Negotiating multicultural Europe

This book is about neighbourhoods and networks between the diverse people of contemporary Europe who live in a globalized and globalizing world and across different types of borders: physical and mental, geopolitical and symbolic. The book's theme is set within the larger framework of globalization and geopolitical re-ordering on the European continent, processes in which the supra-national EU has played a highly significant role and where transnational relations increasingly become the norm. This collection is based on qualitative social research in a range of European locations. It explores community relations that are marked by boundaries whose primary local definitions are national, ethnic or racial, and it examines the local negotiations of those boundaries, including the attempts to overcome them. The book thus brings into comparative perspective the negotiations of national and historical identities that are often foregrounded by border studies, and concerns with ethnic and multicultural identities which tend to be the domain of migration studies.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.