Since 2001, as the social and spatial compositions of multiculture and migration have become more complicated and diverse, geography has moved back to the centre of policy, political, and academic arguments about cultural difference and ethnic diversity in England. This spatial turn is most obvious in preoccupations with notions of increasing ethnic segregation, but it is also apparent in discussions of the possibility of everyday multicultural exchanges in relationally understood places. Responding to the work of others on these questions and in these places, and informed by data from research exploring Ghanaian and Somali migrant settlement in Milton Keynes, we review some of the quantitative and qualitative evidence being drawn on in academic, policy, and political debates about contemporary multiculture. We problematise the dominance of the concept of segregation in these debates and examine the value of the concept of conviviality for understanding the ways in which multiculture is lived.

This article contributes to understandings of the conviviality which has dominated recent sociological approaches to urban multiculture. The article argues for conviviality’s conceptual extension by reference to recent rethinking of community as a profound sociality of ‘being with’ and a culture of urban practice. The article draws from a qualitative dataset examining sustained encounters of cultural difference and the relationships within social leisure organizations in three different English urban geographies. The article explores how the elective coming together of often ethnically diverse others, over time, in places, to do leisure ‘things’ meant these organizations could work as generative spaces of social interaction and shared practice through and in contexts of urban difference. The article concludes that putting conviviality as ‘connective interdependencies’ into dialogue with community as ‘being in common’ develops their sociological and explanatory power and counters the reductions and limitations that are associated with both concepts.

Traditionally issues of race and racism have tended not to be associated with the English countryside. The limited existing research in the area has shown that the presumed dominance of whiteness in the countryside has been used as a basis from which to dismiss the relevancy of race as a rural political or policy concern despite the existence of rural-based minority ethnic communities and despite high levels of rural racism. In the post Macpherson climate and with rural issues currently attracting political and policy attention this article examines the relationship between landscapes and belonging and suggests that racism is differently manifested in different contexts. The essay argues that there are recent indicators of tentative shifts among some rural policy-makers in terms of recognizing that racism is not an urban phenomenon and draws on the early experiences of gaining access to two rural case-study areas to shed light on both this shift and the notion that there are specifically rural forms of racism.

This article considers how structures of community feeling and ways of belonging are produced, maintained and recreated in local rural environments. It argues that rural social organizations, which operate through, and are embedded in, notions of conviviality and community, have taken up a particular role in this process. While using the concept of community with all the usual sociological caveats in place, the article seeks to emphasize a) the importance of the sociality of community and b) the need to understand the ways in which this sociality is continually shaped by the potent imaginary of what `community' and, more specifically, what `rural community' mean and represent. Drawing on a qualitative data set the article details the emotional connectivity participants made between the local and the social and the everyday routine practices involved in constructing a community sensibility. It concludes by examining how ambiguity and governance are part of these processes.