ABSTRACT
This chapter explores contemporary approaches to late modernity, identity and globalisation and assesses their potential for developing new under standings of difference and identity. In particular, I will focus on the dif ferentiations and inequalities relating to ethnicity and racialisation. The aim is to go beyond Giddens' structure-agency framework and to explore alternative views found, especially, in debates about cultural hybridity and diaspora. The chapter develops a framework for theorising social divisions and identities that points to the existence of socially constructed ontological spaces (of gender, ethnicity and class) on the one hand, and locates the understanding of social relations of difference and inequality in their inter sections, on the other.
