Suchergebnisse

This book highlights embodiment as a qualitative research tool and outlines what it means to do embodied research in research. It shows how using this non-invasive approach with vulnerable research participants can help service users or research participants to be involved in the co- production of services and in participatory research.

The paper draws on a recent research collaboration with the London based women's organization MEWso (Middle Eastern Women society organization). It discusses the importance of storytelling and other creative and participatory approaches, such as the World Café, to co-produce knowledge on polygamy involving a different range of social actors such as third sector organizations, academics and women involved in polygamous familial relationships. The paper focuses specifically on one of the workshops where the researchers used body-map storytelling, which is particularly appropriate for helping participants share their story with the rest of the group. This approach has been called "visceral methods" because it draws on the sensory and affective experiences mobilised to reveal discursive, material and structural aspects of research participants' stories (Sweet and Ortiz Escalante, 2014). Body maps have also been understood as cognitive maps representing a mixture of spatial cognition, place representations and spatial imagination that can provide information not only about places themselves, but also about people's identities and behaviours in relation to them (Vacchelli 2018). Body maps, similarly to cognitive maps, have the potential to convey ideas and images of individuals' economic, political, cultural or social contexts with an emphasis on their emotions and feelings (Mendoza and Morén-Alegret, 2013).

This article looks at the impact of the combined effect of the cuts and the localism agenda on women's grassroots organisations, focusing in particular on what happens at the local authority level. Austerity combined with localism has jeopardised the ability of a number of organisations to provide key services to a range of women in vulnerable situations, and there is a growing concern that gender equality in the UK will be seriously affected by this process. The disproportionate way in which the effects of austerity localism have affected women's organisations has relevance for recent debates among feminists about the relative merits of a politics of recognition and a politics of redistribution. Recognition and redistribution are fundamentally intertwined when it comes to devising joint strategies to combat the top-down localism agenda. And if they are able to live up to their ideals of internal solidarity, women's organisations have the potential to develop new pathways for mobilisation and anti-capitalist struggle. Adapted from the source document.

Abstract of the Editorial In "The right to the city" Henri Lefebvre (1968/1996) analysed the dialectic tension between the implosion of historic centres and the explosion of the urban beyond existing city boundaries under capitalist industrialization. The context of his intervention almost 50 years ago was the development of a national technocratic planning and the beginnings of gentrification in Paris' historic city centre. The city as a space occupied by productive labour, by oeuvres and festivities was being lost. The neocapitalist city had replaced the historic core, which once represented the centre of decision-making according to the Western democratic imaginary, into a centre of consumption. The right to the city cannot be conceived simply as a visiting right or a call for a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life for the whole of society and especially for those who inhabit it. The right to the city is open to all urban dwellers and not just citizens according to their social contract with the state (Lefebvre and Groupe de Navarrenx (1990/2003). In conjunction with the right to difference and the right to information, the right to the city should work towards establishing a right for citizens as urban dwellers, especially with regards to their right to use of the centre, a privileged space compared to the ghettos for workers, immigrants, marginalised and for the wealthy who live in suburbs. The right to the city can be claimed by those who contribute to its daily production and social reproduction and are therefore empowered by it. The resurgence of Lefebvre's Right to the City is in part linked to the increasing recognition that the city provides a more relevant focus to explore social relations as well as socio-economic issues than the nation-state (Massey, 2005). Although a wealth of literature has been produced about the right to the city across the globe (Brenner & Schmid, 2015; Harvey, 2012; Kipfer, Saberi, & Wieditz, 2013; Purcell, 2002; Sugranyes & Mathivet, 2010), we argue that the right to the city as conceived by Lefebvre necessitates more than ever an engagement and re-contextualision given the fact that some of these concepts have changed, others have been revised, and importantly did not take into account gender.

This article aims at problematizing the boundaries of what counts as focus group and in so doing it identifies some continuity between focus group and workshop, especially when it comes to arts informed and activity laden focus groups. The workshop [1] is often marginalized as a legitimate method for qualitative data collection outside PAR (Participatory Action Research)-based methodologies. Using examples from our research projects in East Africa and in London we argue that there are areas of overlap between these two methods, yet we tend to use concepts and definitions associated with focus groups because of the lack of visibility of workshops in qualitative research methods academic literature. The article argues that focus groups and workshops present a series of intertwined features resulting in a blending of the two which needs further exploration. In problematizing the boundaries of focus groups and recognizing the increasing usage of art-based and activity-based processes for the production of qualitative data during focus groups, we argue that focus groups and workshop are increasingly converging. We use a specifically feminist epistemology in order to critically unveil the myth around the non-hierarchical nature of consensus and group interaction during focus group discussions and other multi-vocal qualitative methods and contend that more methodological research should be carried out on the workshop as a legitimate qualitative data collection technique situated outside the cycle of action research.

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.