The purpose of this special issue is to examine how diverse perspectives on difference are experienced and enacted by ordinary people in the everyday contexts of migration. Ethno-cultural interpretations of difference have come to be seen as inextricably linked with migration in political rhetoric, policy prescriptions, media coverage and institutional structures. Ethnicity is the ongoing product of migratory processes that give it both form and meaning, and it is the idiom through which the politics of multiculturalism expresses itself in accommodating (and sometimes constituting) post-immigration difference. This privileging of ethnicity is consequential. But as the contributors to this volume will demonstrate, it is not determinative. Understandings of difference are shaped not only by politicians, the media and public institutions; they are simultaneously the practical accomplishment of ordinary people engaging in routine activities. We situate our examinations of diverse modalities of experience in the everyday lives of the people claiming them. Our analyses neither privilege nor dismiss ethnicity, but rather consider how ethnicised views of the world exist and interact with other perspectives on difference. The problemA preoccupation with ethnicity, not only in the empirical world but also in our scholarly analyses of that world, has intentionally or unintentionally endowed ethnicity with a privileged status. Ethnicity has assumed a fixity in both popular and scholarly imaginations that is at odds with its contingent and socially constructed nature. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of migration. Whilst there is broad agreement that ethnicity should not be understood in essentialist terms, the practices and processes of migration have an uncanny way of Ethnicities 13(4) 385-400

Among student and young professional migrants to the UK the opportunity for a global or cosmopolitan experience emerges as a motivating factor for migration. This article takes the example of student and young professional migrants to the UK from the South Indian state of Tamil Nadu, and explores how this cosmopolitan ambition plays out in the formation of UK social networks. Two 'types' of research participant are identified; 'self-conscious cosmopolitans' whose social networks are cross-ethnic, and others whose networks are largely co-ethnic and who are often derided by their self-consciously cosmopolitan counterparts as 'clannish' or 'cliquey'. The article asks how ethnicity emerges as salient (or not) in these migrants' talk and practice around UK social network formations. It then considers whether a co-ethnic social network necessarily limits the cosmopolitan experience, or whether this interpretation reflects a narrow understanding of cosmopolitanism which excludes the multiple inter-cultural encounters these migrants experience in their everyday lives.

No abstract

This paper considers the religious practices of Tamil Hindus who have settled in the West Midlands and South West of England in order to explore how devotees of a specific ethno-regional Hindu tradition with a well-established UK infrastructure in the site of its adherents' population density adapt their religious practices in settlement areas which lack this infrastructure. Unlike the majority of the UK Tamil population who live in the London area, the participants in this study did not have ready access to an ethno-religious infrastructure of Tamil-orientated temples 1 and public rituals. The paper examines two means by which this absence was addressed as well as the intersections and negotiations of religion and ethnicity these entailed: firstly, Tamil Hindus' attendance of temples in their local area which are orientated towards a broadly imagined Hindu constituency or which cater to a non-Tamil ethno-linguistic or sectarian community; and, secondly, through the 'DIY' performance of ethnicised Hindu ritual in non-institutional settings.

This article provides a unique contribution to the debates about archived qualitative data by drawing on two uses of the same data - British Migrants in Spain: the Extent and Nature of Social Integration, 2003-2005 - by Jones (2009) and Oliver and O'reilly (2010), both of which utilise Bourdieu's concepts analytically and produce broadly similar findings. We argue that whilst the insights and experiences of those researchers directly involved in data collection are important resources for developing contextual knowledge used in data analysis, other kinds of critical distance can also facilitate credible data use. We therefore challenge the assumption that the idiosyncratic relationship between context, reflexivity and interpretation limits the future use of data. Moreover, regardless of the complex genealogy of the data itself, given the number of contingencies shaping the qualitative research process and thus the potential for partial or inaccurate interpretation, contextual familiarity need not be privileged over other aspects of qualitative praxis such as sustained theoretical insight, sociological imagination and methodological rigour.