Elena Vacchelli

Is it really just the cuts? neo-liberal tales from the women’s voluntary and community sector in London

This article analyses the ways in which recent neo-liberal changes in service provision together with much reduced budgets due to austerity policies have affected women’s voluntary and community organisations in London. These organisations provide crucial resources to vulnerable women who are victims of domestic abuse, trafficking, honour-based violence, and so on, and are a primary example of women seeking support at the grassroots level. While there is a rich literature on the negative impact of public sector cuts on gender equality in as much as they affect women as workers, with a particular emphasis on increasing female poverty (Fawcett, 2013; Womens Budget Group, 2013), less is known about the effects of the coalition government’s cuts on women’s grassroots organisations. We do know, however, that cuts to public spending have deeply destabilised, and in some cases decimated, women’s organisations, with negative impacts on women’s sexual health, and the prevention of domestic abuse and forced marriage, among other indicators of female well-being (Hirst and Rinne, 2012; Womens Budget Group, 2013). Yet little attention has been paid so far to what we might term ‘the resilience strategies’ of women’s organisations. This article aims to bridge this gap by critically examining what kind of coping strategies women’s organisations are developing.

Geographies of subjectivity: locating feminist political subjects in Milan

This article explores activist womens changing subjectivities and how they sought to challenge the political and spatial order of gender relations in Milan from the late 1960s onwards. Feminist subjectivities have been shaped through the collective practice of consciousness-raising. The relational context of the narratives they established became important as a means of defining their political subjectivity and helped them to make sense of their identity in transformation. Drawing on Adriana Cavareros Arendtian definition of the political, this article argues that feminist political subjectivity is shaped relationally through mutual self-exposure in the public sphere. In this way, exposure to others becomes a constitutive act contributing to an ongoing version of subjectivity. It is also, at the same time, the material condition for social and political life to take place. Contemporary versions of spatial practices such as separatism and consciousness-raising, it is argued, have the potential to inscribe womens role in Milan in an innovative way, especially when compared with the traditional modes of political representation.

Milan 1970-1980: women's place in urban theory

Post-war Italy faced a transition from industrial reconstruction to a phase of mature capitalism characterised by massive internal migrations towards the north of the country. A rapid urbanisation process created large dysfunctional areas at the periphery of the main re-industrialising cities like Milan, Genoa and Turin. In particular Milan has been defined as the capital of the Italian economic miracle (Foot, 2001). But during the 1950s Milans extended industrial areas were subjected to main socio-spatial transformations: from being a mix of industrial and rural communities just after the war, the peripheries of Milan turned into deprived areas lacking basic services and infrastructure during the 1970s, when social conflicts were increasingly rising. From 1968 to 1977 Milan was also one of the main stages of a cultural revolution that in Italy uniquely assumed deep political implications by undermining the fundamental institutions of the state (Balestrini & Moroni, 1988).

Beyond crisis talk: Interrogating migration and crises in Europe

Commencing with some recent examples drawn from Anglophone media, this introductory article reflects on the multiple ways in which crisis and migration have been interconnected over the last decade in public discourse, political debates and academic research. It underlines how crisis has not simply become a key descriptor of specific events, but continues to operate as a powerful narrative device that structures knowledge of migration and shapes policy decisions and governance structures. It explains the rationale for choosing Europe as a multidimensional setting for investigating the diverse links between migration and crisis. It ends with a summary of the contributions that are divided into four thematic strands: relationships between the economic crisis and migrant workers and their families; the Mediterranean in crisis; political and public discourses about the post-2015 ‘migration crisis’; and ethnographies of everyday experiences of the ‘refugee crisis’ on the part of migrants, activists and local people.

Shifting religions and cultures in london's east end

ABSTRACT This article considers the ways in which well-established “traditional” religious communities—particularly Christianity but, to a lesser extent, Islam and Judaism—attempt to construct and minister to religious communities in east London in an age of super-diversity, multiculturalism, and globalization, where religious attendance and affiliation is in no way determined and cannot be taken for granted. We focus particularly on the ways in which religious communities seek to form and stabilize attachments to their worshipers in the context of the significant demographic, economic, and social flux that characterizes east London. The construction of religious communities is an essentially active and ongoing process of work which involves particular sets of practices of worship, social and organizational elements, and attachments to the buildings themselves. Ultimately, the article concludes that the mechanisms devised to practice faith, spread the word, and form attachment between worshipers and their community extended far beyond matters of identity or even religious belief: those religious groups that were able to assemble durable communities did so by forming an assemblage that was at once liturgical, material, organizational, and social.

Localism and austerity: a gender perspective

Austerity localism was adopted as a dominant political narrative by the last coalition government in order to restructure the public sector according to a normative, long-standing and politically conservative model of middle-class voluntarism and social responsibility. The new Tory government will complete the work they started by implementing further cuts. This article discusses the impact austerity will have on the already weakened womens voluntary and community sector, which will be more heavily affected than other areas as changes in funding make it more difficult for smaller organisations to compete for limited resources. Nancy Fraser argues that feminist anti-economism has collapsed into a politics of recognition that privileges identity politics over claims for redistribution and economic justice. Neoliberal rule has also helped depoliticise feminist claims. This article uses Frasers theoretical framework to look at the contradictions inscribed in the localism agenda and points to the strategies that are being enacted for the survival of the womens voluntary and community sector in the UK, using London as a case study.

Embodiment in qualitative research: collage making with migrant, refugee and asylum seeking women:

This article draws on the creative methods deployed in the course of a research project aimed at mapping community-based mental health service provision and other specific services migrant, refugee and asylum seeking women regularly access in London. Although the study made use of a mixed method research design, only the art-based approach deployed as part of the focus groups is discussed. The article contributes to developing embodied research methods in that it explores the bodily engagement of research participants in making a collage and unpacks the implications of this approach for collecting qualitative data involving experiential activity. The body plays a central role in generating qualitative data through the making of the collage and collage-making represents an embodied experience suggesting that how we feel, how we perceive, how we relate to our own bodies and the place they have in the order of things – is contextual, gendered, relational, historically and culturally situated.

Telling digital stories as feminist research and practice: a two-day workshop with migrant women in London

In this article, we look at Digital Storytelling (DS) as a specifically feminist epistemology within qualitative social research methods. Digital Storytelling is a process allowing research participants to tell their stories in their own words through a guided creative workshop that includes the use of digital technology, participatory approaches, and co-production of personal stories. The article draws on a 2-day Digital Storytelling workshop with migrant women which was set up to understand the life stories and work trajectories of volunteers working in the women’s community and voluntary sector in London. By outlining this innovative approach, the article highlights its potential and makes a case for Digital Storytelling as a feminist approach to research while taking into account epistemological, practical, and ethical considerations.