LIMITACIONES DEL ESTUDIO:

Glasgow and Manchester were the two cities chosen as the primary sites for the research. As outlined in chapter 2, the starting point for this research was Scotland, a choice made in view of the gap in the literature on race, racism and Islamophobia in Scotland. The

tendency to project racism onto England, and the widespread phenomenon of ‘Scottish exceptionalism’ begged a number of questions: how is Islamophobia understood in Scotland, and what might the effect be of some of these Scotland-based narratives on organising around Islamophobia as a social problem? But it also called for a particular methodological approach which entailed incorporating a second research site outside of Scotland.

The tendency for literature on Islamophobia in Scotland to reproduce the idea that Scotland is a ‘model’ for Muslim integration and non-racism (see Harris 2018 for a critique of such approaches) is exacerbated when research sites remain isolated rather than connected to elsewhere. Equally, comparisons with England might be more nuanced if they were based on empirical research which extended the scope of study beyond Scotland and into

England. Vice versa, assumptions about Islamophobia and racism ‘in the UK’ might better reflect the cultural, historical and political specificities of a Scottish context as part of research which seeks to connect the two. Perhaps paradoxically, the subsuming of Scotland under Britain in studies on racism and anti-racism – leading to a dearth of literature

focusing on Scotland – has contributed to the popular notion that Scotland is exceptionally different in matters of race and racism, with little evidence to support such a claim. Thus, the justification for multiple research sites initially emerged from a concern to understand the Scottish context. Manchester offered a secondary, counterpoint research site, intended to help make sense of patterns around race, racism, and anti-racism in Scotland and the related literature.

However, as the research developed, I increasingly came to recognise the significance of place across both research sites in how participants talked about and responded to

Islamophobia. This is most evident in chapter 4, which gives equal weight to the role of place in Manchester and Glasgow, and which demonstrates a commitment to a more

‘relational’ approach to the research project: in other words, an approach which seeks to connect rather than simply compare (Goldberg 2009). Whilst much research on race and racism has tended to compare discreet national entities, overlooking the complex ways in which racisms (and anti-racisms) circulate, I was interested in addressing how “ideas and practices from one place interact with conditions and expressions tried and tested

elsewhere” (Goldberg 2009: 1273). This more ‘relational’ approach is particularly

applicable to research on anti-racism, since movements and ‘solidarities’ cross and unsettle national borders, both in terms of those who participate and in their political demands (see Featherstone 2012; Ramamurthy 2013; Virdee 2014). In this sense, whilst it was necessary to establish geographical boundaries due to time and resource constraints, I also recognise that the two research sites are in no way completely discreet, and this is reflected in the ‘messiness’ of other aspects of the methodology, for example in the migration and residential histories of participants, as mentioned in section 3.5.

Glasgow as a specific city was chosen for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is Scotland’s largest city, with ‘Glasgow City’2 _{having a recorded population of 593,245 in the 2011}

census (Scotland’s Census 2011). It is also home to Scotland’s largest population of Muslims (Elshayyal 2016). Two wards in the South Side of Glasgow also have the highest concentration of Muslims in Scotland, and the largest ethnic minority group in Glasgow is ‘Asian, Asian Scottish or Asian British’ (Scotland’s Census 2011), accounting for 8.1% of the city’s population. Notably, Irish Catholic migration to Glasgow has resulted in a significant Irish Catholic community in Glasgow, such that those identifying as ‘Roman Catholic’ made up 27.3% of the city’s population at the last census (compared to 15.9% of Scotland’s overall population). While ostensibly ‘white’, the historical racialisation of Irish Catholics in Scotland in particular (Virdee 2014; Slaven 2018) suggests that the ‘diversity’ of Scotland’s population as a whole – and Glasgow in particular – is often under-

2 _{Glasgow City is the area under the control of Glasgow City Council. I make a distinction here between}

Glasgow City and Greater Glasgow, which also includes smaller towns situated around Glasgow. For the purposes of this research, we can make a useful comparison in terms of population size between Glasgow City and the area covered by Manchester City Council, and between Greater Glasgow and the larger conurbation of Greater Manchester (discussed later in the section).

recognised. Whilst ethnic diversity does not correlate straightforwardly with anti-racist activity, these demographic particularities make it likely that Glasgow is more of a ‘hub’ for anti-racist work than other cities in Scotland and indeed England3_{. Muslim-led}

initiatives are also more likely to emerge in a city with a significant Muslim population, and it is plausible that the wider public would have a greater understanding of

Islamophobia in a city with a significant Muslim population. In a partial reflection of these demographics, qualitative research on Islamophobia in Scotland has tended to focus on Glasgow and Edinburgh as key sites (see Hopkins 2004; Bonino 2017) but has paid much less attention to other factors which further differentiate the two cities. Glasgow’s

significant role in the British Empire (see Mullen 2009), its contemporary post-industrial character, and its publicly celebrated history of radical organising position it closer to a city like Manchester.

Manchester is known as the city of industry. It is the city in which, based on his

observations there, Freidrich Engels (1987 [1845]) wrote his seminal text The Condition of

the Working Class in England, and where Karl Marx famously came to visit him. The

city’s contemporary emblem, the ‘worker bee’, encapsulates the centrality of the industrial revolution to Manchester’s contemporary identity, and the city’s role in Empire. Like Glasgow, it is also famous for radical working class organising, and this history has been memorialised in the city’s museums, monuments and other cultural outputs. The strong identities of Glasgow and Manchester as cities are also comparable in that they are at least in part constructed in opposition to their respective (richer, more powerful) capitals, Edinburgh and London. Glasgow and Manchester are comparable in size; the population residing in the area covered by Manchester City Council was recorded at 503,127 in the 2011 census (Office for National Statistics 2011a), somewhat smaller than ‘Glasgow City’ but much closer in size than Manchester is to other major cities such as London or

Birmingham. Glasgow and Manchester are also comparable in terms of other social

indicators such as deprivation and are therefore often paired together in comparative social

3 _{See Virdee (2014) for an account of the important historical role of Irish Catholic migrants – considered as}

research (see, for example, Glasgow Centre for Population Health 2010). Manchester is, however, significantly less ‘white’ than Glasgow; 17.1% of Manchester’s population identified as ‘Asian or Asian British’ at the last census, for example (more than twice the proportion in Glasgow), and 8.6% as ‘Black or Black British’ (Office for National Statistics 2011a). Muslims in particular make up a large part of Manchester’s population, demonstrated by figures from the 2011 Census, which at the time showed that around 5% of Glasgow’s population identified as Muslim, while 15.8% of Manchester’s did (Office for National Statistics 2011b; Scotland’s Census 2011b). It is also important to note potential differences between the economic positions occupied by particular racialised groups between the two cities. For example, Dunlop (1993) has highlighted the historically higher levels of self-employment within the Asian population in Scotland compared to England.

This being said, Manchester is not, on balance, so different from Glasgow as to make a comparison meaningless, as might be the case when comparing Glasgow with London, a city over ten times bigger and much more ethnically diverse. A further reason for not choosing London as a second site for the research was the exceptional attention that London has already received in the literature on racism, anti-racism and Islamophobia. This is perhaps unsurprising given its size and diversity, but such attention nevertheless overwhelms other cities in the UK that have been relatively under-researched by

comparison. Finally, my own personal connections with Manchester meant that I had prior knowledge of the constellation of organisations working on relevant issues in the city. I had also already established relationships with key activists and organisations in the city through my own personal connections and activism which – as I elaborate on in section 3.9.2 – played a key role in the recruitment of participants.

While the cities of Glasgow and Manchester were chosen as primary sites for the research, the sorts of activities that participants were involved with could not be neatly mapped onto geographical areas determined by local authority or electoral boundaries. A number of participants were, or had been, involved in work or activism which reached beyond the city to more peripheral towns or areas. One participant, for example, was involved in anti-racist work in Manchester, but also in Ashton-under-Lyne, a small town in the Greater

much of their anti-racist work in Cumbernauld, a town just outside Glasgow in North Lanarkshire. So, while participants were recruited on the basis that they had been or were involved in some ‘work’ in Glasgow or Manchester, the various and diverse forms of work that individuals actually participated in could not be ‘contained’ in such a way.