Multicultural love

Similar critiques have been made by Sara Ahmed (2004) in Cultural Politics of Emotion (see pages 104 – 143). Like Fortier, Ahmed (2004) critiques a ‘multiculturalism’ that accepts certain differences (especially the value of openness) whilst rejecting differences that threaten liberalism⁴. Ahmed positions her critique in relation to policy discourse (government white papers, quotes from politicians) to show how “acting in the name of love can work to enforce a particular ideal onto others by requiring that they live up to an idea to enter the community” (p.139). To quote her at some length:

“Others must agree to value difference: difference is now what we would have in common. In other words, difference becomes an elevated or sublimated form of likeness: you must like us – and be like us – by valuing or even loving differences (though clearly this is only about the differences that can be taken on and in by the nation, those that will not breach the ideal image of the nation)” (p.138)

By ‘others’ she refers specifically to those labelled “intolerant racists” and “migrant or asylum seekers”; those who must prove their ability to value difference. Unfortunately however, Ahmed does not offer any detail of which differences can be “taken on and in” contrary to those that “will not breach the ideal image”.

Ahmed (2004) also shares Amin’s (2012) critique of the “humanist fantasy” that a world of love will transform society. She repeats (and critiques) the mantra “if only we got close we could be as one”, akin to Amin’s (2012) claim that social theory (as well as policy) has invested too much promise in the inter-personal tie to respond to social conflict. To be sure, Ahmed (2004) recognises that it is not that love isn’t important (she states she is not “against love”), rather “how one loves matters; it has effects on the texture of everyday life and on the intimate ‘withness’ of social relations” (p.140, emphasis mine).

Ahmed (2004) and Fortier’s (2010) critiques of contemporary forms of governing shed light into the normalised codes of conduct that are implicit in practices and policies. In this sense, their critiques are hugely important in foregrounding questions of power, authority, and ideology. However, such critiques can leave us

4 Although the policies she’s referring to are often framed more by the language of ‘community cohesion’ and ‘integration’ than ‘multiculturalism’, she uses the term ‘multiculturalism’ to describe a particular British relation to otherness in society.

wondering what the alternative forms of interaction might look like. By suggesting that bridging (for Fortier) and loving and valuing difference (for Ahmed) are co-opted by techniques of governance and tying these complex acts too closely to a coherent governing intention, we have less room for the messy and contradictory politics of encounter that do not always fold so neatly into such modes of governance.

Interestingly, both Ahmed and Fortier devote just a few lines to any alternative ideas of how we might live together. As explored above, for Fortier (2010) an alternative politics is found in Mouffe’s antagonist politics that contains “anger, sadness, apathy, ambivalence and confusion” (see Cvetkovich 2007, p.464, cited in Fortier, 2010, p.27). Similarly, Ahmed (2004) shares a concern for the principle of disagreement and draws on Jodi Dean who argues for a “reflective solidarity as that openness to difference which lets our disagreements provide the basis for connection”

(Dean 1996: 17, cited in Ahmed, 2004, p.141). How these alternative approaches to engagement might be built in, or re-shape existing norms of governance, will be brought into my analysis of how practitioners design, and facilitate, spaces of encounter in the meeting of strangers in multicultural regions of West Yorkshire. One way into complicating narratives of governing, is to think through the contested politics of encounter, as I shall go onto explore.

2.3.3 Complicating narratives of governing through politics of encounter

While being careful not to reduce the complexity of Fortier’s arguments (and to some extent Amin 2012 and Ahmed 2004) to a simplistic critique of Foucauldian-inspired perspectives, I want to suggest scholars make more room within this literature for the affective potential of encounter to shape actions, alter behaviours, habits and practices, or the contingency and complexity of relationships prior to encounters. Similar critiques have been levelled at governance studies of the pre-emptive measures to manage Muslim communities through the Prevent agenda, with O’Toole et al. (2016) arguing that in practice Prevent has been “less complete, and more contested, than many studies have allowed” (p.165). Governmentality-inspired critiques that focus too exclusively on the discursive formations of policy through written documentation (for example), obscure the “transformative agency” of practice, which as McKee (2009) argues, has resulted in a pessimism of how to respond creatively to such accounts (see also Cooper 1994; Philo, 2012).

To be sure, Fortier herself recognises that her critics warn “against attributing to governmentality a coherence that it lacks” (2010, p.19), whilst also recognising that the success of governing regimes cannot always be assumed. This point is returned to in a later article by Fortier (2016) in a special series of Citizenship Studies on ‘affective citizenship’ where she calls for “much needed research that recognises how all actors who are various affected by a state policy… variously experience, interpret, enact and feel those policies” (p.1042, emphasis original). She goes as far to suggest, drawing on the work of de Wilde and Duyvendak (2016), that “policy practitioners” are “more

‘fully human’ than they are often made out to be when they are conceived as ‘agents of the state’” (p.1042). By attending to the practices of encounter, then, I want to augment Fortier’s (2010) ‘proximity by design’, and welcome her call for further research into how policy practitioners experience designing and implementing projects of encounter.

In doing so, I seek to complicate recent accounts of governance (de Wilde and Duyvendak 2016; Vrasti and Dayal 2016) through attention to the multiple dimensions and potentialities of encounter; both the limitations and possibilities of alternative geographies of coexistence.

In order to make this step however, I argue for a different relation to the empirical material. This next section develops one way into this task. To do this, I draw on the work of Gibson-Graham (2008) who offer another way of thinking about academic practice. They argue:

“[a]t present we are trained to be discerning, detached and critical so that we can penetrate the veil of common understanding and expose the root causes and bottom lines that govern the phenomenal world. This academic stance means that most theorizing is tinged with scepticism and negativity, not a particularly nurturing environment for hopeful, inchoate experiments” (2008, p.618)

Writing in the context of investigating creative economies, Gibson-Graham (2008) argue that conventional “discerning, detached and critical” academic practice is likely to dismiss experiments in promoting new economies as “capitalism in another guise or as always already coopted; they are often judged as inadequate before they are explored in all their complexity and incoherence” (p.618, emphasis mine). Their term ‘always already coopted’ is worth unpacking. Co-option assumes that a practice has lost its ability to shape an outcome that is different to the expected (coherent) agenda.

Gibson-Graham (2008) also argue that the very dismissal of an “always already coopted”

project reinforces the very mechanism in which certain practices are perceived as dominant. Instead, they argue for a “different orientation to theory” (p.618) that enables openings; “a space of freedom and possibility” (p.619). Drawing on principles of ‘weak theory’ from Sedgwick (2003), Gibson-Graham (2008) propose we start on the premise that we do not know whether systems will fail or are “destined to reinforce dominance” (p.619). Instead, they suggest we ought to read for “difference not dominance” as well as how processes coexist simultaneously (p.623). One example they offer is relevant to the topic at hand. In a fairly contested example (as seen in recent debates in UK welfare politics, see Featherstone et al. 2012), Gibson-Graham show that it is possible to condone the retreatment of the state from welfare provision at the same time as “explore the social economy that has become visible in the wake of that departure, including the full range of social enterprises and perhaps even socially responsible corporations” (p.628). In other words, not writing these enterprises off simply because they stem from state welfare restructuring. A similar argument is made by Cloke et al. (2017) who argue that reading food banks as simply “embodiments of the neoliberal shadow state” can “obscure some of the more progressive possibilities arising in and through spaces of food banking and wider welfare and care” (p.704). Or, to rephrase Thrift (1997), not everything can be forced into set categories of either resistance or submission.

So, incorporating ideas from rethinking academic practice and affirmative critique with Gibson-Graham, the following openings can be brought to work by Fortier (2010), Ahmed (2004) and Amin (2012). Firstly, we need to attend to other constituents who shape overlapping notions of the “human need to connect with others” that Fortier identifies in policy documents (Fortier 2010, p.22), as we look for

“difference not dominance” (Gibson-Graham 2008, p.623) as competing accounts might coexist across actors.

Secondly, there are times when we need to refrain from coding particular actions as apparently un/desirable (i.e. in a weak theory vein). What would it mean, for example, to hold back deciding that policy dictates that “[i]t is good to have fun, cool, easy and meaningful interactions, it is bad to tackle racism” (Fortier 2010, p.27)?

Fortier is of course deliberately codifying the outcome of particular forms of governing through proximity in simplistic terms to expose particular sentiments. Yet, as we will see in the research, the aims of tackling racism are not always easily written out in the practice of strategies that are shaped by the policies of meaningful interaction. Indeed,

the DCLG documents that Fortier uses to justify her critique borrow from a range of

‘partners’, some of whom directly adopt anti-racist principles in their community organising. Rather, we need an account of the shifting rationalities (and hence power relations) that are negotiated and mediated through the conflictual interests that arise in the uneasy alliances of state policy, civil society organisations and individual capacities for integrating interpreted policies.

Thirdly – and in relation to Amin’s (2012) dismissal of projects of (human) encounter – we might hold back framing multicultural projects as “likely to flounder”

since people might nevertheless be “persuaded by a politics of care for the stranger”

(p.33). Pushing Amin’s (2012) argument (perhaps a bit audaciously), if we assume that the various Near Neighbours projects are “already always coopted” (Gibson-Graham 2008, p.618) and destined to reinforce cultural difference, then we miss out on the struggle for agency, commitment and will, as well as the ‘quiet politics’ that undercut dichotomies of oppression/resistance (Askins 2014).

Of course it is important to recognise the differences in approach between critical governance studies (Fortier 2010; Ahmed 2008) and the task this thesis addresses (understanding how ‘encounters’ are thought through and practiced in the context of diverse community engagement). However, this thesis attempts to address the limitations of the former (i.e. critical governance studies) through offering insights from empirical ethnographic accounts of how encounters are worked through by those organising diverse communities in the activities of Near Neighbours in West Yorkshire. To do so requires a different relation to governance which I approach taking inspiration from the work of Gibson-Graham (2008). I argue this is a more affirmative sort of approach, yet remaining critical (i.e. critique as affirmative, rather than critique as scepticism). Such approach to engaging with the range of different motivations for being involved, experiences of participation, and variety outcomes in projects of encounter, I argue, then helps reconsider the relationship between community practices and governance. In laying out a “different orientation to theory” (Gibson-Graham 2008, p.618) that enables “a space of freedom and possibility” (p.619), we can begin to imagine how research might be undertaken in this context. The next chapter will engage further with how Gibson-Graham’s (2008) approach that encourages

“working with people who are already making new worlds” might inform methodologies of research, particularly co-production approaches to knowledge and to reworking concepts of governance as the inherent ‘negotiation’ between different partners. Gibson-Graham (2008) argue for the need to:

“…mobilize the resources to support the co-creation of knowledge, create the networks necessary to spread these knowledges, work with activists and academics of the future, and foster an environment where new facts can survive” (p.629).

Gibson-Graham’s (2008) call to work with activists and others “making new worlds” then leads to a final consideration on the task of complicating accounts of governance. This is to revisit how participatory geographies – that explicitly takes a different approach to the question of governance – offer insights into understanding the negotiations implicit in the interactions between different partners. While I have given attention above to critical Foucauldian accounts of governance (i.e. Fortier 2010;

Ahmed 2008), it is also worth mentioning work by Mike Kesby who – in a very different way – engages with concepts of ‘governance’. Kesby’s (2007) perspective on governance comes from a different strand of Human Geography – participatory geographies – however his arguments are particularly useful for Chapter 7, where I explore how practitioners are working with researchers to explore questions of spaces of encounter. Rather than examine how ideals of mixing circulate in policy and practice, Kesby (2007) argues that any form of engagement with these issues (especially in contexts of participation) will invariably involve forms of power. Yet rather than writing engagement because participatory research is a form of power, he joins other participatory geographers in arguing that participation “can effect empowerment and catalyse radical transformation” (Kesby et al. 2007, p.23). They write:

“The unavoidable paradox is that the governance of participatory spaces can enable the emergence of associational modes of interaction” (Kesby et al 2007, p.23).

Hence, the final way I shall bring another perspective to the existing literature on critical governance is by showing how concepts of governance become reworked, as practitioners (and in this case, with researchers) “practice more inclusive forms of governance” (Blackstock et al 2015, p.254).

To summarise this section, in order to complicate narratives of governance, I adopt a different form of engagement than recent Foucauldian critiques of governance, through the inspiration of Gibson-Graham (2008). In doing so, space is opened up to

explore the affective potential of encounter to shape actions, alter behaviours, habits and practices, and the contingency and complexity of relationships prior to encounters.

By looking for “difference not dominance” (p.623) whilst resisting the idea that governmental supported practices are “already always coopted” (618), a different approach can be fostered to examine the possibilities of alternative ways of governing (and subverting particular norms of governance). Finally, as Chapter 7 will particularly develop, insights from other fields of Human Geography can help shed light into how governance might be reworked to promote more inclusive forms of being together and encouraging interaction in diversity.