The 1970s saw a growing challenge of assimilationist policies at the root of dispersal. Despite that, the hurdles to an efficient movement against it were many: the necessity to make a living among Asian immigrants, difficult access to information about dispersal schools, the fact that immigrants faced a bureaucracy which was opaque to them, etc. The Race Relations Board as well as the Ealing Community Relations Council proved instrumental in generating a growing awareness of the problems around and of the discriminatory nature of dispersal. For many Asians, the struggle against dispersal was primarily about equality and the recognition of a common human dignity, as is attested in some testimonies of former militants. In this chapter, the Kogan Report (commissioned by the RRB) is also analysed in depth, as well as the way dispersal illustrated in its last years a form of Welfare roll-back, rather than a policy of immigrant assimilation.

This chapter contributes to debates about the social life of methods by describing the co-evolution of a research practice and infrastructure. It offers straightforward description of an ethnographic practice where I collect sensor data with participants, such as heart rate or ambient temperature, rework it into interpretable form, and sit down together with them to co-produce its meaning. The chapter reflects on how that method evolved with the available technical infrastructure, and argues that taking the social life of methods seriously might also mean intervening directly in the tools that sustain cultures of big data.

Sanctuary cities exemplify the rescaling of citizenship, community, and belonging. This chapter sets the stage for the book by exploring urban sanctuary practices and policies in different countries. Drawing on the USA, the UK, and Canada the chapter shows how sanctuary policies and practices aim to accommodate illegalised migrants and refugees in urban communities. The concept of the ‘sanctuary city’, however, is highly ambiguous: it refers to a variety of different policies and practices, and focuses on variable populations in different national contexts. The chapter examines the international literature to show how urban sanctuary policies and practices differ between national contexts and assess whether there are common features of sanctuary cities. It uncovers legal, discursive, identity-formative, and scalar aspects of urban sanctuary policies and practices. These aspects assemble in ways that differ between countries. The chapter discusses these aspect in relation to urban practices in other countries, such as Germany, Spain, and Chile. It concludes by raising important practical and theoretical questions about urban sanctuary.

This chapter traces the history marrying sound with pictures and begins with Thomas Edison's laboratory assistant W. K. L. Dickson's attempt in 1889. Warner Bros. Pictures' Don Juan had impressive synchronised sound effects. In 1927, they had completed construction of the first sound studio in the world and started production on The Jazz Singer. The chapter highlights the changes that had to be made to the filmmaking process with the advent of synchronous sound. By 1929, it was mostly agreed that it was preferable to re-record the cutting copy soundtrack to re-balance the levels and adjust tonal differences during the production process. By 1933, sound could be manipulated on the editing bench with the same flexibility as picture and all the means were in place that would quickly be refined into a cinematic form that would remain largely unchanged for the next 27 years.

Chapter 3 investigates the printed magazine as a site where the world of art and fashion merged in the 1980s. Since the early 1990s fashion photographs have migrated effortlessly between the art field and the commercial field, between being considered as personal works or assignments limited by the ideas and wants of designers, brands and fashion publications. As pointed out by several scholars a crucial part of this development was the new aesthetics that emerged in the 1990s which challenged traditional notions of fashion as glamorous depictions of garments, a style labelled ‘trash realism’, ’radical fashion’ or ’post fashion’. However, as the chapter shows, an equally important material basis for this development was the emergence of new fora in the 1980s. Later on, in the 1990s and early 2000s several magazines that straddled art, style culture and high fashion appeared, such as Purple Prose, Tank, 032C and Sleek. This chapter trace the beginnings of these transgressions through a close examination of the two magazines i-D and Artforum, which from different positions and with different strategies served as an active interface between art and fashion in the 1980s.

This chapter draws on writings by race theorists and pragmatists to inquire into the internal politics of our academic communities. The argument is built around the epistemic injustice articulated by students of colour in my own doctoral programme. The chapter starts with this situation and develops the concept of ‘embodied ignorance’ and its embeddedness in positions of power in order to explain such epistemological injustice and find ways to overcome it. Embodied ignorance arises at the individual level from the limits and particularity of being just one person in space and time; and it arises at the social level from the mobilisation of categories of bodies that mark some as more authoritatively, legally and normatively entitled and powerful than others. Greater epistemological justice within the academy cannot easily remedy practical harms, requiring, instead, engagement with the broader society. The chapter examines the history and current practice of affirmative action to better understand the political and economic dimensions of academic exclusion/inclusion. It then turns to pragmatist thought to understand how to go beyond the current limitations imposed on racial and other forms of inclusion in the creation of new knowledge aimed at more democratic ways of knowing and living.

Football studies are replete with analyses of hooliganism. Yet ultras are distinct from hooligans. The ‘English style’ of hooliganism has influenced ultras through greater match attendance at international tournaments. Yet violent incidents are still relatively rare. Increasingly, violence is symbolic and displayed in the overtly masculine choreographies and chants of the ultras. The gendered dimension of ultras fandom remains dominant as masculinity underpins much of the symbolic violence in the ultras’ performance.

This chapter relies almost wholly on ethnographic fieldwork, i.e. interviews of formerly bussed pupils sharing their recollections some decades later. An analysis is provided of their broad sociological profile and how this may impact their memories of bussing. Then, various pragmatic elements about the bussing routine are studied, as well as the way racism in the dispersal schools was an unchallenged norm. Just as importantly, bussing’s effect was in fact to segregate rather than to integrate children in various kinds of ways. The fieldwork also illustrates sometimes the way individual children or families managed to circumvent certain demands through their seeming compliance and calculated conformity. Lastly, some exceptions to how negative bussing was are studied, as well as the way bussing ‘toughened up’, with hindsight, many of the interviewees themselves.

This chapter assesses the key theoretical presuppositions of ethnomethodology: that social order – interpreted as the intelligibility of coordinated patterns of action - is the central focus of sociological (and perhaps even of all social scientific) inquiry; that Parsons’ ‘analytical realism’ is false because order is observable routinely in everyday situations; that the meanings of social actions are locally variable and context-dependent (‘indexical’ and ‘reflexive’), rather than being determined by a semantic code; and that they are intelligible because they are self-identifying – their meaning is displayed and recognised by actors via shared methods or practices, in other words they are ‘accountable’. Ethnomethodology also involves some important methodological commitments: that for inquiry to be rigorous it must avoid reliance upon unexplicated resources, appealing only to what is observable or intersubjectively available; and the aim of rigorous social analysis must be literal description, rather than explanation or the production of theory: the task should be to ‘make visible’ members’ methods for the production of social phenomena. The conclusion reached in examining these arguments is that, while they relate to significant issues for social science, they exaggerate the intractability of the problems they identify. Moreover, ethnomethodology itself does not escape them.

This chapter compares the orientations of Garfinkel and Goffman. Their work is often regarded as similar, being concerned with the study of mundane patterns of social interaction. However, ethnomethodologists usually insist that there are fundamental differences between them. Their orientations are examined via a comparison with the work of a third sociologist, Georg Simmel, who was an important influence upon Goffman. While Garfinkel does not seem to have drawn on Simmel’s work, there are interesting parallels: in particular, they share a concern with the constitutive role that social interaction plays in social life. It is argued that, despite similarities between the orientations of Garfinkel and Goffman, the differences are more significant. For Goffman, the aim is to generate conceptual frameworks that illuminate everyday behavior, whereas ethnomethodologists resist the bringing in of new concepts, being concerned instead with explicating the processes by which social phenomena are produced in their own terms. Other differences relate to what is taken to be the context of social interaction, with Goffman treating the interaction order as mediating the effects of outside factors, whereas ethnomethodologists insist that the context of any process of social interaction can only be what is constituted as context within it.

The ultras style of football fandom emerged in 1960s Italy and has spread across Europe and the Mediterranean, to North America and Asia. This is not a history of the ultras, but an analysis of the way history has been used and incorporated into the ultras’ performance. History is an important foundation of ultras groups. It can act as an ‘invented tradition’ where ultras integrate historical narratives of their club, city and nation to present themselves to others. This chapter illustrates some of the many ways in which history has been incorporated into the development of the ultras style.

This chapter clarifies the role of relevance structures, typifications, language and discursive rationality in conflict and conflict resolution processes. Problem-solving workshop conflict resolution forms a framework for mutual cultural adaptation. The participants need to find a 'scheme of translation' to produce ways to understand each other and to create a shared reality. Since the problem-solving workshop offers a context for mutual adaptation, it needs to be studied how typifications change in that context. Face-to-face interaction between the conflicting parties is one of the core ideas on which most of the problem-solving conflict resolution approaches rely. Discursive rationality is fundamental in the context of problem-solving conflict resolution, because it contributes to the prevention of the further breakdown of 'sociality' and facilitates the finding of a shared language game. Since the workshop is an encounter where mutual cultural adaptation can take place, problem-solving workshop conflict resolution consists of discursive possibilities.

Third-party intervention is one form of conflict resolution among legal regulation, the deterrence model and bargaining and negotiation. Third-party activity has traditionally been theorised in three ways. The focus has been on 'intermediary activities', 'general conflict theory' or the 'negotiation system'. The traditional view which emphasises mainly on intermediary activities studies third-party tactics and identities. The fourth approach to third-party intermediary activities can be found in problem-solving conflict resolution, which John Burton's theory exemplifies. Three problem-solving conflict resolution schools emerged, namely, the London, Yale and Harvard schools, which employed International Relations theorising and practical techniques differently. A comparison of three problem-solving approaches reveals that the Harvard group led by H. Kelman emphasises that international conflicts are not simply the product of misunderstanding and misperception. Real conflicts of interest or competing definitions of national interests are often, according to Kelman, at the centre of disputes.

This chapter explores counterterrorism and counter-radicalisation practices in the United States and operationalises a more sociological approach to securitisation by looking at security practices themselves. I look at the everyday practices of security actors at various levels of the security field: federal (the Department of Homeland Security) and city (the NYPD). The chapter establishes two types of counterterrorism practice: the ‘hard’ approach and the ‘soft’ approach (referred to as countering violent extremism), which relies on counter-insurgency tactics. The chapter investigates cases of police entrapment by security professionals and, in line with civil liberties unions, offers a critique of the surveillance and targeting of minority groups for ‘security’ purposes.

This chapter explores the ways that films are structured and the theories that inform those structures in terms of what is recognised as traditional film-editing practice. It focuses on situations where the editing largely follows alternations in the dialogue. Any considerations of the way that dialogue is edited must begin by acknowledging that the structuring methods that editors use to reveal the essential meanings within a set of dialogue exchanges have changed hardly at all since the early 1930s; certainly by 1932 the fundamentals were widely understood. In most instances the performances given during a series of dialogue exchanges will be those determined by the actors during rehearsals of the scene and accepted by the director at the time of shooting. For the purposes of analysis, it will be helpful to examine the verbal and the visual elements of a series of dialogue exchanges separately.