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Everyday integration: The Local Contexts, Practices, and Mobilities of Integration

Funder: UK Research and InnovationProject code: ES/S009582/1
Funded under: ESRC Funder Contribution: 768,503 GBP

Everyday integration: The Local Contexts, Practices, and Mobilities of Integration

Description

The recent Casey Review (2016) and Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper (2018) have revived integration as a national policy priority. The problem these strategies address is the perceived lack of integration of immigrants and ethnic minorities. The fix they propose combines English Language provision and the promotion of 'fundamental British values' with curbs on immigration and interventions to address what are viewed as harmful cultural practices. Whilst most will agree that integration is desirable, there are different views on what integration is and how best to achieve it. Our approach is distinctive in at least three ways. First, we view integration as a process involving everyone, not just immigrants and ethnic minorities. The drawback of approaches that single out certain populations as 'unintegrated' is that they relieve other, 'integrated' populations of responsibility for integration. Integration, we argue, can only work if it involves everyone, where everyone shares its responsibilities and benefits. Second, we view integration as beginning in the situated practices and local contexts of everyday life. The drawback of approaches that stress fundamental national values is they trade in abstractions that may have little bearing on people's day-to-day concerns. Integration, we argue, should be pursued and achieved through social intercourse grounded in everyday life, not (only) through the promotion of abstract national values. Third, we view integration as a bottom-up phenomenon, where the aim of policy should be to capture and encourage existing best practices whilst simultaneously attenuating local barriers to integration. The drawback of approaches pitched at the national level is they are less sensitive to variation in local context. Integration, we argue, must begin with and attend to the specificities of local context. Our Everyday Integration approach reclaims and retools integration for academic and policy purposes. Our approach represents a step change in the scholarship on integration. Integration has been criticised for its assimilationist undertones and lack of conceptual clarity, leading some to abandon it in favour of cognate concepts such as incorporation or inclusion. Given integration's continued policy relevance, however, our aim instead is to redefine and reclaim it in ways that identify and then remedy its earlier shortcomings. We begin with integration as an assortment of locally grounded everyday practices and mobilities that facilitate meaningful and constructive social exchange. We will develop this approach as our main scholarly intervention to integration. Our approach is designed to achieve maximum impact for the everyday users and agents of integration. Integration is not just a matter of fostering good relations between citizens and migrants in national contexts. Rather, integration occurs through the grounded practices, exchanges, and mobilities of everyday life in local contexts. Our policy interventions are designed to capture and facilitate existing good practices whilst simultaneously addressing remaining barriers to integration. Working with the Mayor of Bristol, the Bristol City Council, and a wide range of City and Community Partners, we will use our research findings to co-produce and implement an Integration Strategy for Bristol. We will then distil the insights from our research and Strategy to formulate an Integration Toolkit that can be flexibly adapted for other urban contexts across Britain. Rather than simply seeing the lack of integration as a problem, we contend that a focus on the ways in which different groups of mobile and settled residents of the city already experience and practice integration - that is, the people who are its everyday architects and agents - can provide insights and creative approaches for scholars and policymakers seeking to understand and foster integration.

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