migration, this thesis draws upon two other sets of literature which, in part, have emerged as counters to some of the more economistic of their formulations. In this light, the second area of sociological literature I draw upon is the recent work on the concepts of free and unfree labour. Finally, this thesis is informed by an analysis of recent debates on the concept of racialization. In synthesizing these three strands of sociology, this thesis advances the theoretical claim that political economy oriented theorists should focus on modes of incorporation, or the manner in which foreign-born labour articulates with capital and the state. Within this context, four distinct modes of incorporation under capitalism are identified. These modes of incorporation are designated as: free immigrant labour, unfree immigrant labour, free migrant labour and unfree migrant labour. This thesis suggests that agents are subject to particular modes of incorporation, in part, on the basis on the process of racialization. This thesis uses the cases of late nineteenth and early twentieth century Chinese migration to Canada, and the post-1945 migration of farm labourers, from a number of source countries, including, specifically, the Netherlands, Poland, Germany, and the Caribbean, to the south western Ontario fruit and vegetable industry to highlight the centrality of the state in the process of migration, and the differential modes of incorporation of foreign-born persons into sites in production relations. Furthermore, the process of racialization is seen to have an impact on whether particular groups are allowed entry to a social formation, and upon how they are incorporated into sites in production relations.

According to the 1991 Census, Indians are the largest ethnic minority group in the UK. This thesis uses quantitative techniques to investigate the experiences of Indians in the British labour market over the past five decades. This study analyses the factors that encouraged Indians to migrate and settle in the UK and highlights the changes in their skill composition and labour market experiences over time. A comparative study is also made between Indian males and females and their counterparts from other ethnic groups in order to investigate the differences in industrial and occupational distribution, participation decisions and earnings across the various ethnic and gender groups. This thesis attempts to evaluate the extent of discrimination faced by Indians in the British labour market and investigates the consequences of discrimination and labour market disadvantages. Over the years, economists have made significant contributions towards analysing the employment prospects, earnings and disadvantages faced by minority groups in the labour markets of developed countries. Most of the UK studies in this area using quantitative techniques have attempted to evaluate the relative positions of different ethnic groups in the British labour market. This study is more focussed since it concentrates on the experiences of Indians - the largest minority group in the UK. The research also provides a perspective from India, that is, mainly the lessons learnt from the experiences of migrant Indians in the labour market of a developed country. This thesis investigates the impacts of migration on the Indian economy with emphasis on how the Indian government can address the problem of "brain drain" and benefit by utilising the technical know-how, skills and savings of Indians residing in the UK and other countries.

This thesis performs a social mapping of the field of British-Asian independent film between 1976 and 1996. Through a practical application of Pierre Bourdieu's methodological approach to reading cultural production, this research examines a series of film production contexts as a means of revealing refracted homologies between particular texts, the cultural field and the broader field of power in Britain. The empirical core of the thesis identifies and examines five different film practices: an excluded film practice, an institutional film practice, a theoretical film practice, a successful film practice and contemporary film practices. The selected films are primarily analysed as cultural "barometers" of the given social contexts, providing for each of the empirical chapters a basis from which to map the genesis of a particular film practice. By mapping the relations between cultural production, the key social events and forces for change as actualised within the films, each empirical chapter aims to reveal the dominant logic which informed given film practices. Ethnicity, instead of functioning as the essential object of analysis, provides this research with a starting point and the key sampling device to map the British independent film field. In principal, this thesis examines the ways in which images of "ethnic minorities" in the British independent film field have been both liberated and regulated through the presence of dominant dispositions which have structured the field generating, and consecrating particular film-making practices over and above others.