Blog post by Maddy Clark and Aleksandra Lewicki, University of Sussex, UK
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In September 2025, one of the largest far-right marches in the history of the UK took place in London at which the American tech billionaire Elon Musk addressed a crowd of over 100,000 protesters wrapped in Union Jack and St. George’s flags, openly inciting violent action. In the following week, the UK’s Labour Government rolled out the red carpet for US President Donald Trump’s state visit to facilitate a £150 billion investment of American tech firms. Both events are indicators of the mainstreaming, transnationalization, mimicking and courting of the far-right movement – trends that have a longer trajectory in the UK.

Mainstreaming has been defined as involving conservative, liberal and social democratic political forces, on the one hand, embracing and implementing far-right talking points, demands and political agendas. On the other hand, far-right actors successfully expand their protest repertoires and appeal to new target audiences within the population.

In our Identities article, we examine key facets of this mainstreaming and emboldening of the far-right. Specifically, we analyzed statements by individuals who have gained a public profile by advancing far-right agendas (even though some do not necessarily self-represent as far-right agitators themselves). This analysis drew on an archive of social media posts and 21 interviews with individuals self-identifying as men and 18 self-identifying as women (no one identified outside of this binary) which were generated within two separate research projects over the past five years.

Blog post by Tariku Sagoya Gashute, Arba Minch University, Ethiopia; Abebe Lemessa Saka, Haramaya University, Ethiopia; and Tompson Makahamadze, George Mason University, USA

Ethiopian federalism was introduced to manage ethnic conflicts that arose from questions of recognition and autonomy. However, it further solidified ethnic division and conflict: drawing ethnicity at the centre of politics, it created rigid ethnic boundaries that increased division and conflicts.

Our Identities article, ‘Shared identity approach to conflict transformation: the case of the Konso–Derashe–Alle area, Ethiopian federalism in focus’, was based on a research question formulated against these limitations of Ethiopian federalism to mitigate conflict. The emphasis was on its tendency to undermine important bonding and bridging spaces. The system has deemphasized shared sociocultural and historical values that sustained intergroup relationships while exaggerating ethnic differences mainly for elite political ends, in which some sociocultural differences are politicized for a share in the regional and national cake.  

Blog post by Ester Gallo, University of Trento, Trento, Italy
 
My Identities article, ‘Utility workers: religion and the migratory stratification of foreign nurses across generations’, explores the role of Catholic institutions in shaping Indian nurses’ mobility pathways to Italy. The COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated the global demand for nurses, and in many parts of the Global North (such as Europe, UK, Canada or the US) the provision of healthcare relies on the recruitment of  staff educated in the Global South. India represents one of the most important sources for this international recruitment of qualified nurses, who tend to be women from poorer groups.
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The international mobility of migrant nurses raises numerous challenges. When countries invest in the training of healthcare workers ‘for export’ – often at the expense of educational quality, workers’ rights and retention – this can make it difficult for their own country to address healthcare needs due to nurse shortages. In receiving countries, foreign-born nurses are often hired through temporary contracts; mass emergency recruitment coexists with periods of unemployment, resulting in precarious working conditions.

Blog post by Imran Awan and Damian Breen, Birmingham City University, UK
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March 23rd, 2025 marked five years since the first national lockdown in the UK as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As an unprecedented series of events, the pandemic exposed and exacerbated a range of pre-existing health and social inequalities, with Black and South Asian minority ethnic groups being among those most impacted.

At the height of the pandemic, the risk of mortality from COVID-19 was around three times higher for Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups than the national average. Whilst this is far from a complete picture of Muslim communities in the UK, it is ordinarily as close as we get in terms of data pertaining to British Muslims where religion is not measured in publicly available national-level data. However, whilst there was some acknowledgement of the racialized disparities exposed by the pandemic, one aspect which was overlooked was the impact of lockdowns on faith communities.

As we show in our Identities article, ‘Islam and faith in times of crisis: religious observance and Muslim communities in the pandemic’, key focus of our research was ‘faith in times of crisis’, and specifically faith practice for Muslims in the context of local and national lockdowns. Our project drew attention to the emphasis on practise in the context of Islam, and what lockdowns and restrictions meant for Muslims in particular. 

Blog post by Roberta Altin, University of Trieste, Italy
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How do memories, histories and representations of past migrations influence current migration processes in a border region? How do migration processes shape a borderscape, and how are memories interwoven across different historical layers?
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Migration studies have grown significantly over the last two decades, leading to specialization in specific areas. While academic interest in migration has increased since the so-called 'migration crisis', the connection between migration studies and memory studies, especially regarding how perceptions of the past impact immigrant integration, is rare.

It is useful to view migration alongside integration contexts such as cities. My Identities article, ‘Displaced memories in the Trieste border area: a never-ending historical entanglement’, focuses on the Trieste border area, known for its cultural diversity due to the historical presence of different languages and migrations, and intertwined socio-cultural dynamics. Time plays a key role, and public spaces, materials and oral memory sources are also examined. 

Blog post by Sri Rahayu Hijrah Hati, University of Indonesia

In today’s fast-paced world, food delivery apps have become an essential part of urban life. With just a few taps on a smartphone, consumers can access a vast array of meals, delivered swiftly to their doorsteps. This convenience has been particularly significant in Muslim-majority countries like Indonesia, where online food platforms such as GrabFood and GoFood dominate the market. However, for Muslim consumers, convenience alone is not enough: ensuring that food adheres to halal standards is a fundamental requirement.

As the digital economy grows, so does the demand for ethical and religiously compliant food choices. This raises a critical question: how does religious self identity and halal labelling influence Muslim consumers’ trust and purchasing intentions in food delivery apps?

Our Identities article, ‘Food for the soul: religious identity and ethical halal labelling in sharing economy apps’, explores the complex relationship between religious identity, halal labelling, trust and trust in shaping consumer behaviour within Indonesia’s thriving digital marketplace.

Blog post by Simone Haarbosch, Radboud University, Netherlands and Claire Wallace, University of Aberdeen, UK

Increased mobility within the European Union means that many people have learned to live in new places. However, improved communications meant they no longer had to choose one place or another – they can live in both places simultaneously using what we have analysed as ‘hybrid habitus’ (drawing on Bourdieu’s ideas). Brexit added a further complication by forcing them to adapt to a new situation whereby the UK was no longer part of the facilitated EU migration policy, thus adding new levels of uncertainty to the situation. However, for professional people, the choice is not so much an economic one (can I afford this?) as an existential one leading them to reconsider: Who am I?  Where do I belong?

Our Identities article, ‘Renegotiating female transnational identities after Brexit: the importance of hybrid habitus’, looked at the experiences of 58 middle class women, who were either Dutch people living long term in the UK (Scotland in this case) or British people living in the Netherlands. We looked at how they established a new sense of ‘home’ in another country on the one hand, and how they retained links with their motherlands on the other, as aspects of this hybrid habitus.  

Blog post by Saime Özçürümez, Baskent University, Türkiye and Pınar Sönmez, Bilkent University, Türkiye
 
Scholars working on highly skilled migrants (HSMs) portray them as privileged cosmopolitans who can move effortlessly across borders due to high competition for attracting talent. However, little is known about how HSMs narrate their everyday experiences while reflecting on their sense of belonging. How do the HSMs reconcile national attachments with a global outlook? How do they navigate the complex socio-political landscapes of their host countries?
 
Our Identities article, ‘Patriotic cosmopolitans in Budapest: narratives of belonging among highly skilled migrants’, challenges the dominant framing and research on HSMs as essentially economic actors. We focus on their experience of international mobility and examine how they think through their identity and sense of belonging in complex socio-political settings. Drawing on Kwame Anthony Appiah’s assertion that one can identify as both a cosmopolitan and remain loyal to country of origin, we conceptualize cosmopolitanism and patriotism as intertwined spatial and emotional attachments constituting the foundations of HSMs’ sense of belonging. 

Blog post by Ruxandra Ana, University of Łódź, Poland

​My Identities article, ‘Modes of embodiment: exercising agency through Afro-Cuban dance’, was inspired by a conversation with Alvaro, a Berlin-based dancer and dance instructor and one of my research participants after the opening of the exhibition O Quilombismo: Of Resisting and Insisting. Of Flight as Fight. Of Other Democratic Egalitarian Political Philosophies, hosted in 2023 by the House of World Cultures in Berlin. One of the installations in the exhibition, Table of Goods by Portuguese visual artist Grada Kilomba, consisted of a pyramid of soil surrounded by candles, indented with notches filled with coffee, sugar and cocoa, to symbolize the violence that facilitates modern pleasures, and serving as a metaphor for trauma and the colonial wound.

Alvaro spoke enthusiastically about this particular installation, which resonated with our on-going conversations about the fetishization of Black and Brown bodies as part of broader processes of commodification of Cuban music and dance on the island and in European contexts. Our talks inevitably touched upon the experience of racial discrimination in Berlin and the German desire and occasional positive valorization of Blackness, almost unequivocally connotated negatively in Cuba, and Alvaro was not an isolated example.

Blog post by Muhammad Habib Qazi, University of Central Punjab, Pakistan

Punjabi, the language of Pakistan’s largest ethnic community, continues to face marginalization despite its deep-rooted cultural and historical significance. This linguistic relegation is not merely the result of state policies but is also reinforced at the societal level, particularly by Punjabi women. Their role in fostering linguistic cringe has been a crucial yet underexplored phenomenon. The term linguistic cringe refers to one’s feeling of embarrassment about their linguistic and cultural products vis-à-vis those of dominant languages and cultures (Phillips 2006). My Identities article, ‘Ethnic languages conundrum in postcolonial Pakistan and the role of women in fostering Punjabi linguistic cringe’, investigates the ways in which postcolonial socio-political structures and internalized stigmas have led Punjabi women to distance themselves from their mother tongue.
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Based on a mixed-method approach, the study draws on data from 312 randomly sampled Punjabi women through semi-structured interviews and questionnaires. The findings reveal that colonial legacies and postcolonial nation-building efforts have led to the assertion and imposition of Urdu and English as superior languages, pushing Punjabi to the periphery. This imposed linguistic hierarchy has contributed to Punjabi women’s reluctance to pass the language on to their children, reinforcing its decline and strengthening the perception of Punjabi as a ‘backward’ or ‘rural’ language (John 2015; Asif 2005).

Blog post by Amir Aziz, University of California, Berkeley
 
Situated in the scenic port area, the downtown neighbourhood Noailles is frequently touted as the heart of multicultural diversity in the French Mediterranean city of Marseille. Since the 1990s, Noailles has been subjected to waves of urban renewal programmes, such as the Euroméditerranée project, that sought to revitalize Marseille’s downtown by building new offices, hotels and tourist amenities. This construction of expensive projects has threatened to drive out longtime Noailles residents and shopowners, many of whom are of Muslim and northern/western African origin.

In October 2018, locals protested the decision to tear down Place Jean-Jaurès, a public square affectionately called La Plaine (‘The Plains’) that hosted free local activities and markets. The city deployed riot police to quell protests and guard the construction zone, erecting a costly 2.5-metre concrete wall to prohibit access. Yet, commercial redevelopment has not led to concrete living improvements for locals.

Blog post by Liam Gillespie, University of Melbourne, Australia
 
It is often said that we are living in a period characterized by the ‘main-streaming’ of the far right. The idea is that the previously unacceptable ‘fringes’ of society – the literally ‘far’ right – have come to increasingly occupy and influence the mainstream or ‘centre’ of society, effectively becoming part of it. Commonly cited indicators for this idea include the return – and indeed in some cases the re-election – of political figures like Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Marine Le Pen, Viktor Orbán, Giorgia Meloni, Javier Milei and Geert Wilders, all of whom have successfully tapped into and normalized racism, ethnic nationalism, xenophobia, misogyny, transphobia (and more) to achieve political success.
 
Consequently, research on the far right is booming, and much of the emerging literature now attempts to understand how and why the far right has come to be mainstreamed and normalized.

Blog post by Rosa Martinez-Cuadros, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain and Alberta Giorgi, University of Bergamo, Italy
 
When considering ‘Islam’ and ‘feminism’ in Europe, people often think to the topics of migration, terrorism, and related narratives of women’s oppression within ‘Islam’ and opposition between ‘Islam’ and ‘Europe’. These narratives have been fuelled by the rise of far-right movements and Islamophobic discourses that associate ‘Islam’ with chauvinism, or male dominance. Additionally, European feminist movements are traditionally secular, with a long story of opposition to, and emancipation from, religion (Christian religion, more specifically): hence, religion, including Islam, is often primarily framed as a context of oppression for women.
 
This creates a complex environment for activist Muslim women living in Europe, especially those who aim to be engaged in civil society organizations and local politics. In this context, how do activist Muslim women respond to these challenges? Do they identify as feminists?

Blog post by Heather Sauyaq Jean Gordon, USA

As an Indigenous scholar of race and ethnicity, I have struggled to find a place for who I am within the field. I studied race and ethnic studies as an undergraduate, but the curriculum focused on Black/African Americans, Asian Americans, White Americans and Latinos/Hispanics/Chicanos. I chose term paper topics and presentations that centered on Alaska Native (Indigneous) people to bring us into the conversation. My honors thesis on Arab American racism post-9/11 was another effort to highlight underrepresented populations.

Blog post by Marcus Nicolson, Institute for Minority Rights, Italy

Scotland has been described as having a progressive politics towards immigration and migrant integration, which is closely tied to the civic brand of nationalism that has been promoted by the Scottish government in the 21st century.

But what effects do these narratives have on young adult migrants who have made Scotland their home, and how do they relate to these narratives when negotiating their own identities? These are the key questions which are explored in my Identities article, ‘Transnational identities and agency: navigating everyday life as a young adult migrant in Glasgow, UK'.

Blog post by Sudip Sen, University of Portsmouth, UK

In my Identities article, ‘Belligerent shyness and puzzlement: a discursive analysis of ‘not racism’ and the post-racial on UK phone-in radio’, I investigate ‘the talk about the talk’ about racism –  including when that talk is about how we shouldn’t talk about it. In particular, I analyze commercial phone-in radio calls in the UK, where speakers seek to minimize or deny the relevance of racism, and find that there is a persistence of performed shyness and puzzlement.

Shy people are usually not belligerent, and people genuinely puzzled by something are not usually quite so adamant about their answer. So, what is going on here? The speakers’ ‘shy’ and indirect utterances emphasize their view that they cannot speak anymore, and their puzzlement and shock frames racism as exceptional. In other words, these small public performances, rehearsed and repeated, are (re)generative of a post-racial discourse.  

Blog post by Jamella Gow, Bowdoin College, USA

What makes a migrant ‘Black’? Frequently, negative rhetoric surrounding migrants in the United States and Europe have used race and culture as a means through which to contrast the inherent ‘belonging’ of citizens with the seeming ‘non-belonging’ of migrants. Migrants’ presence and cultures are, at worst, feared due to assumptions derived from 16th-19th century rhetoric which drove the colonization of people broadly conceived as Others. This is particularly the case for Black migrants.
 
We can draw a line between the transformations of nations in the Caribbean under colonization to the migratory waves of the 20th and 21st century. Historically, the colonization of the British Caribbean anticipated the arrival of the Windrush generation of Caribbean migrants (1948) who sought to build new lives in the centre of Empire. The imperial forays of the United States in Central America and the Caribbean also generated pathways to migration for Haitians who have been coming to the US since Haiti’s founding in 1804.
 
The arrival and reception of Black migrants to the US and Europe, therefore, cannot be understood without these deeper historical links that draw the Caribbean and the West together. These linkages are explored in my Identities article, ‘From colonial subjects to Black nations: racializing the Caribbean within global Blackness’, where I trace the history of Blackness in the Caribbean to better understand how mobility became a feature of Blackness both under slavery and more modern iterations of Black migration today. 

Blog post by Chiara Martini, University of Milan, Italy
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For anyone who has spent time in Athens in recent years – especially those involved in migration research or work – Victoria Square is a place they have undoubtedly passed through and become familiar with. Victoria Square, located in central Athens, offers a unique lens through which to understand the complexities of migration and social stratification in contemporary Europe.

​In my Identities article, ‘Victoria Square, Athens: migratory movements and social stratifications in the centre of the Greek capital’, I explore how this seemingly ordinary space reflects larger migration dynamics, showcasing the intersection of diverse communities, solidarity efforts and social tensions in urban environments

Blog post by Aaron Winter, Lancaster University, UK; Co-Editor, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power

In the past, I’ve warned against seeing Trump and fascism as the ultimate threat(s) because they can serve as extreme, exceptional and, in the case of the former, individualised distractions from problems in the wider system, mainstream politics and liberal democracy in ways that can position these as a bulwark despite their role in mainstreaming the far right and upholding the same inequalities and injustices. Then there was Musk’s Nazi salute at Trump’s inauguration and questions about what it meant. In many ways, Musk may serve the same purpose for Trump as the latter has for American society and politics by making him look less illiberal, extreme and scary. That does not mean we should not be concerned about Trump or more importantly fascism but also be attuned to the inequalities and injustices in the system, mainstream and democracy that may not only be distracted from but also justified, exploited and exacerbated by it. We see this most acutely in how the liberal mainstream has embraced the war on ‘woke’ and migrants in order to prevent something worse. Something that, despite or possibly because of this, has been emboldened and is already occurring.

Of course, few expected much from Trump’s second inauguration on 20 January 2025. As much as many feared the new administration would oversee the rise of fascism and collapse of American Democracy, there also seemed to be an atmosphere of resignation. At the very least, many probably thought that he could not possibly do worse than in his appearance on 6 January 2021 just prior to the last inauguration. If anything, it was the events of that day that led many to assume it would not happen again, either because Trump would not get re-elected or his victory would at least satisfy the extremists. Everything seemed to be going as expected with the typical combination of procedure and ritual, albeit with extra nationalism, glitz and guests. The latter included far right celebrities such as former head of Breitbart and Trump Chief Strategist Steve Bannon, Reform UK leader Nigel Farage and X CEO Elon Musk, as well as other tech bros. One notable guest, Brexit and UKIP funder Arron Banks could not attend his own Stars and Stripes and Union Jack Party because he was denied entry to the US. This led to outrage from those more often heard demanding tougher border controls. 

Blog post by Alyssa Marie Kvalvaag, Nord University, Norway

When questions around migration appear in a European context, the concept ‘integration’ often follows. Despite being a well-established concept within migration policies and studies, many scholars have highlighted that integration is characterized by ambiguities and multiple, often unclear, meanings (e.g., Grillo 2011; Kutor, Arku, and Bandauko 2023; Vertovec 2020).

In my Identities article, ‘Contesting integration discourses: migrant organizations and epistemic resistance in northern Norway’, I explore how leaders of migrant organizations use and contest integration discourses by drawing on their experiential ways of knowing and doing. Migrant organizations are understood as organizations created by migrants and run (primarily) for migrants. I argue that leaders of migrant organizations use integration discourses to ‘do’ multiple things, at times subverting common ways of knowing about integration and carving out new spaces of possibilities in thinking about what integration is and may be. 

Blog post by Monika Mokre, Austrian Academy of Sciences, Austria
 
Identity politics were something like a buzz word in the 2024 US election campaign. On the one hand, media speculated why Kamala Harris did not play the ‘identity card’ of her multiethnic origin in a similar way as Barack Obama did. On the other hand, Republicans accused Harris precisely of using her minority identity as a campaign token and reject, at the same time, any kind of anti-racist or gender politics as identity politics of an elite neglecting the problems of the majority population.

Identities and their political usage, thus, might influence the outcome of elections and, in this way, play a role for the most important participatory practice of representative democracy. Their impact, however, goes far beyond ballot box agendas. When democracy is government of the people, for the people, and by the people, identity politics pose the paramount question if there is, in fact, a ‘people’ or if the citizenry consists of fundamentally irreconcilable subgroups

Blog post by Sara Amadasi, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy

In our Identities article, ‘Keeping two cultures together’: the binary construction of belonging in narratives of professionals on children’s cultural identity’, we investigated how the sense of belonging and cultural identity of children with a migration background[1] are socially constructed by Italian professionals who work at schools and in social services with young people. We also investigated whether narratives told by interviewees are affected by the gender of the children they are referring to.
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Our article is based on interviews conducted in the context of the Horizon 2020 project, ‘Child-Up: Children Hybrid Integration: Learning Dialogue as a Way of Upgrading Policies of Participation’. This project investigated the opportunities of children with a migration background to actively exercise their agency to change their social and cultural conditions. While the project involved several groups of people, our Identities article analyzed interviews conducted with teachers, educators, social workers and mediators in three cities in northern Italy.

Blog post by Diditi Mitra, Brookdale Community College, USA

As I explore in my Identities article, ‘The socioeconomics of Sikh American identity’, semi structured interviews conducted with immigrant Sikh taxi drivers in New York City and with immigrant Sikh families show that socioeconomic differences are impactful in shaping the experiences and identities of non-white immigrants of the Sikh religious faith. The respondents of these interviews converged and diverged on their lived experiences and subsequently in terms of making meaning of themselves. While all the respondents converged on their encounter with racism, the specific form of those racist encounters was shaped by socioeconomic status.
 
The spaces occupied by the professional informants were typically suffused with colourblind racial ideology, making it challenging to identify it as such and as a matter of fact casting doubt on the professional respondents’ assessment of those encounters as racist. The taxi drivers, in contrast, reported routine and blatant experiences of racism from passengers, law enforcement and the taxi court judges. In my view, it was possible to remove the mask of liberalism, that usually conceals overt expressions of racism in professional workplaces, in dealings with non-white immigrant cab drivers whose work and social status ranked low in the social order. 

Blog post by Karim Murji, University of West London, UK

My Identities article, ‘The BBC, public intellectuals, and the making of Five Views of Multiracial Britain’, centres on a series of five television programmes made by the BBC in 1978 and subsequently published as a slim booklet by the Commission for Racial Equality. This is a piece of media and socio-political history though re-viewing it in light of  recent events reveals  some notable contrasts about public intellectuals and the media/the BBC then and now.
 
In August 2024 widespread rioting took place in towns and cities, largely in England though there were also some in Northern Ireland and in Wales. Some of the locations were Aldershot, Birmingham, Blackburn, Blackpool, Bolton, Bristol, Darlington, Hartlepool, High Wycombe, Hull, Leeds, Leicester, Liverpool, Manchester, Middlesbrough, Nottingham, Plymouth, Portsmouth, Preston, Rotherham, Southport, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland, Tamworth and Weymouth.

Blog post by Stephen Cho Suh, San Diego State University, USA
 
In April 2024, David Chang, head of the Momofuku food empire, came under fire when lawyers for his brand sent cease-and-desist letters to dozens of companies across the US. At issue was the apparent unauthorized use of ‘chili crunch’, a name that Momofuku was in the process of trademarking for one of its own chili oil products. Though Momofuku eventually pulled these requests, with Chang himself issuing a public apology, it was clear that a metaphorical line had been crossed. Chang, a long-time advocate if not key representative of the Asian American food scene, was roundly criticized by Asian American foodies and food entrepreneurs for doing the very things he frequently railed against – seemingly creating artificial barriers to entry for fledgling entrepreneurs while also policing the culinary boundaries of a dish or cuisine. To many, Chang had become the culinary bully that he had built his career claiming to despise.

It is easy to dismiss this short-lived Asian American food drama as a business decision gone temporarily awry or as the grumblings of a small but loud minority. But doing so would miss the broader cultural significance of this micro-event. We contend that what was at conflict here was not simply the overly complicated nature of trademark law, nor was it just about who gets to claim ownership of an ingredient or dish. No, the predicament here had to do with something that was far more fundamental – the questions of ‘What is Asian American food?’ and ‘Who does Asian American food belong to?’.