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Wed 24 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Thu 25 March
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    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Fri 26 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.15

Sat 27 March
    11.00 - 12.15
    12.30 - 13.45
    14.30 - 15.45
    16.00 - 17.00

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Friday 26 March 2021 12.30 - 13.45
R-10 ETH15 Minorities, Racism and Place in Post-war Britain: from Post-war Workers to Finding a Place in Rural Britain
R
Network: Ethnicity and Migration Chair: Marlou Schrover
Organizer: Samantha Kate Knapton Discussants: -
Pål Brunnström, Robert Nilsson Mohammadi : Do Labour Migrants need to know Swedish? Migration and Integration Policy and Praxis on the Municipal Level 1945–1970
This paper contributes to ongoing research on how European cities managed the influx of migrant workers, refugees and displaced persons from the 1940s to 1970s by focusing on the city of Malmö, Sweden. Municipalities is an often-overseen level in migration history, at least in the post-war period. Meanwhile, it was ... (Show more)
This paper contributes to ongoing research on how European cities managed the influx of migrant workers, refugees and displaced persons from the 1940s to 1970s by focusing on the city of Malmö, Sweden. Municipalities is an often-overseen level in migration history, at least in the post-war period. Meanwhile, it was on a local level that migrants found housing, work, and language-training. One aim of this paper is therefore to assemble the municipal level through studies of how municipal agencies, employers, trade-unions, landlords, and civil society organizations such as the tenants’ movement co-produced receptions of different migrant groups. In order to do so, the paper relies on archived materials, government and municipal reports, and social science reports from the examined period. The paper also wants to clarify the municipal level within the Swedish model for reception if migratory workers and refugees. The material is therefore interpreted in relation to historical knowledge about labour in and migration to Sweden, but also includes some comparative outlooks to cities in Germany and the UK. (Show less)

Sarah Hackett : ‘I do really want to become a better Muslim’: Migrant Communities, Islam & Religious Practice in Rural Britain
This paper explores Muslim migrant communities’ experiences, perceptions and recollections regarding the local understanding of Islam and religious practice in rural Britain across the post-1960s period. Using Wiltshire in the South West of England as a case study, a county chosen for its diverse, well-established and under-researched Muslim populations, it ... (Show more)
This paper explores Muslim migrant communities’ experiences, perceptions and recollections regarding the local understanding of Islam and religious practice in rural Britain across the post-1960s period. Using Wiltshire in the South West of England as a case study, a county chosen for its diverse, well-established and under-researched Muslim populations, it draws upon c. 40 oral history interviews carried out with first- and second-generation Muslim migrants from a range of ethnic backgrounds, including Bangladeshi, Moroccan, Pakistani, Tunisian and Turkish. The personal, unique and powerful oral testimonies of migration uncover a clear rural sphere to practicing Islam in Britain consisting of a series of compromises, challenges, inconveniences, sacrifices and anxieties, but also multi-ethnic collaboration and cohesion, that has largely gone undocumented. This includes a lack of religious education opportunities; women feeling uncomfortable wearing a headscarf; not having access to, and having to travel long distances for, Friday prayer; anxieties about not being able to access halal food, secure a suitable imam and about dying in Wiltshire due to the absence of Muslim burial rituals; and the prevalence of multi-ethnic mosque congregations and Islamic organisations that pursue integration and community cohesion. Furthermore, the oral histories expose a deep-rooted tension between absence and presence. On the one hand, Muslims have been highly visible on the county’s “White” rural landscape yet, on the other, they have not been able to “Islamisize” local space through purpose-built mosques and community organisations, and enact their religious identities in certain neighbourhoods in order to fully achieve a local sense of belonging. On the whole, these testimonies reveal an apprehension about not being able to “be Muslim” to the same extent as their urban counterparts, as well as the constant process of negotiation that living as a Muslim in rural Britain entails. (Show less)

Samantha Kate Knapton : ‘He might be a Foreigner, but he’s “Our” Foreigner’: Polish Post-war Migrants to Britain and the Issue of ‘Integration’
Immediately after the end of the Second World War the Allies set plans into motion aimed at repatriating and resettling those displaced by the war. The scale of the displaced persons (DPs) operation in Germany alone was overwhelming for the organisations charged with the task of untangling the wartime chaos. ... (Show more)
Immediately after the end of the Second World War the Allies set plans into motion aimed at repatriating and resettling those displaced by the war. The scale of the displaced persons (DPs) operation in Germany alone was overwhelming for the organisations charged with the task of untangling the wartime chaos. After the initial rush of DPs being repatriated to their homes, a large proportion, often from Central and Eastern Europe were left in the DP camps under Allied care. The largest proportion were Polish DPs and many of them refused to return to a Poland that they no longer recognised as their home. After numerous attempts to repatriate Poles from the British zone of occupation in Germany, and only after the allocated quota for foreign workers could not be filled by other DPs, was it finally agreed that Polish DPs would be allowed onto Britain’s European Volunteer Workers (EVW) scheme. Unlike many other post-war labour schemes, those accepted onto the EVW scheme (named by the British as Operation Westward Ho!) were not expected to return “home” but to remain and integrate into society. Their integration was fraught with local and governmental confusion over the purpose of these labourers, their ‘usefulness’ to the host society and often conflicting conceptions of who was deemed to be an ‘acceptable’ foreigner. The period of 1946-1948 saw a large increase in post-war Polish migration to Britain as Parliament enacted the first ever mass immigration legislation, The Polish Resettlement Act (1947). These two simultaneous migrations saw an increasing hostility towards some Poles but not others. This paper will explore the varying receptions former Polish DPs received in Britain following recruitment on work schemes and as part of the Polish Resettlement Act. Through an analysis of local attitudes to Poles in particular in Britain during this period, this paper will emphasise the disparity in provisions for the recruitment of foreign workers and highlight the sliding scale or racial hierarchy among Central and Eastern Europeans in the immediate post-war period. (Show less)

Gavin Schaffer : Thriving or Surviving? Fears of Decline and the Postwar British-Jewish Community
In a climate of secularisation and assimilation, amid broader social concerns about population decline, leaders and scholars of Britain’s Jewish community invested considerable thought and time in strategies to preserve and develop the community in the postwar period. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, British-Jewry, previously something of a backwater ... (Show more)
In a climate of secularisation and assimilation, amid broader social concerns about population decline, leaders and scholars of Britain’s Jewish community invested considerable thought and time in strategies to preserve and develop the community in the postwar period. In the aftermath of the Holocaust, British-Jewry, previously something of a backwater of European Jewish life, suddenly became the centre point, and pressures to protect and nurture its development grew as a result. Complicated by the desire to support the State of Israel (which had its own designs on Jewish Britons as migrants) and challenged by the end of significant Jewish immigration, leaders of British Jewry embarked on an extensive programme of education and advocacy in an attempt to stem what it perceived as a tide of intermarriage and secularism. This paper will give consideration to these community endeavours and their impacts, attempting in the process to draw conclusions about the meanings of Jewishness in postwar Europe, and the evolving nature of diasporic Jewish subjectivities more broadly. (Show less)

Christopher Roy Zembe : Politicising Memory: Zimbabwean Immigrants Reconstructing Identities and Relations.
Like most African states, Zimbabwe as a nation-state is a colonial construct in which ethno-racial identities and prejudices had been developed and nurtured. This paper will therefore illustrate why Zimbabwean immigrants in Britain are a product of those ethno-racial identities and prejudices developed and nurtured during the pre-colonial, colonial and ... (Show more)
Like most African states, Zimbabwe as a nation-state is a colonial construct in which ethno-racial identities and prejudices had been developed and nurtured. This paper will therefore illustrate why Zimbabwean immigrants in Britain are a product of those ethno-racial identities and prejudices developed and nurtured during the pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial phases of Zimbabwe’s history. In the absence of shared historic socio-economic or cultural commonalities within the Zimbabwean diaspora communities the paper will be tackling the key question: Are Zimbabweans in Britain an imagined community?
To understand the impact of historical memories three themes will be explored. The first theme unveils a Black diaspora Zimbabwean community imbued with historic communal tensions and prejudices. This allows the paper to capture why Black Zimbabwean Diaspora personalities and interactions cannot only be explained as tragedies of pre-colonial or colonial eras’ tensions but also Nationalist Movement’s entrenchment of nostalgic ideas devoid of uniting historically polarised Africans. The second theme engages the pre-emigration construction of racial allegiances and prejudices and how they were reinvented and reinforced within Zimbabwe’s Diaspora community. The paper’s final theme will develop a critical narrative on how the failure by Whites to liberate themselves from a sense of colonial superiority enhanced creation of separate and racially insular Zimbabwean immigrant communities without a nurtured shared sense of national identity.
With contemporary literature on Zimbabweans in Britain tending to create perceptions that they are a monolithic community of Blacks, the paper’s examination of Blacks, Whites, Coloureds and Asians illustrates why African Diasporas should not be understood as racial homogenous communities. (Show less)



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