Jon May

Global cities at work : new migrant divisions of labour

List of tables List of figures List of plates List of acronyms Acknowledgements 1 Deregulation, migration and the new world of work 2 Global city labour markets and Londons new migrant division of labour 3 Londons low paid foreign-born workers 4 Living and remaking Londons ethnic and gender divisions 5 Tactics of survival amongst migrant workers in London 6 Relational lives: Migrants, London and the rest of the world 7 Remaking the city: Immigration and post-secular politics in London today 8 Just geographies of (im)migration Appendices References Index

Complexity not collapse: Recasting the geographies of homelessness in a ‘punitive’ age

Over the past decade there has been a proliferation of work on homelessness by geographers. Much of this has been framed by the desire to connect discussions of homelessness to wider debates around gentrification, urban restructuring and the politics of public space. Though such work has been helpful in shifting discussions of homelessness into the mainstream geographical literature, too much of it remains narrowly framed within a US metric of knowledge and too closely focused upon the recent punitive turn in urban social policy. Here we advance instead a framework that recognizes the growing multiplicy of homeless geographies in recent years under policies that are better understood as multifaceted and ambivalent rather than only punitive.

Exploring ethos? Discourses of 'charity' in the provision of emergency services for homeless people

This paper examines the ethos of organisations providing emergency services for homeless people in Britain. Drawing on extensive surveys of nonstatutory organisations we present a discourse analysis of statements of ‘mission’, ‘values’, and ‘ethics’, arguing that, although care needs to be exercised in translating organisational ethos into likely practices of care, these overarching messages of ethos are significant waymarkers in the moral landscapes of caring for homeless people. Using Coless rethinking of the politics of generosity, we interrogate ethos in terms of three ideal types—Christian caritas, secular humanism, and postsecular charity—concluding that the principal fault-line in current services divides organisations which expect particular behavioural outcomes from homeless people (including Christian ‘conversion’ and more secular assumptions of self-responsibility), and those which provide care regardless of individual response.

Men on the move: narratives of migration and work among low-paid migrant men in London

The impact of migration on gender identities, norms and conventions has been predominantly understood from the perspective of female migrants. Far less attention has been paid to the potential that migration entails for the negotiation and reconstruction of male identities. Drawing on sixty-seven in-depth interviews with male migrants employed in low-paid work in London, this paper explores the reworking of male identities at different stages of ‘the migration project’, focusing particularly upon the reasons extended for migration and how these are shaped by gender ideologies in home countries and negotiation of life and work in London. The paper also draws attention to ways in which these re-negotiations are themselves cross-cut by ethnic, racial and class differences, so constructing a more nuanced picture of mobile men and male identities.

Of Nomads and Vagrants: Single Homelessness and Narratives of Home as Place

Within a growing and varied body of work exploring homeless peoples own understandings and experiences of homelessness, increased attention has begun to focus upon the varying understandings of ‘home’ held by those who are currently ‘home-less’. Most such work has been concerned with an examination of peoples experiences of ‘home as residence’, with far less attention paid to homeless peoples understandings of what might be termed ‘home as place’. Given the extent to which homelessness continues to be constructed as an experience intimately if not inevitably associated with the experience of movement, such an omission is surprising. As homeless people move within, between, and through places—sometimes by necessity, sometimes by ‘choice’—such movements are liable to have a significant impact upon a persons sense of home as well as upon his or her experience of homelessness. The author examines understandings of home as place articulated by single homeless men living in night shelter and hostel accommodation in a large town on the south coast of England. Drawing upon a reconstructive life-history approach, the author sets the understandings of each respondent within the context of the mobility which has characterised that respondents homeless career. In attempting to make sense of respondents’ experiences, four contrasting narratives of home as place are outlined, relating to the experiences of the ‘(dis)placed’, the ‘homesick’, those whose lives now move around a ‘spectral geography’, and of the ‘new nomads’.

Performativity and affect in the homeless city

In this paper we discuss some of the ‘strange maps’ of city life performed by homeless people. Current models of urban homelessness emphasise both the strategies by which spaces of homelessness are disciplined and contained, and the tactics deployed by homeless people to negotiate this containment. Whilst recognising the value of such work, we argue that there is a need to move beyond this ‘rationalist’ reading of the homeless city to recognise the importance of emotion and affect in the lives of homeless people, and the traces such emotions leave on the homeless city. Drawing on in-depth interviews, we chart the journeys and pauses made by homeless people in the city of Bristol, UK. We show how the geography of homelessness thus described moves beyond current accounts of the homeless city rooted in an understanding of the strategic or tactical use of space and allows for a more nuanced reading of urban space able to take proper account of the less visible, more ‘transient’ reinscriptions of place that mark the presence of homeless people in the city.

Alternative Cartographies of Homelessness: Rendering visible British women's experiences of ‘visible’ homelessness

This article focuses on a group largely ignored by both geographers and feminist scholars of homelessness alike—the growing number of ‘visibly homeless’ women in Britain. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 19 ‘visibly homeless’ women, we delineate between four ‘alternative cartographies’ of homelessness, each articulating quite different gendered homeless identities. The article suggests that whilst it is important to recognise that women too suffer the exclusions of visible homelessness, it is also clear that the experience of visible homelessness differs for different women. Any attempt to respond to the (immediate) needs of such women necessitates a recognition rather than denial of these differences.

In Search of Authenticity off and on the Beaten Track

Recent years has seen increasing academic concern with constructions of authenticity, much of it focused upon the travel industry and the emergence of the ‘real holidays’ market in particular. Of appeal to independent travellers moving off the beaten track, such holidays have been located within a sociology of tourism that draws strict distinctions between the desires and activities of an independent traveller, drawn from the new cultural class, and working-class package tourists. Here it is suggested that accounts tracing the emergence of this market have tended to conflate two often related, but analytically distinct, discourses of authenticity which, when held apart, undermine the usual tourist typologies and considerably extend our understandings of the search for authenticity. Drawing upon qualitative interviews undertaken both with ‘travellers’ and with ‘tourists’ it is suggested that our understandings of this search be extended, to consider the ways in which a concern for authenticity is negotiated by a range of tourists enjoying a variety of holidays. Offering a critical intervention in debates around authenticity I champion a method capable of mapping the ambiguities of individual experience, rather than forcing that experience through the restrictive categories of various ideal types.

a migrant ethic of care? negotiating care and caring among migrant workers in London's low-pay economy

A care deficit is clearly evident in global cities such as London and is attributable to an ageing population, the increased employment of native-born women, prevalent gender ideologies that continue to exempt men from much reproductive work, as well as the failure of the state to provide viable alternatives. However, while it is now acknowledged that migrant women, and to a lesser extent, migrant men, step in to provide care in cities such as London, there is less research on how this shapes the nature, politics and ethics of care. Drawing upon empirical research with low-paid migrant workers employed as domiciliary care providers in London, this paper explores the emergence of a distinct migrant ethic of care that is critically shaped by the caring work that migrant women and men perform.

The geographies of food banks in the meantime

Geographies of food banks have focused predominantly on issues of neoliberal political-economy and food insecurity. In this paper, we trace alternative understandings of food banking – as spaces of care, and as liminal spaces of encounter capable of incubating political and ethical values, practices and subjectivities that challenge neoliberal austerity. Our aim is to develop a conceptual approach to voluntary welfare capable both of holding in tension the ambivalent and contradictory dynamics of care and welfare in the meantime(s), and of underlining some of the more hopeful and progressive possibilities that can arise in and through such spaces of care.