How does integration materialise in interactions and practices of everyday life of residents within theirneighbourhood in a superdiverse context?

Lead Research Organisation: University College London
Department Name: Social Science

Abstract

Integration is a highly contested and politicised concept. It carries different, and often, contradictory meanings. Inmy research, I challenge conventional approaches to integration which are based on integrating a part to a whole,migrants to a society, or them to us. I rethink integration, through consciously recognising academic criticisms andlearning from attempts to explore alternative concepts. I aim to develop an alternative approach to studyingintegration as interactions taking place in the everyday life within an urban space among superdiverse population.Hence, I do not frame integration as a positive end goal migrants strive to acquire. Instead, I am interested instudying integration as a dynamic, continuously shaped in people's everyday lives, materialised in their interactionsand practices and configured within space. From this, I derive my core research question:
How does integration materialise in interactions and practices of everyday life of residents within theirneighbourhood in a superdiverse context?
To tackle this question, I have developed a methodology that is sensitive to superdiversity and neighbourhoodcontexts and capable of capturing everyday practices and framing the residents as agents of integration. Mymethodology explores three dimensions of integration, the narratives of the residents, their practices and thespaces in which these are situated. I will conduct fieldwork in two diverse inner-city neighbourhoods in Europeancapital cities, Embajadores in Madrid and Molenbeek in Brussels. This will involve living in the two neighbourhoodsfor the entire period of the field research, four months each. During this period, in each of the two neighbourhoods,I will conduct 10 go-alongs with four core informants to spaces they go to as part of their everyday life, participatoryobservations of four space selected from spaces visited during the go-alongs and ten brief chats with other usersof these spaces.

Publications

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Studentship Projects

Project Reference Relationship Related To Start End Student Name
ES/P000592/1 01/10/2017 30/09/2027
2870329 Studentship ES/P000592/1 02/10/2023 30/09/2026 Hend Aly