This article offers an explanation for recent trends that indicate higher numbers of young British Pakistani men and women pursue higher education compared to their white peers. Our qualitative research provides evidence for shared norms and values amongst British Pakistani families, what we term ‘ethnic capital’. However, our findings also highlight differences between families. The Bourdieuian notion of ‘cultural capital’ explains educational success among middle-class British Pakistani families. We argue, however, that insufficient attention has been given to the relation between education and ethnicity, and particularly the role of ‘ethnic capital’ in ameliorating social class disadvantage. Our research also recognizes the limitations of ‘ethnic capital’ and traces the interplay of ethnicity with gender and religion that produces differences between, and within, working-class British Pakistani families. We also emphasize how structural constraints, selective school systems and racialized labour markets, influence the effectiveness of ‘ethnic capital’ in promoting educational achievement and social mobility.

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This paper presents a critical assessment of the concept of transnationalism and its place within the current refiguration of cultural geography. Identifying three specific concerns with current theorizations of transnationalism (regarding the concept's scope, specificity and politics), the paper discusses the widely perceived need to ‘ground’ the study of transnationalism in specific empirical research. It argues that this discussion has been unhelpfully dominated by an overemphasis on identifying transnational migrant and diasporic communities. The paper highlights the authors' research with a range of food and fashion firms working between Britain and the Indian subcontinent to argue that an analysis of commodity culture provides an alternative way of advancing our understanding of contemporary transnationality. This approach suggests that transnational space can be recognized as both multidimensional and multiply inhabited. The paper concludes by outlining the alternative ways in which attention to commodity culture helps ‘ground’ the concept of transnationalism.

The author addresses contradictions of community through a case study which explores how young British Muslim women construct and contest their identities. Drawing upon the work of Hall, and others, in their theorisation of 'new ethnicities' or 'hybrid identities', she examines the possibilities for reworking the idea of community as a dynamic process which has a discursive and political effectivity. Through an examination of the constructions of community negotiated and deployed by young British Muslim women she highlights the ways in which different imaginations of community can be both empowering and constraining.

Since the last report on qualitative methods (Crang, 2005), much has been going on as normal within the practical procedures of doing qualitative research. Human geographers continue to study texts, to conduct interviews, to convene groups and to engage in ethnography. Indeed, it is hard, though perhaps not impossible, to imagine what a radically new form of qualitative research practice might look like. So, for the time being, this suite of methods remains the backbone of qualitative research in human geography. Yet, we would like to contend that whilst these activities continue as before, there are changes in the way they are being conceived and carried out, and related to this, there are transformations in the way these methods are being used to make claims to understanding and intervening in the world. In the first of our three reports on qualitative methods, it is this link between qualitative methodologies and interpretative strategies we would like to reflect on. If looking for a provocative metaphor and some opening arguments, then a good starting point is John Law's methods (anti)textbook After Method: Mess in social science research (Law 2004). From this it is possible to derive elements that describe some, if not encapsulate all, of these impulses. Firstly, and above all, there is rejection of singularity; of the operation of social science research methods simply to generate clarity, precision and reduce uncertainty and ambiguity in our understanding of the world. This is not to argue that existing 3 methodological repertoires are irrelevant, nor that empirical research is futile (though it does raise thorny issues for simplistic approaches to the orthodoxy of triangulation). Rather, there is the suggestion that we need to revise our understanding of what social science investigations achieve as particular ways of framing and interfering with the world. There is commitment to understanding all research as performative; that our methods help enact the real in different situations (Law and Urry, 2004; Makussen, 2005). Thus we have to figure out what it means to engage with the world, both in methodological practice, but also in our choice of interpretative strategy and ethical aspirations (Bennett, 2001). In place of the pursuit of certainty in generating representations of the world, there is recognition that the world is so textured as to exceed our capacity to understand it, and thus to accede that social science methodologies and forms of knowing will be characterised as much by openness, reflexivity and recursivity as by categorisation, conclusion and closure.We explore these issues below through three themes recurring in recent qualitative research in human geography: questions of agency, embodiment and emotion; being within nature; and the performativity of place. Concluding, we reflect briefly on the politics of these forms of qualitative research, raising questions we intend to explore more explicitly in our review next year, perhaps anticipating that practical experimentation and critical dia...