Although mixed-race partnering in the United States is on the rise, scholars have paid scant attention to where people of `differently racialized parentage' (Ifekwunigwe, 2001: 46) actually meet. In an effort to help fill this gap, this paper (1) offers an overview of current scholarship on places of encounter and (2) aims to provide a blueprint for future research that will explicitly interrogate where mixed-race partners meet. We organize our survey around four contexts—residential neighborhoods, workplaces, educational settings, and cyberspace—to point out productive avenues for further inquiry. In contrast to much of the literature cited in this essay and in an effort to emphasize the intersections of race and space, we advocate for new scholarship that addresses the times and places where routine, prosaic, interactions between adults can erode long-standing stereotypes and lead to meaningful relationships. In studying everyday social and spatial processes, we highlight the potential insights gained from detailing the `micro-geographies of habitual practice' (Nash, 2000: 656).

This review highlights geographical perspectives on mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the United States, explicitly calling for increased analysis at the scale of the mixed-race household. We begin with a discussion of mixed-race rhetoric and then sketch contemporary trends in mixed-race partnering and multiraciality in the US. We also weave in considerations of the public and the private and the genealogical and social constructions of race. Our challenges to current thought add to the landscape of scholarship concerned with race and space. By presenting mixed race in fresh ways, we offer new sites for intervention in this evolving literature.

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Team research enables the collection of multiple, sometimes conflicting, stories of migration, family, and belonging. Using common qualitative methods within a team research context can stretch these research techniques in productive and instructive ways and proffer new insight and meaning.Therefore, the authors suggest that team research offers an important avenue for both extending qualitative methods and expanding interpretative lenses. To illustrate these points, the authors draw upon their study of the settlement and migration patterns of East African Shia Ismaili Muslims in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and discuss their experiences with focus group effects, the simultaneous household interview strategy, and postinterview dialogues. The article highlights how these three techniques and effects enacted in the team research context helped the authors explicitly locate contradictions, ambiguities, and paradoxes within the narratives of first-and second-generation Ismailis.Keywords collaborative team research; focus groups; household interviews; Ismailis; qualitative methods "Team Ismaili"l is a group of four geographers (at the time two master's students, one professor, and one instructor), who joined together as research collaborators in the summer of 2005 to explore transnational migrations and connections, family and community expectations, and identity expressions among East African Shia Ismaili Muslims 2 in Greater Vancouver, Canada. We approached these themes through focus groups and in-depth individual interviews with Ismailis who either forcibly or voluntarily left East Africa between 1970s and early 1990s (people we defined as first-generation Ismailis) and the adult Canadian-born children of these immigrants (defined as second-generation Ismailis).3 The contrasting and complementary stories of "Ismaili-ness" evident in the research archive grew to be a compelling focus within our study and prompted us to reflexively consider how our methods contributed to the gathering of disparate accounts. Therefore, in this article we discuss our experiences with focus group effects, the simultaneous household interview strategy, and postinterview dialogues. We highlight how stretching qualitative methods through the team research context helped us explicitly locate contradictions, ambiguities, and paradoxes within the narratives of first-and second-generation Ismailis. In other words, the meaning ofthe narratives about the Ismaili community became nuanced and textured through the teambased mobilization of our methods.The three methodological engagements that we discuss here provide the foundation for this article. With this in mind, first, we detail the literature on focus groups and discuss the emergence of various focus group effects in our research. We next turn to the simultaneous household interview strategy and outline how this technique offers glimpses into assorted intergenerational perspectives (Jamal, 2006;Pang, 1998). We conclude with examples from our postinterview dialogues. This stru...