October 2020

As Director of the Centre for the Study of Ethnicity and Citizenship at the University of Bristol, I work on issues related to racial equality, multiculturalism, ethnic minorities, and equal citizenship in the context of cultural and ethno-religious diversity.

An example of the kinds of big questions I’m grappling with in my work is: “how do we achieve equal citizenship, and what does it mean to be a citizen where one has a distinct ethnic, religious, or racial identity?” These identities can be partly because of how other people look at you, but they can also be because you are a member of a group that has a sense of distinct identity as well – i.e. a Muslim who is strongly connected to their faith and others of their faith around the world, or someone who is proud of their black heritage. So, whereas we normally think of sameness of treatment when we think of equal rights, equality and citizenship need to be combined with the idea of distinct group memberships and identities. This is the idea of equality in difference which lies at the heart of multiculturalism.

My recent work is also particularly concerned with reconciling national identity with the development of multiculturalism - which I understand as a form of equality which embraces differences. This question is very relevant for the policy debates many countries are having about integration. Across Britain, Western Europe, and the United States we have recently seen a rise of anti-multicultural, exclusive nationalism. We have also seen the rise of a particularly French idea that identities such as religious group membership divide citizens and separate them from each other.

In contrast, my work argues that multiculturalism is about creating new national identities in which minorities can see themselves in the national identity. To me, citizenship is not just about sameness of treatment, it is about giving people a sense of belonging to each other in their political community. This form of national identity is not colour-blind or identity-blind. Rather, it welcomes and includes minority difference. For this to work, we need to re-think our country in a new, diverse way, which is multi-ethnic, multi-racial, multi-faith and so on. This multicultural, inclusive approach does not push away national identity or dilute it. Rather, it can lead to the fostering of a form of multicultural nationalism.

In autumn 2019, I worked with CSaP on a seminar organised at the British Academy as part of a program on Cohesive Societies, which brings together academics ranging from historians and linguists to economists and sociologists to explore what makes a cohesive society. Britain has become very polarised, and this program challenges us to consider the obstacles we face today in trying to produce a cohesive society. At the Cohesive Societies seminar, I argued that multicultural nationalism and hyphenated identities is one of the ways of bridging the divides we face as a country. We need to take national identity seriously, while at the same time taking minority identities equally seriously.