Between solidarity and hostility: exploring the paradox of community through peer research

This paper explores migrants’ experiences of settling in Greenwich, London, using peer research and taking into account the socio-political context and specific place-based politics unfolding in local communities. Resulting from a research collaboration between academic researchers, two civil society organisations, and four people of migrant origins as peer researchers, this paper interrogates community, reflecting on its dichotomous understandings in sociological literature. By cautioning against idealised notions of community, we foreground Greenwich’s history of racial violence and show how communities function as liminal spaces where everyday interactions with local government and services unfold, and where forms of intra-migrant solidarity emerge. Yet it is within communities that, despite London’s diversity, racism continues to order residents into hierarchies of belonging, affecting migrants and racialised citizens. In articulating this paradox, we argue that assessments of personal trajectories of integration must tend to local specificities, including the tensions migrants experience in their everyday.