CCIG Intimacy Programme Seminar
Wednesday, 1st October 2008, 2.00pm
Seminar Room 5, Human Resources Training & Development Centre,
Wilson D Block
Proximity by design? Intimate citizenship and the
promise of cohesion
Anne-Marie Fortier, Dept of Sociology, University of Lancaster
Alchemies of ethnicity - locality, landscape and
intimate formations of Englishness
Sarah Neal, Dept of Social Policy, The Open University
Proximity by design? Intimate citizenship and the promise of cohesion
Anne-Marie Fortier
Department of Sociology
Lancaster University
Lancaster LA1 4YT
a.fortier@lancaster.ac.u
‘Community cohesion’ was developed as the preferred framework for managing ‘race relations’ and ‘conflict’
in contemporary Britain. Initially adopted in government policy following civil disturbances in the summer of
2001, ‘community cohesion’ combined visions of shared belonging with strategies of managing diversity.
More recent versions, however, still place a strong emphasis on ideas of shared belonging but these are
combined with strategies of managing migration and identity which are deployed in view of securing local
communities against threats posed by extremism, deprivation, diversity and feelings of unease. This article
examines how integration, proximity and intimate citizenship come together under the banner of ‘community
cohesion’, which has now become a national fantasy for a posthistorical future. The article centres on how
proximities are calibrated and designed into programmatic visions of ‘integration and cohesion’ that are
founded on compulsory individuality and responsible, ethical citizenship – that is, where discerning citizens
are those who are responsible ‘users’ of their ‘culture’, and who show the right affective attachment (or
detachment) to their local community. In this respect, ‘cohesion’ is an ethical project imagined in the
ambivalent spatial terms of obligations to and dangers of proximity – not only proximity to others, but
crucially proximity to one’s (culturalised) self.
Dr Fortier is Senior Lecture in the Sociology Department and Director of the Centre for Gender and
Women’s Studies at Lancaster University. She is the author of Multicultural Horizons (Routledge 2008) and
Migrant Belongings (Berg 2000), and co-editor of Uprootings/Regroundings (Berg 2003). She has also coedited thematic issues of journals such as: issue on ‘Re-Imagining Communities’ for the International
Journal of Cultural Studies 6(3) 2003, and on ‘European Migrant Horizons’ (w. Gail Lewis) for Mobilities
1(3)2006. She has published in numerous journals, including: Theory, Culture and Society; Ethnic and
Racial Studies; Diaspora; European Journal of Cultural Studies.
Sarah Neal
Social Policy, OU
Alchemies of ethnicity - locality, landscape and intimate formations of Englishness
This paper argues that ethnic identification and belonging are entangled and hybrid processes. While the
categories of the social and the cultural are recognised as integral to these process the categories of the
natural and the non-human have been more neglected in debates surrounding ethnicity and identity.
Using empirical data the paper attempts to open up the concept of ethnicity through a focus on rural
nature. It does this in two key ways first, it explores how the non-human is discursively mobilised to
naturalise ethnicity and affirm belonging and second, it then suggests that rural nature and the non-human
are not easy to secure and are able to offer transformative sites in which re-readings can be made and new
attachments formed.
Bio details: Sarah is in the process of writing the manuscript her research monograph on rural identities:
ethnicity, nature and community in the contemporary English countryside. She is co-author with Julian
Agyeman of The new Countryside, Ethnicity, Nation and Exclusion in Rural Britain and has a number of articles
exploring rurality, nation, identity, community and exclusion in journals such as Ethnic and Racial Studies,
Journal of Rural Studies, GeoForum, Sociology and The Journal of Social Policy.
If you would like to reserve a place please e-mail: SocSci-CCIG-Events@open.ac.uk of contact Kelly
Weekes, CCIG Research Secretary
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