First of all, I argue that academic stories have contributed to the story of Bradford.
There has been academic research conducted in Bradford since as early as the 1970s, with five documents published on the city. It increased gradually in the 1980s with eleven noted publications, before augmenting rapidly in the 1990s and 2000s with over two hundred publications about the city by then.
In terms of the themes treated, all but one of the academic papers published in the 1970s (Cater and Jones, 1979; Dahya, 1974; Le Lohé; 1979 and Saifullah Khan, 1977) are concerned with the “Asian communities,” in particular the Pakistanis that have migrated to Bradford. They generally concern patterns of settlement of the migrants and their way of life in the “host country,” with Le Lohé’s chapter (1979) looking at a political aspect of the settlement of immigrants. This trend is carried through in the 1980s, with ten out of the eleven academic sources presenting research on the “Asian communities,” be it at large (Mawby and Batta, 1980; Batta and McCulloch, 1981; Cater, 1981; Campbell and Jones, 1982) or specific groups (e.g. Pakistani women in Afshar, 1989; Muslim women in Mirza, 1989 and Bengali Muslims in Barton, 1986). Within this focus on “Asians,” three themes dominate:
crime, housing, and young people. In addition, two studies are concerned specifically with two events that marked Bradford in the 1980s: the Honeyford Affair (Halstead, 1988) and the Rushdie Affair (Appignanesi and Maitland, 1989). By the 1990s, Bradford appears to be a fairly highly researched area, with no less than 53 academic articles or books and 26 reports looking at it. The main themes are multicultural relations (a notable change in language as previously, academic and political writing had talked of “race relations”), health, housing and young people.
Again, most of the research still focuses on ethnic minorities, in particular those from “Asia.”Interestingly, a religious approach complements the so far dominant ethnic one, and within research on “Asian” communities, the theme of Islam comes through strongly. In addition, the research on the “Asian community” is mainly around health, drugs, housing, crime and domestic violence, with apparently little
research on similar topics within the white community. This is not to say that there is a hidden agenda on the part of researchers. Admittedly, the “Asian” population of Bradford is large and faced with some specific challenges. However, I would like to draw attention to the apparent lack of comparative dimension of the research on the city. Other minorities like Ukrainian immigrants and the Jewish community that have settled down in the city only attracted a limited attention and the “white”
majority population has not been researched much either. Clearly, there are other topics of interest in the city too as some pieces of research investigated issues such as food consumption (Jamal, 1998) and Bradford as a city of peace (Rank, 1997).
Even more research was carried out in the city and District in the 2000s, with over 200 academic articles, chapters, reports and books being published that used the city as their topic or case study. The main themes are the 2001 riots, community cohesion (with another notable change in language as the term “multiculturalism”
is used less), young people (with a third of the documents on youths concerning Muslim youths), the economy (including regeneration and unemployment), housing (with a focus on segregation), crime (with half of the sources on crime concerning the “Asian communities”) and health (with, again, a third of the research on health conducted within the “Asian communities”). Less researched but occasional topics were Eastern European migrants, British Asian women, community participation and accounts of lived experience.
To sum up, research on Bradford has increased so much over the years that there is now a large body of literature about the city. Within this corpus, there has been an overwhelming and prolonged focus on “Asian communities,” with more or less attention to deconstructing this homogenizing category. As a result, ethnic and, with a focus on “Asian Muslims” since the 1990s, religious approaches tend to dominate the literature to the detriment perhaps of gender, class and other possible analyses. In addition, although the focus on the “Asian communities” is justified to an extent as it is the largest ethnic minority within the city, it is to the detriment of research on the majority “white” population but also other migrant
communities. It gives us an idea that Bradford tends to be constructed in a specific way within academia, which is what I will explore in the next sub-section.
b – Constructions of Bradford in academia
To explore how Bradford has been constructed in academia, I first turned my attention to issues of authorship and audience of the academic stories. Then, I looked at the terms of the academic stories themselves with regards to their portrayal of the city.
First, in trying to understand the academic constructions of Bradford, I questioned who researches the city. Having seen that there is a tendency in the national popular culture for outsiders to come to Bradford and write or communicate about it, I hypothesised that a similar situation may be found in academia. However, my observations were inconclusive. Generally, there is not enough biographical information available about researchers in academic publications, especially in terms of their positioning in relation to the city, to draw conclusions in terms of an insider/outsider framework. Academic affiliations are generally acknowledged, but they often change and do not provide any consequential information for my purpose. In addition, although I knew some background information about some of the authors who wrote from within Bradford, it was still not enough to infer that there may be insider and outsider academic stories of Bradford. My conclusions on academic authorship about Bradford are limited but still useful, in that it is clear that there is both a local and national interest in Bradford, which has led to much academic debate about the city. Bradford, then, is on the academic agenda and perhaps it suffices to note that academics, as authors of stories, have taken an interest in the city.
In terms of audience, I used the documents I analysed in depth to question who the academic stories were directed at. The audience tends to be a national academic and specialist one, with most research being published in discipline specific journals or in academic books. As evident from the databases though, over the years local
organisations have commissioned more and more research about the city. The outcomes in form of reports can be seen to have perhaps both a national and local audience, but also a less academic one and to be directed for example towards practitioners in the various fields concerned and local authorities beyond Bradford.
However, beyond these audiences, it is difficult to know how much readership academic research receives, and to what extent it is disseminated into mainstream society and impacts on it. It remains that within the academic storytelling arena, knowledge on Bradford has been produced by academics, at least for other academics and potentially for a wider audience.
Concerning the terms of the stories, I sought to investigate how Bradford has been constructed in academia. I observed that in the research published in the 1970s, 1980s and to a certain extent 1990s, Bradford tends to be chosen as a case study for research, without an emphasis on the uniqueness of the city. Rather, it is often studied alongside other cities such as Birmingham (e.g. Dahya, 1974 and Rex and Samad, 1996) and Leeds (e.g. Rees et al., 1995). Then, how is the city represented when it is chosen as a case study? It is striking that academics tend to extensively use some of the same narrative tropes as the culturally dominant storyline to describe Bradford in their research. There are frequent comparisons between the rich industrial past and the contemporary decline of the city, and to the large
“Asian” community, regularly presented in problematic terms. Perhaps the prejudices against the North of England do not transpire as much, although this changes after the 2001 riots when the term “northern disturbances” is commonly used in academia, like in the national dominant story, to refer to the street disturbances in Oldham, Burnley and Bradford. In the wake of the riots too, Bradford “the case study” becomes more often Bradford “the site of research in and for itself.”25 It seems that following the 1995 and 2001 riots, the premise for research in Bradford is that the city can be constructed as a contested urban space,
25See for example, Bolognani, 2007; Bühler et al., 2002; Burnett, 2008; Hussain and Bagguley, 2005;
Kundnani, 2001; Webster, 2003. In some cases, this is due to research being commissioned from within the city, for example by the Joseph Rowntree Foundation. See Athwal et al., 2011; Gill, 2008 and Hudson et al., 2011
which is affirmed and reaffirmed regularly when research is conducted there, as admittedly in my own research. Although this is justified to an extent, it is limiting to understand Bradford only in those terms. As research dwells on the social tensions in the city, there is a risk that it stigmatises the city and its inhabitants in the process (Jezierski, 2004), as for example with the “Asian” communities that are the focus of so much research in Bradford, notably around segregation and the criminalisation of “Pakistani” and “Bangladeshi” youths. As Burnett writes, following the 2001 riots Bradford became the “archetype of the ‘parallel lives’
theory” (2008: 41) and the research destination of choice for exploring related issues. Admittedly, much research rehearses the culturally dominant storyline as a starting point for investigations in Bradford, thus establishing it as a common idea.
However, not all research then goes on to confirm the dominant narrative. Some research does, but some goes beyond and positions itself as counter to the dominant storyline. I will explore this further in the next section.