Everyday integration: The Local Contexts, Practices, and Mobilities of Integration

最近的《凯西评论》（2016年）和《综合社区战略绿皮书》（2018年）重新将融合作为国家政策优先事项。这些战略解决的问题是人们认为移民和少数民族缺乏融合。他们提出的解决方案将英语语言规定和促进“英国基本价值观”与限制移民和干预措施结合起来，以解决被视为有害的文化习俗。虽然大多数人都同意集成是可取的，但对于集成是什么以及如何最好地实现集成，存在不同的观点。我们的方法至少在三个方面与众不同。首先，我们认为融合是一个涉及所有人的过程，而不仅仅是移民和少数民族。把某些人群单独挑出来作为“未整合”的方法的缺点是，它们减轻了其他“整合”人群整合的责任。我们认为，只有每个人都参与进来，每个人都分担责任和利益，一体化才能发挥作用。其次，我们认为整合是从日常生活的情境实践和当地背景开始的。强调基本国家价值观的方法的缺点是，它们交易的抽象概念可能与人们的日常关注无关。我们认为，一体化应该通过植根于日常生活的社会交往来追求和实现，而不仅仅是通过促进抽象的国家价值观。第三，我们认为一体化是一种自下而上的现象，政策的目标应该是捕捉和鼓励现有的最佳做法，同时减少当地一体化的障碍。在国家层面提出的方法的缺点是，它们对当地情况的变化不太敏感。我们认为，整合必须从当地环境的特殊性开始并加以关注。我们的日常集成方法为学术和政策目的回收和重新工具集成。我们的方法代表了整合研究领域的一个重大变化。“融合”一词因其同化主义色彩和缺乏概念清晰度而受到批评，导致一些人放弃它，转而使用类似的概念，如“合并”或“包容”。然而，考虑到一体化的持续政策相关性，我们的目标是重新定义和收回它，以识别并弥补其早期缺陷的方式。我们从整合开始，将其作为各种基于当地的日常实践和活动，以促进有意义和建设性的社会交流。我们将发展这种方法作为我们对整合的主要学术干预。我们的方法旨在为日常用户和集成代理实现最大的影响。融合不仅仅是在国家背景下培养公民和移民之间的良好关系。相反，融合是通过当地背景下日常生活的实践、交流和流动来实现的。我们的政策干预措施旨在捕捉和促进现有的良好做法，同时解决一体化的剩余障碍。与布里斯托尔市长、布里斯托尔市议会以及广泛的城市和社区合作伙伴合作，我们将利用我们的研究成果共同制定和实施布里斯托尔的整合战略。然后，我们将从我们的研究和战略中提炼出见解，以制定一个可以灵活地适应英国其他城市环境的整合工具包。我们不是简单地将缺乏融合视为一个问题，而是认为，关注城市中不同的流动和定居居民群体（即日常建筑师和代理人）已经体验和实践融合的方式，可以为寻求理解和促进融合的学者和政策制定者提供见解和创造性的方法。

The recent Casey Review (2016) and Integrated Communities Strategy Green Paper (2018) have revived integration as a national policy priority. The problem these strategies address is the perceived lack of integration of immigrants and ethnic minorities. The fix they propose combines English Language provision and the promotion of 'fundamental British values' with curbs on immigration and interventions to address what are viewed as harmful cultural practices. Whilst most will agree that integration is desirable, there are different views on what integration is and how best to achieve it. Our approach is distinctive in at least three ways.First, we view integration as a process involving everyone, not just immigrants and ethnic minorities. The drawback of approaches that single out certain populations as 'unintegrated' is that they relieve other, 'integrated' populations of responsibility for integration. Integration, we argue, can only work if it involves everyone, where everyone shares its responsibilities and benefits.Second, we view integration as beginning in the situated practices and local contexts of everyday life. The drawback of approaches that stress fundamental national values is they trade in abstractions that may have little bearing on people's day-to-day concerns. Integration, we argue, should be pursued and achieved through social intercourse grounded in everyday life, not (only) through the promotion of abstract national values.Third, we view integration as a bottom-up phenomenon, where the aim of policy should be to capture and encourage existing best practices whilst simultaneously attenuating local barriers to integration. The drawback of approaches pitched at the national level is they are less sensitive to variation in local context. Integration, we argue, must begin with and attend to the specificities of local context.Our Everyday Integration approach reclaims and retools integration for academic and policy purposes.Our approach represents a step change in the scholarship on integration. Integration has been criticised for its assimilationist undertones and lack of conceptual clarity, leading some to abandon it in favour of cognate concepts such as incorporation or inclusion. Given integration's continued policy relevance, however, our aim instead is to redefine and reclaim it in ways that identify and then remedy its earlier shortcomings. We begin with integration as an assortment of locally grounded everyday practices and mobilities that facilitate meaningful and constructive social exchange. We will develop this approach as our main scholarly intervention to integration.Our approach is designed to achieve maximum impact for the everyday users and agents of integration. Integration is not just a matter of fostering good relations between citizens and migrants in national contexts. Rather, integration occurs through the grounded practices, exchanges, and mobilities of everyday life in local contexts. Our policy interventions are designed to capture and facilitate existing good practices whilst simultaneously addressing remaining barriers to integration. Working with the Mayor of Bristol, the Bristol City Council, and a wide range of City and Community Partners, we will use our research findings to co-produce and implement an Integration Strategy for Bristol. We will then distil the insights from our research and Strategy to formulate an Integration Toolkit that can be flexibly adapted for other urban contexts across Britain.Rather than simply seeing the lack of integration as a problem, we contend that a focus on the ways in which different groups of mobile and settled residents of the city already experience and practice integration - that is, the people who are its everyday architects and agents - can provide insights and creative approaches for scholars and policymakers seeking to understand and foster integration.