Diana receives British Academy / Leverhulme funding

Diana Yeh has been awarded a British Academy/Leverhulme Small Grant as the Principal Investigator of the project ‘Becoming East Asian: Race, Ethnicity and Youth Politics of Belonging in Superdiverse Britain’ with Dr Tamsin Barber, Oxford Brookes University.

The project examines emerging East Asian youth identities and social spaces in urban Britain to investigate the changing significance of race and ethnicity in ‘superdiverse’ contexts. Due to migration, East Asians in Britain are now one of the fastest growing ‘ethnic’ groupings (ONS 2011), with the highest percentage of international students (HESA 2014), yet they remain invisible in both academic and policy debates on citizenship, integration and multiculturalism.

The project will investigate how and why young people in London and Birmingham are engaging in racial and pan-ethnic group-making around the problematic racial category of ‘Oriental’ or ‘East Asian’ when recent social surveys suggest that race is losing its significance as a dominant identity (Aspinall and Song 2013). Re-embedding questions of power, inequality, exclusion and racism in discussions of superdiversity, it will provide new knowledge on invisible minorities, exploring affiliations and divisions among them and their place in wider society. It will also contribute to debates on how political mobilization and belonging are changing under superdiversity and lead to a research agenda on emerging East Asian politics in Britain.