Migration, everyday life and the ethnicity bias

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.