Numbers and Needs - the urban and the rural: Immigrant settlement in Shropshire and Tower Hamlets

Anne Kershen discusses the comparisons between immigrant settlements in Shropshire and London's Tower Hamlets, exploring different issues of the migrant experience arising in the two areas. Integration is a term that is used in many different places and contexts and is increasingly prominent within public debates about migration in the UK and elsewhere in the West. 'Integration' remains vague in definition, which is perhaps one reason it can be useful in many varying contexts. Is it a new assimilationism, a reactionary retreat from multiculturalism, or a progressive, dynamic model for thinking about diversity? How does it relate to cohesion, to transnationalism and to cosmopolitanism? Can, and should, it be measured and monitored? How is it framed in relation to the different scales of governance and belonging, from the neighbourhood to the 'super-diverse' city to the nation-state? This seminar series brings together scholars working ethnographically on everyday practices of integration with scholars working on the production, reproduction and contestation of integration discourse.