The main objective of this edited collection is to provide an insight into key facets of contemporary research and scholarship on race and ethnicity. The various chapters were presented at a conference to celebrate the 40th Anniversary of the international journal Ethnic and Racial Studies. Given this context, contributors reflect on the evolution of scholarship over the past five decades, and look forward to the range of issues that we shall need to research and understand more fully in the future. In doing so they both provide an overview of the shifting boundaries of the field of ethnic and racial studies and display an engagement with emerging fields of scholarship and research. The volume brings together leading scholars who have experience of researching race and ethnicity in various parts of the globe, and combines conceptual reflection with empirically focused analysis. This book was originally published as a special issue of Ethnic and Racial Studies.