Policing British Asian Identities; policing and the situated negotiation of belonging and ethnicity among young British Asian men in Staffordshire

• Main Author: Millings, Matthew
• Published: Keele University 2009
• Subjects: 363.2
• Online Access: http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.572444

This thesis has two fundamental aims. Firstly, it contributes to the on-going production of a cultural sociology of policing, and secondly it helps to develop a more complete understanding of the challenges of policing culturally diverse, ethnically mixed and plural polities. It does so by examining how the police as an institution, and issues around policing, security and safety more generally, contribute to the competing identity constructions of young British Asian men in Staffordshire. By adopting and adapting Floya Anthias' (2001, 2002) concept of 'translocational positionalitv' this study sets out a framework for understanding processes of identity construction that enable us to better interpret the meaning and symbolic capital of young British Asian mens' real and imagined exchanges with the police. At the same time it takes us to towards more tuned and appropriate vocabularies of identity and social groupings than those currently employed within policing (and indeed wider public service) provision. By understanding individual and collective negotiations of belonging at the intersections of wider, national and global understandings of culture, community and ethnicity, it is possible to recognise their impact upon the experience and nature of the local as the young people in question forge their sense of being Asian/being Muslim in Staffordshire. By placing the situated constructions of individual and group self-definition within their fractured sets of social relations the study furthers understanding of the experiences of integration and marginalisation that generate the tangible challenges for multicultural politics and social justice to surmount. Within the dynamic and complex negotiations of identity, interactions - real or imagined - with the police have to be located. On one level, relationships with, and dispositions towards, the police serve to craft and re-work ethnically coded claims of belonging and political participation. On another, coming to terms with the processes that manufacture individual and collective definition exposes the complexity of the on-going generation of diverse publics evolving within the ethnically diverse, culturally plural and racially mixed Britain that the organisation is charged with serving.