Becoming British

From Syrian asylum seekers to super-rich foreign investors, immigration is one of the most controversial issues facing Britain today. Politicians kick the subject from one election to the next with energetic but ineffectual promises to 'crack down', while newspaper editors plaster it across front pages. But few know the truth behind the headlines; indeed, the almost daily changes to our complex immigration laws pile up so quickly that even the officials in charge struggle to keep up. In this clear, concise guide, Thom Brooks, one of the UK's leading experts on British citizenship - and a newly initiated British citizen himself - deftly navigates the perennially thorny path, exploding myths and exposing absurdities along the way. Ranging from how to test for 'Britishness' to how to tackle EU 'free movement', Becoming British explores how UK immigration really works - and sparks a long-overdue debate about how it should work. Combining expert analysis with a blistering critique of the failings of successive governments, this is the definitive guide to one of the most hotly disputed issues in the UK today. Wherever you stand on the immigration debate, Brooks's wryly observed account is the essential road map.

British culture today is the product of a shifting combination of tradition and experimentation, national identity and regional and ethnic diversity. These distinctive tensions are expressed in a range of cultural arenas, such as art, sport, journalism, fashion, education, and race. This Companion addresses these and other major aspects of British culture, and offers a sophisticated understanding of what it means to study and think about the diverse cultural landscapes of contemporary Britain. Each contributor looks at the language through which culture is formed and expressed, the political and institutional trends that shape culture, and at the role of culture in daily life. This interesting and informative account of modern British culture embraces controversy and debate, and never loses sight of the fact that Britain and Britishness must always be understood in relation to the increasingly international context of globalisation.

This title was first published in 2002: Becoming Delinquent: British and European Youth, 1650-1950 provides a critical synthesis of the growing body of work on the history of British and European juvenile delinquency. It is unique in that it analyzes definitions of and responses to, disorderly youth across time (from the mid-seventeenth to the mid-twentieth centuries) and across space (covering developments across Western Europe). This comparative approach allows it to show how certain themes dominated European discourses of delinquency across this period, not least panics about urban culture, poor parenting, dangerous pleasures, family breakdown, national fitness and future social stability. It also shows how these various threats were countered by recurring strategies, most notably by repeated attempts to deter delinquency, to divide responsibility between the state, civil society and the family, and to find a "proper" balance between moral reform and physical punishment, between care and control.

This book explores the process of acquiring UK citizenship and investigates how the naturalisation process is experienced, with an explicit focus on language practices. This ethnographically-informed study focuses on W, a Yemeni immigrant in the UK, during the final phase of the citizenship process. In this time, he encounters linguistic trials and tests involving the Life in the UK citizenship test, community life, ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages), adult education and the citizenship ceremony. The richness of linguistic data featured in this book allows for a nuanced portrayal of the complexities of becoming a citizen. This is especially so in the context of the UK's assimilationist form of citizenship which is reflected in the introduction of a citizenship test within a broader socio-political climate. Becoming a Citizen offers a detailed analysis of the linguistic process of naturalisation in the the UK and is relevant to scholars working in sociolinguistics, language policy, migration studies and ethnographic research.

Becoming German tells the story of the largest and earliest mass movement of German-speaking immigrants to America, the Palatine migration of 1709, tracking their journey from Germany to London to New York City and into the frontier areas of New York.

Examines theories of time that are based on metaphor, especially the moving spotlight theory which holds that "presentness" moves along the series of times from the past into the future, and proposes ways in which the moving spotlight theory may be made compatible with the theory of relativity.

The first volume of David Plante's extraordinary diaries of a life lived among the artistic elite, both a deeply personal memoir and a hugely significant document of cultural history

Becoming British Columbia is the first comprehensive, demographic history of British Columbia. Investigating critical moments in the demographic record and linking demographic patterns to larger social and political questions, it shows how biology, politics, and history conspired with sex, death, and migration to create a particular kind of society. John Belshaw overturns the widespread tendency to associate population growth with progress. He reveals that the province has a long tradition of thinking and acting vigorously in ways meant to control and shape biological communities of humans, and suggests that imperialism, race, class, and gender have historically situated population issues at the centre of public consciousness in British Columbia.