SPAIS Lunchtime Talks are a chance to hear SPAIS lecturers and researchers offer their take on some of the big issues of the day. Talks will draw on their research and expertise, inviting us to think critically about events and ideas shaping popular discourse on politics and international relations today. Talks will last approximately 25 minutes, followed by a Q&A session. 

In this talk, Professor Jon Fox considers the problematique of integration. Once heralded as the preferred approach to post-immigration diversity, it has more recently become the focus of scrutiny and criticism. Integration’s perennial preoccupation with immigrant diversity is seen by some as hardening differences, not softening them. Its top-down, statist approach is held by others to be out of touch with the lived experiences of the people it seeks to integrate. And still others see it as a tool of nationalism, sometimes with racialising undertones. These critiques and others like them have led some observers to conclude that the best thing to do with integration is to move beyond it. Jon agrees with these critiques, but not with their conclusion. Binning integration ignores the real world issues integration can address and risks side-lining academics from policy debate. Rather than abandon integration, his aim is to reclaim, redefine, and recondition it to make it a positive force in the world. Jon begins by shifting integration’s focus away from national difference and toward social distance. With social distance the problem, he elaborates a fix that 1) includes everyone (not just immigrants), 2) sees people as the everyday agents of integration (not the state), and 3) begins locally (and doesn’t end nationally). This inclusive, bottom-up, and local approach to integration lessens the barriers of social distance so that people can get on with the everyday practice of integration.