Maggie O'Neill

Walking across disciplines: from ethnography to arts practice

While walking has long been implicated in ethnography and arts practice, in recent years it has become increasingly central as a means of both creating new embodied ways of knowing and producing scholarly narrative. This introduction explores this cross-disciplinary coalescence of interest in peripatetic practice. It raises a series of questions inspired by the walking/arts event, which was the starting point for this collection, as well as by the articles and works published in this special issue.

Walking, sensing, belonging: ethno-mimesis as performative praxis

This article outlines a research project that used participatory action research (PAR) and arts practice (ethno-mimesis) to explore the senses of belonging negotiated by asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants in the English East Midlands. At the core of this project was a walking event in which refugees and new arrivals guided long-term residents through the city, tracing an imaginary and real journey that linked the here and now with the then and there. Reflecting on the ways that walking evokes and invokes, this article suggests that while walking should not be privileged as a way of knowing, it has certain sensate, embodied, relational and collective attributes which rendered it particularly useful as a means of exploring the importance of being-in-place among a group whose lives are often depicted as markedly transnational.

Asylum, migration and community

Contents: Part one: Globalisation and the asylum-migration-community nexus: Introduction: the asylum-migration-community nexus Globalisation, humiliation, transnational communities and social justice Human rights and the law Part two: Contemporary Theoretical and Methodological approaches: Researching the asylum-migration-community nexus Re-presenting refugees and asylum seekers in the British media Diasporic communities and the impact of dispersal: participatory action research and participatory arts Unaccompanied children and young people Women Refugees: a safe haven? Part three: Performative Praxis: Social Policy and the asylum-migration-community nexus: Fortress Europe? Borders, containment and emerging communities Refused asylum seekers, destitution, poverty and the role of social networks The Human Dignity and Humiliation Studies (HDHS) global network and the search for social justice Conclusion: asylum, migration and communities - what next?

Living with the Other: Street sex work, contingent communities and degrees of tolerance

There is substantial literature on how fears of Other populations are prompting the increased surveillance and regulation of public spaces at the heart of Western cities. Yet, in contrast to the consumer-oriented spaces of the city centre, there has been relatively little attention devoted to the quality of the street spaces in residential neighbourhoods beyond the central city. In this article, we explore how media representations of sex workers as an abject and criminalized Other inform the reactions of residents to street sex work in such communities. Drawing on our work in a number of British cities we highlight the different degrees of tolerance which residents express towards street sex work. In light of the Home Office strategy document, A Coordinated Prostitution Strategy, this article concludes by advocating participatory action research and community conferencing as a means of resolving conflicts and assuaging fears of difference.

Cultural Criminology and Sex Work: Resisting Regulation Through Radical Democracy and Participatory Action Research (PAR)

Taking a feminist cultural criminological analysis to the regulation of sex work in the United Kingdom, this paper argues against the dominant deviancy and the increasingly abolitionist criminal justice model for regulating sex work. The paper begins by offering a critique of the dominant regulatory regimes which have operated since the Victorian era, amended in part in the 1950s with Wolfenden, and currently being reinscribed with the Home Office strategy on prostitution and various pieces of legislation. The focus is specifically upon research with female sex workers and the usefulness of using Participatory Action research methodologies (PAR) with sex workers, agencies, and policy makers in order to foreground the diverse voices and experiences of sex workers, challenge the current focus on abolitionist criminal justice regimes and outcomes, and offer an alternative framework for a cultural materialist analysis of sex work, drawing upon the work of Nancy Fraser.

Global Refugees, Exile, Displacement and Belonging

orced migration is not a modern phenomenon. In global terms, war, ethnic cleansing, economic migration, natural disasters and environmental catastrophes have shaped the contours of what has come to be known as the ‘refugee problem’ or ‘refugee crisis’. Forced migration reflects global conflict and socio-economic and political crises (Castles and Miller, 1998; Castles, 2000; Castles and Davidson, 2000). Refugees and, more recently, what are now called ‘asylum seekers’ have sought refuge in the UK throughout history: the Huguenots escaping persecution in 17th-century Europe; Jewish migrants for over a thousand years, increasing in numbers in the 20th century; Irish immigrants escaping the political and economic situation in Ireland; White Russians and Czechs fleeing Communism circa 1917; predominantly Jewish refugees fleeing the Holocaust and, post Second World War, political and economic migrants from Europe. Labour shortages in the 1950s brought economic migrants from the Caribbean and, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, the political situation in Africa led to Kenyan and Ugandan Asian exiles seeking refuge; and Iranians fled Khomeini, followed by the Vietnamese boat people. Later still came Bosnian, Serb and Croat exiles fleeing war in the former Yugoslavia, Kosovan and Kosovan/Albanian exiles from war in Kosovo and people seeking exile from Sudan, Rwanda, Turkey and Algeria. Currently in the UK the top ten countries of origin for asylum seekers are: Iraq, Afghanistan, Zimbabwe, Somalia, Sri Lanka, China, Turkey, Pakistan, Iran and the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia (for further information see www.refugeecouncil.org.uk/infocentre/stats). In the UK a wave of legislation has emerged in reaction to the flows of people across Europe.1 Holocaust survivor Rabbi Hugo Grynn described the 20th century as ‘an extraordinary period of movement and upheaval’ and, moreover, said that the

What's anti-social about sex work? The changing representation of prostitution's incivility

This article considers the likely success of recent reforms of prostitution policy by reflecting on a recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation‐funded study that examined the experiences of those living and working in areas of street sex work. This empirical work points to some of the dangers of policy frameworks and techniques of control that continue to situate sex work as antithetical to the cultivation of community safety.

Community safety, rights and recognition: Towards a co‐ordinated prostitution strategy?

This article argues that there are two main barriers preventing imagining and actioning an inclusive, holistic strategy for prostitution reform in the UK. It identifies five key tenets needed to improve the situations for men and women involved in selling sex. Findings from innovative research methods are used to explore how community safety may be improved.