Parallel Lives: Round Table

Three speakers addressing the Challenging Parallel Lives Conference. Debbie Phillips (Leeds and Oxford Universities) will focus on how questions about community cohesion have become intertwined with a racialised political discourse on urban segregation and integration. Shamser Sinha (CoConvenor BSA Race and Ethnicity Study Group) argues that multicultural communities are displaying solidarities and resisting racism in ways confounding Trevor Phillips' segregation thesis and its inbuilt reification of cultural, ethnic and racial difference. Kjartan Sveinsson (Runnymede Trust) will argue that the socioeconomic disadvantage of poor white communities has been cast as an ethnic and cultural problem while larger structural considerations, such as the hierarchical nature of the British class system, are left out of the equation altogether.