Contested narratives of encounter from a bridge-building project in northern England

ABSTRACT

Recent years of community engagement under the war on terror in the UK have seen the co-option of bridge-building initiatives into wider narratives of securing communities. Through ethnographic insights into a peace building inter-faith initiative that made it onto the news as a ‘deradicalization’ workshop, I show how encounters in such projects are susceptible to being reframed into the very narrative in which encounters are sought after in the first place as a political settlement to growing inter-ethnic tension and conflict. This paper contributes to the growing geographies of encounter literature by making more explicit the narratives that shape how encounters function.

KEYWORDS:

• Encounter
• narrative
• community cohesion
• integration
• war on terror

Acknowledgements

My thanks and appreciation go to the participants at the Peace Ambassadors. Many thanks go to an anonymous reviewer and the editor who provided detailed comments for strengthening the argument, as well as Lynn Staeheli, Ben Anderson and Angharad Closs Stephens, who provided valuable input and encouragement.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributor

Sam Slatcher is an ESRC-funded PhD student in the Department of Geography at Durham University, UK. His research explores the contested sites of government-funded community engagement projects to explore how concepts of the ‘encounter’ are imagined, enacted and reflected upon. Sam has also been involved in a participatory film project around safe spaces for difficult conversations with different community organizations in Leeds, West Yorkshire.

Notes

1 Name kept anonymous for confidentiality.

2 Wilson’s (2016) recent work also lays out a critique of Valentine and Sadgrove’s (2014) implicit assumptions of ‘meaning’ within conceptualizing encounters.

3 The attacks on the 7 July 2005 involved coordinated suicide bombings by Islamic extremists that took place during rush-hour on the London underground and on a bus, killing 56 and injuring 700+.

4 While the terms ‘extremism’ and ‘(de)radicalization’ are often used interchangeably in political discourse, I shall critically attend to the terms as espoused in UK policy; ‘radicalization’ here is referred to as ‘the process by which people come to support violent extremism and, in some cases, join terrorist groups’ (Home Office, 2009, pp. 10–11). (See also Borum, 2011).

5 A pseudonym.

6 See Kundnani (2009).

7 It’s worth noting that, according to Anne, the media coverage of the Peace Ambassadors’ trip to London to commemorate the London bombings was ‘much better’. Anne felt she was able to steer the conversations back to the Peace Ambassadors as they ‘stole the show’.

8 The name for the meal to break the fast during Ramadan in the Muslim faith.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Economic & Social Research Council under grant number 1333677.