Religious Diversity, Encounter and Prejudice

I said that I would come back to the Superdiversity conference at the end of June and there is one issue in particular that I have been reflecting on and would want to explore further.

The first plenary was by Gill Valentine and outlined a project that she was involved in around questions of prejudice. At the risk of simplifying considerably, the gist of her argument was that a number of recent studies had shown that in areas of high diversity the day to day contact between people was both polite and tolerant, with little evidence of tension or underlying prejudice. She noted that the research on which this conclusion was based emphasised observation in public places and the analysis of what she referred to as ‘encounters’ (I got the impression that this was something of a technical term in a particular strand of recent geographical thinking and I will need to follow this up). Her work, and that of the team of which she is a part, has been investigating this further in the UK and Poland by seeking out individuals and engaging in detailed in depth interviews. This work shows that out of the public sphere, in the privacy of an individual’s own house, then there remains a considerable level of unspoken prejudice. The public politeness and tolerance is seen as a necessity imposed on the individual by the norms of society (‘political correctness gone mad’, or something equivalent). For Valentine the discourse that her team has identified in private, the one in which prejudice still predominates, was implicitly seen as the ‘truth’ and the one to be noted, while that of the public spaces was fragile and uncertain.

I find this interesting, not least because my recent book is based almost entirely on the public discourses that Valentine appears to dismiss. First, it is interesting to note that there is other work out there which reinforces this, and one possibility for exploring this further is a paper by Susanne Wessendorf on ‘common place diversity’ which appears to link very closely with my own ideas. Wessenfdorf is working within IRiS so I will be following this up and will see what can be learnt from it. Second, Valentine’s work appears to suggest that my own analysis is flawed. That may be the case, but I do want to try and explore this further.

At the root of this, I want to suggest, is a methodological question. In a previous paper I proposed the possibility of three different discourses on religion within society that can be identified with three different data collecting methods. There is the discourse that is based on what people will claim in public as their ‘religion’ that can be seen in the census data and the debates around that, particularly in Abby Day’s work. There is the discourse that an individual will use about their own faith, that is complex, contradictory, and that is uncovered through in-depth interviews, narrative methodologies or something similar. And finally there is a wider ‘public’ discourse about religion in society, what we all basically assent to, that is what I discovered through observation and listening to public conversations on religion. In the paper I began with the three discourses and looked at possible methods for ‘hearing’ them. We could, just as easily, begin with a series of methods and ask what kinds of discourses are ‘heard’ through those methods. So, with the encounter literature in geography, for example, we hear ‘public discourses’. With in-depth interviews we hear a very different ‘discourse’, whether that is one of faith in terms of the analysis above, or prejudice in terms of Valentine’s work. The real question, however, is how far we should give priority to one of these discourses over the others and what kinds of hierarchy (whether explicit or implicit) should be given to these discourse, and by implication the methodologies that uncover them.

I am currently in the process of writing a Leverhulme bid that aims to test some of the claims made through my book. This has been relatively straightforward and has the advantage of being very easy to express. Leverhulme, however, like methodological creativity and I was not finding anything that I could get my teeth into at this level. The above discussion, however, raises a very interesting possibility. Was the discourse on ‘diversity’ that I found in the superdiverse neighbourhood of Handsworth a product of the superdiversity, as I proposed (by contrast to a discourse on ‘difference’ in the less religiously diverse neighbourhood of Highgate), or was it, perhaps, a product of the observational, encounter based, methodology that I was using. The project, therefore, could perhaps test both the impact of superdiversity on one axis, and the impact of methodology on another and see what happens at the various points of intersection. That would probably make quite an interesting and suitably sophisticated and original proposal that I would hope Leverhulme might be interested in.