Sorting Bodies: Race, Affect, and Everyday Multiculture in a Mill Town in Northern England

• DOI: 10.1068/a42395
• Publication Date: 2010-08-18T15:44:26Z
• Authors: Dan Swanton
• Keywords: Symbol (formal)

This paper examines how race might be understood differently when social interaction is taken as the starting point of analysis. I argue that dominant modes theorising a biological construct or epistemological marker remain insufficient for understanding multiple, contingent, and devious ways in which takes form in, gives shape to, encounters. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork Keighley—a former mill town northern England—the assembles narrative fragments reconstruct encounters with difference (that vary intensity from mundane to terror alerts). In each these return question: what does do? The offers reconsideration racism. theorise technology differentiation sorts human acknowledge malleability more-than-human composition relations. go outline an racism—a racism assemblages—that recognises sorting also accompanied by judgments prefigure assemblages opportunity address operation at level nonconscious thinking affective intensities through judging differences are performed. work gathering generates insights into microsociality multicultural life Keighley, disrupting narratives white Asian communities lead ‘parallel lives’ towns.