Adrian Favell | University of Leeds (original) (raw)

Papers by Adrian Favell

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2023

A book review of Ann Morning and Marcello Maneri’s An Ugly Word: Rethinking Race in Italy and th... more A book review of Ann Morning and Marcello Maneri’s An Ugly Word: Rethinking
Race in Italy and the United States, which assesses their intervention into the
difficult but developing field in comparative international sociology of race
and ethnicity. They advance a model that would replace reference to “race” or
“ethnicity” with a more encompassing notion of “descent-based difference”.
The review suggests their empirical evidence for the ongoing effects of the Du
Boisian “colour line” and its origins in Eurocentric racial theories, runs counter
to their analytical model, which tends to sanction a proliferation of the term
“racialization” beyond the clear historical narrative of racial capitalism.

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2022

A critical review of the state-of-the-art in migration studies. The paper centres on a contrast b... more A critical review of the state-of-the-art in migration studies. The
paper centres on a contrast between established comparative
scholarship – elaborating progressive models of immigration,
integration and citizenship, that reflect the increasingly diverse,
migrant-built societies of the North Atlantic West – and a new
generation of work in the last decade, influenced by critical, antiracist
and decolonial theory, that rejects this ‘Eurocentric’ liberal
democratic global order and self-image. Establishing a bridge
between older neo-Weberian approaches to immigration and
sovereign nation-state building and newer (or revived) Marxist-
Foucauldian accounts, it accents the state-power building effects
of bordering, managing and cultivating ‘diverse’ national
populations, and its ongoing governmental categorisation of
citizens and migrants, nationals and aliens, majorities and
minorities, as a key feature of neoliberal ‘racial capitalism’. The
argument develops in relation to wanted and unwanted
migration in advanced liberal democratic economies, “visible”
forms of immigration versus ‘middling’ forms of everyday crossborder
mobility, and the limits of humanitarian arguments for
open borders and expansive asylum rights. The paper sketches an
alternate politics to the self-legitimating ‘political demography’ of
liberal democracy, relating the ongoing colonial power of ideas
of immigration, integration and citizenship, to the reproduction
of massive global inequalities between ‘the West and the Rest’.

Ethnicities, 2023

A review of Nasar Meer's exceptionally lucid collection of essays on questions of race, anti-raci... more A review of Nasar Meer's exceptionally lucid collection of essays on questions of race, anti-racism, multiculturalism and immigration in the UK, in the wave of the Black Lives Matter movements. Recommended in particular to those in the left-liberal mainstream who are perplexed by the depth of the "woke" issues -- and anger -- articulated by Black and minority students and activists, as well as to North Americans, who will be familiar with the theoretical sources here and its critical positions on race and racialisation, but not the terrain of UK race, minority and migration politics.

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2023

[With Andrew Wallace] Our contribution to this special issue brings the theoretical and empirica... more [With Andrew Wallace] Our contribution to this special issue brings the theoretical and
empirical orientations of the Becoming a Minority (BaM) project
into dialogue with the complex and charged post-Brexit
geography of the North of England. We present findings from the
UK ESRC funded project Northern Exposure: Race, Nation and
Disaffection in ‘Ordinary’ Towns and Cities after Brexit, drawing
upon a period of co-productive and ethnographic work with local
authority stakeholders, voluntary sector practitioners and
community actors in two urban locations in the English North:
Halifax and Wakefield. We report on how shifting patterns of
diversity and population change interlock with deindustrialised
economies, fiscal austerity, the coronavirus crisis, and the
predations of ethno-nationalist politics and policy. Amid these
dislocations and risks, we find delicate, differentiated, and
predominantly informal infrastructures of community governance
and intervention attempting to build alliances and resolve
tensions: a grounded, local-view that belies the kind of image of
the North established in mainstream national understandings of
the dramatic politics of Brexit and after. Taking a productive cue
from the BaM study, we offer some fine-grained reflections on
localised dynamics of diversity experience and the negotiation of
inter-ethnic relations albeit in a sprawling urban region beyond
the West-European metropolitan core.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2023

A critical review of the 2023 CUP volume, Majorities, Minorities and the Future of Nationhood, ed... more A critical review of the 2023 CUP volume, Majorities, Minorities and the Future of Nationhood, edited by Liav Orgad and Ruud Koopmans. Contributors to the volume explore the ongoing tensions between rights based liberalism and majoritarian democracy, within a provocative framework that considers justifications for the privileging of majority cultural rights, in the face of indigenous, immigrant, ethnic and racial minority claims. While some contributors see the work as laying out a major new paradigm defending the rights of majority populations in the twenty-first century, I ask whether these now anachronistic political philosophy debates may not in fact reflect the last gasp of White supremacy in the North Atlantic West, at a time when the reparative claims to justice for the majorities of the Global South seem overwhelming.

Hamburg-Vigoni Forum Conference Paper, 2023

It is very hard to make the case for EU policy and politics on migration as a positive, progressi... more It is very hard to make the case for EU policy and politics on migration as a positive, progressive embodiment of the continent's highest values. The Euro-Mediterranean refugee crisis of 2015-16, showed up a crabby and implacably hostile club of member states unable and unwilling to face up to the despair and flight from danger of asylum seekers beyond and across its borders. This grave moral failure was summarised in the stark and abject photo syndicated worldwide of the washed up body of three year old Syrian toddler Alan (or Aylan) Kurdi on a beach in Turkey in September 2015. At the same time FRONTEX operations against helpless boat people, and the legal pursuit of anyone showing solidarity with the present day "wretched of the Earth" (Fanon 1961), regularly conjure up further images of the darkside of European integration, with dinghies packed with bodies that eerily echo the brutal efficiency of slave trading boats. Notwithstanding Angela Merkel's surprise, emotional decision to open German doors to over a million Syrian refugees in 2015, the EU continues to uphold security and policing operations at its borders at odds with its commitment to human rights, global development and equality between nations.

Migration, Displacement and Diversity: The IRiS Anthology, 2023

Were Raymond Williams re-writing his majesterial handbook Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and S... more Were Raymond Williams re-writing his majesterial handbook Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (1976) today, he would undoubtedly have found a place for the term diversity. While we might reserve a different genealogy for the notion of bio-diversity in the natural sciences, the conception of social diversity, in the sense referring to heterogenous societal formations or inherent differences between people, is clearly a word that emerged to prominence as a characteristic term of the epoch of neo-liberal globalisation, at its height in the optimistic 1990s. Post-1989, diversity sat of a piece with open or opening borders and free movement; with cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism; hybridity and the rise of identity politics; and with mobilities and transnationalism. This was ironic, perhaps, given that the end of the Cold War signalled above all the triumph of a more mono-cultural political economy. Talk of diversity gestured towards the supposed multiplicities of the big, flat, global world, if not always the multitudes beyond the North Atlantic West, while affirming the moral primacy of individualism, and the freedom to be, do, or (even) think different.

Nanovic Institute, University of Notre Dame, 2022

I had initially thought of a more general theoretical/conceptual reflection on "peripheries" for ... more I had initially thought of a more general theoretical/conceptual reflection on "peripheries" for the workshop ("Theory from the peripheries"), as a response in particular to the concept note. Clearly, in mapping the concept we should engage (and most likely have!) in some reflection on World Systems theories and their resurgence in comparative historical studies, on nationalisms and Empire, on the relation of "peripheries" as a frame to studies of majorities and minorities, natives and settlers, to the colonial and the decolonial, to borders, margins and the marginalised, to "positionality" and "intersectionality" in social scientific and humanities work, the subaltern and "wretched", who can and can't talk or move, to "global inequalities" and the "birthright lottery". And so on... But as a (sadly) former EU citizen, cursed at birth to be a born Englishman, now living and working in the south west of Ireland, I cannot resist a more personal reflection on what we might learn in thinking about the past, present and future of the (to give its full, regal title), "The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" as a case of (making/reflecting/reproducing) spatial, structural, social, political and epistemic "peripheries".

Ethnic and Racial Studies Book Symposium, 2022

A rejoinder to the critical reviews of The Integration Nation: Immigration and Colonial Power in ... more A rejoinder to the critical reviews of The Integration Nation: Immigration and Colonial Power in Liberal Democracies by Janine Dahinden, Sara Wallace Goodman, Paul Statham, and Willem Schinkel. The Integration Nation lays out a manifesto for critical migration studies, that builds on a critique of the mainstream literature and normative linear notions of immigration, integration and citizenship. Two readers see the argument and its conceptualisation of the field as almost self evident, while two read it as a frustrating provocation that elicits a strong, critical reaction. The rejoinder responds to these reflections, and reiterates its goal of laying the foundations of a new political demography. Conventional thinking on international migration, minorities and diversity, it argues, sustains the colonial power of advanced liberal democracies in the North Atlantic West, built on vast global inequalities in citizenship status, and mechanisms of selection, extraction, exclusion and effacement of non-national populations.

British Journal of Sociology, 2022

Julian Go's BJS annual lecture is discussed in reference to his landmark OUP text Postcolonial Th... more Julian Go's BJS annual lecture is discussed in reference to his landmark OUP text Postcolonial Thought and Social Theory (2016). Go is one of the most prominent names in a "third wave" of post-colonial thought, now spearheading a post-(or de-) colonial turn in sociological theory, something that has professionally revived the sub-field of "grand" social theory in mainstream US sociology. While endorsing the aims and substantive themes of this turn, the review raises questions about the delayed timing of this post-colonial wave in the discipline, both relative to the humanities more generally, and to the impact of post-colonialism in other national contexts. Go's challenge is, in effect, something quite particular to teaching social theory in the US sociology context. The review goes on to question how effectively the critique speaks to mainstream empirical practitioners, given its lack of focus on transforming technical methods. It concludes by raising concerns about the relationship of Go and other "third wave" decolonial theorists to Marxism and Marxist politics.

Migration Theory (4th edition), 2022

Reflecting on the changing historical backdrop to the various editions (now 4th) of the widely us... more Reflecting on the changing historical backdrop to the various editions (now 4th) of the widely used handbook Migration Theory: Talking Across Disciplines, edited by Caroline Brettell and James Hollifield, this post-script to the volume offers a brief introduction to the new generation of critical migration studies that have emerged across disciplines, from outside of the migration studies paradigm mostly represented in their collection. It explains the turn to highly politicised and activist-driven critique of the modes of liberal democratic thinking about migration and immigration, which have been exposed as often reproducing techniques of governmental power in the management of populations nationally and internationally. It also addresses the charge of “denying race” in migration studies or that the field is too “white”, while suggesting ways in which the field is being transformed by reflecting on migration in the Global South, or (especially) Global East. It ends with a short sketch of what the author refers to as the study of “political demography”: reframing migration and mobilities studies in line with the critique of critical migration studies and decolonial theory more generally.

Research in Political Sociology, 2020

In June 2016, a clear majority of English voters chose to unilaterally take the United Kingdom ou... more In June 2016, a clear majority of English voters chose to unilaterally take the United Kingdom out of the European Union (EU). According to many of the post-Brexit vote analyses, the single strongest motivating factor driving this vote was “immigration” in Britain, an issue which had long been the central mobilising force of the United Kingdom Independence Party. The article focuses on how – following the bitter demise of multiculturalism – these Brexit related developments may now signal the end of Britain’s post-colonial settlement on migration and race, the other parts of a progressive philosophy which had long been marked out as a proud British distinction from its neighbours. In successfully racialising, lumping together and re-labelling as “immigrants” three anomalous non-“immigrant” groups – asylum seekers, EU nationals, and British Muslims – UKIP leader Nigel Farage made explicit an insidious re-casting of ideas of “immigration” and “integration,” emergent since the year 2000, which exhumed the ideas of Enoch Powell, and threatened the status of even the most settled British minority ethnic populations – as has been seen in the Windrush scandal. Central to this has been the rejection of the post-national principle of non-discrimination by nationality, which had seen its fullest European expression in Britain during the 1990s and 2000s. The referendum on Brexit enabled an extraordinary democratic vote on the notion of “national” population and membership, in which “the People” might openly roll back the various diasporic, multi-national, cosmopolitan, or human rights-based conceptions of global society which had taken root during those decades. The article unpacks the toxic cocktail that lays behind the forces propelling Boris Johnson to power. It also raises the question of whether Britain will provide a negative examplar to the rest of Europe on issues concerning the future of multi-ethnic societies.

Emancipations, 2021

A set of four short reflections on the life and work of David Graeber, that came out of a Bauman ... more A set of four short reflections on the life and work of David Graeber, that came out of a Bauman Institute seminar on his work. Introduced and edited by Adrian Favell, with contributions from Myka Tucker-Abramson, Mark Davis and Andrew Wallace.

+Journal Ta, 2021

The 1990s and first years of the 2000s were an age of mobilities. As announced in the 1999 manife... more The 1990s and first years of the 2000s were an age of mobilities. As announced in the 1999 manifesto of a leading British social theorist, John Urry, published right at the turn of the century, a borderless world seemed to be in the making. Globalization appeared to be creating an integrated world beyond national societies, in which individuals might move freely across frontiers, in the same way that the exchange of capital, goods, cultural products, ideas, information and waste was intensifying. There was hope that these opportunities were ever expanding, especially for younger people; that everyone might have the chance to experience visiting, or even living and working, other countries, if not as migrant, at least as a traveller. Tourism and low cost international travel increased dramatically. The figure of the migrant became the global professional: educated in top universities and business schools, able to move freely, collect passports, and settle in the global city of their choice.

Twenty years or so later, and most analysts or commentators have a much more gloomy view of such mobilities: more in line with the predictions of the Polish postmodern theorist, Zygmunt Bauman. They see them as an index of dramatic inequalities in the world: between those who are free to move across borders as tourists or professionals as they wish, and those whose passport, income or education gives them no access to the affluent and safe countries of the developed world....

Catalogue essay on Aida Makoto and Yamaguchi Akira for the Ashmolean show in Oxford, Tokyo: Art a... more Catalogue essay on Aida Makoto and Yamaguchi Akira for the Ashmolean show in Oxford, Tokyo: Art and Photography, which opened in July 2021.

European Societies, 2021

In the light of Brexit and ongoing doubts about the future of a united Europe, have Britain and D... more In the light of Brexit and ongoing doubts about the future of a united Europe, have Britain and Denmark really been outliers to the collective European project, as suggested by their political positioning towards the EU? Despite the Euroscepticism expressed in referenda and public attitudes, we question whether these two countries are inherently less Europeanised, sociologically speaking, than other member states habitually seen as closer to the European project. Using data from the EUCROSS survey about the transnational practices and identifications of ordinary European citizens in five member states, we show that Britain and Denmark have been positioned close to Germany in terms of the degree and type of European cosmopolitanism and transnationalism found in these countries, and are more transnational societies than Spain and Italy. Moreover, in other ways, Britain and Denmark have been exemplary European societies, embodying the EU’s cosmopolitan ‘normative power’ agenda. We suggest that the marked divide between the ‘everyday Europeanisation’ of these societies and their political hostility to the EU is a paradox that lies at the heart of the democratic crisis of the continent, a schism that may now be directly corrosive to the longer term cosmopolitanism fostered by European integration. The paper was originally presented with the title "Irrational Nationalism" at the 2017 EUSA conference in Miami.

Discover Society, 2021

Europe desperately needs new migration policies—and thinking. In the 1990s and early 2000s, mains... more Europe desperately needs new migration policies—and thinking. In the 1990s and early 2000s, mainstream policy makers and researchers alike were holding out for “managed migration” in the continent: a potential “win-win-win” scenario that might see demographic benefits of new migration within and to Europe, integration of new migrant groups, and positive development effects via remittances and global networks on sending countries. But, as captured by Hein de Haas’s pendulum mood swing in migration research (2012), the economic and political crises of recent years have seen thinking return to defensive concerns of border security and limiting numbers among the policy minded; and, among autonomous
researchers, to an implacably critical stance on the ongoing devastation wrought by a colonial, racist West. In his ambitious new book, A Modern Migration Theory: An Alternative Economic Approach to Failed EU Policy (2021), Peo Hansen offers a scathing assessment of how Europe’s politicians, policy makers, and applied researchers have come to a consensus on the alleged trade offs: between “protecting” European welfare states and stabilising “native” political hostility to immigration, versus the rights or mobility that may be offered to migrant populations.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021

IN THE scholarly analysis of contemporary politics, public opinion is king. As liberal democracie... more IN THE scholarly analysis of contemporary politics, public opinion is king. As liberal democracies have seen multi-party competition devolve into divisive, one dimensional verdicts on strong man politics and single issue referenda, so has public opinion scholarship never been more prominent or discussed. Brexit in the UK has been a boomtime for this kind of work. University of Manchester professors Maria Sobolewska and Robert Ford sit at the sober and most scholarly end of a highly visible and influential field of work, that runs from the technical boffinry of John Curtice on election night, via scholars such as Geoff Evans and Will Jennings echoing the "blue left" by charting the loss of the Labour heartlands, to the anti-liberal op. ed. provocations of Matthew Goodwin, Eric Kaufmann and David Goodhart. All of them seem to share a thirst for the media limelight: sometimes awkwardly combining "data science" with work close to the logic of media commentary and party strategising. Brexitland may stand as the capstone of a literature first launched by Ford's earlier volume with Goodwin, Revolt on the Right (2014): on the rise of UKIP, Nigel Farage, and the ripping apart and realignment of two party dominated British politics. Brexit, it argues, was the end point of a seismic shift in British politics that can be drawn right back through the post-war period. Key to this view has been the emergence of what they see as a deeply rooted "cultural war" patterned essentially on the one raging on the other side of the Atlantic, with one crucial dimension — the variable salience over the decades of "immigration" as the wild card in British politics.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2020

Brexit shocked — or should have — anyone complacently thinking that the UK was a paragon of multi... more Brexit shocked — or should have — anyone complacently thinking that the UK was a paragon of multi-racial, cosmopolitan, or globalised harmony. It announced a starkly quantified state-of-the-nation, which revealed unresolved divisions on class, race and migrant diversity, and threatened to rewind everything back to rivers thought to have been crossed in the 1960s or 70s. The UK found itself plunged into a nasty referendum that pulled a fragmented country out of Europe, and left all kinds of minority and foreign-origin residents — whether of colour or not — wondering if they were still living in a place called home. University of Sussex geographer Ben Rogaly is certainly a scholar who saw what was coming. The fruit of a nearly ten year ethnographic study of disadvantaged and marginalised populations in the provincial city of Peterborough, Stories from a Migrant City addresses the fallout of recent British politics by looking for hope. Its fundamental aim is to dislodge the academic reflex that invariably only goes looking for this in big core cities — such as London — in the shape of “everyday” or “convivial” multiculture.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2020

Sivamohan Valluvan's The Clamour of Nationalism offers a convincing diagnosis of how a protean id... more Sivamohan Valluvan's The Clamour of Nationalism offers a convincing diagnosis of how a protean ideology of nationalism has successfully wound its way through the mainstream politics of the right and the left in the UK, laying the ideational foundations for Leave’s victory, and the rise of Boris Johnson to power. Bringing to bear the powerful legacy of critical race studies after Hall and Gilroy, it successfully shows how and why English nationalism in the UK has marginalised its previously pioneering context of multiculturalism and cosmopolitanism. Aside from some hopeful examples of conviviality and multiculture in the Corbyn era, the book does not offer much to guide more positive thinking forward in the post-Brexit era.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2023

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2022

Ethnicities, 2023

Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 2023

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2023

Hamburg-Vigoni Forum Conference Paper, 2023

Migration, Displacement and Diversity: The IRiS Anthology, 2023

Nanovic Institute, University of Notre Dame, 2022

Ethnic and Racial Studies Book Symposium, 2022

British Journal of Sociology, 2022

Migration Theory (4th edition), 2022

Research in Political Sociology, 2020

Emancipations, 2021

+Journal Ta, 2021

European Societies, 2021

Discover Society, 2021

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2021

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2020

Blue Kingfisher / DAP, 2012

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ECPR Press / Rowman and Littlefield, 2015

A collection of essays on immigration, integration mobility that have shaped agendas in migration... more A collection of essays on immigration, integration mobility that have shaped agendas in migration studies since the late 1990s.