Regulating sex work in the EU: prostitute women and the new spaces of exclusion

Contemporary prostitution policy within the European Union has coalesced around the view that female prostitution is rarely voluntary, and often a consequence of sex trafficking. Responding, different nation-states have, however, adopted antithetical legal positions based on prohibition (Sweden), abolition (UK) or legalisation (Netherlands). Despite the apparently sharp differences between these positions, in this article we argue that there is now a shared preoccupation with repressing spaces of street prostitution. Noting the forms of exploitation that nonetheless adhere to many spaces of off-street work, we conclude that the state and law may intervene in sex work markets with the intention of tackling gendered injustice, but are perpetuating geographies of exception and abandonment.     

Resisting Traditions: Ceramics, Identity, and Consumer Choice in the Outer Hebrides from 1800 to the Present

On a number of levels, peripheral status has been imposed on the Outer Hebrides (Scotland) since the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745. Drawing on a series of interviews with Hebridean families, this paper explores the changing meanings of ceramics imported into the islands from the early nineteenth century and displayed on wooden dressers. It is argued that in renegotiating their identity in the face of a series of externally generated economic changes, rural communities in the Hebrides have acted as thoughtful consumers, appropriating mainland material culture to their own ends. Throughout this process, imports have behaved ambiguously. This ambiguity is crucial to our understanding of the relationship—here characterized not as resistance but as resistant adaptation—between the Hebrides and the mainland.     

The Choosers or the Dispossessed? Aspects of the Work of some French Eighteenth Century Pacific Explorers

This paper links the work of eighteenth century French explorers with that being done by contemporary anthropologists. Good ethnographic writers are not necessarily limited by the texts they read before going into the field and, since the time of Bougainville, have actively evaluated what they saw against what they had read. Bougainville himself has been much underrated as an ethnographer and this paper accounts for the trivializing of his work. Furthermore, the paper makes it clear that there was not one unified attitude concerning the Other in eighteenth century France. In noting that abridged or re-written forms of the explorers' journals were extremely popular, the paper posits the idea that at any one time there is a limit as to how much We want to know about Them. Finally, the paper considers the role of the exotic in obliging the French to re-define the knowledge systems they were building in their own culture. In this context, the ethnographic text is seen as a provocation in proportion to the amount of the exotic world of ‘other’ it conveys.     

From Urban Aborigines to Aboriginality and the City: One Path Through the History of Australian Cultural Geography

This paper charts one idiosyncratic and rather personalised path through the emergence of cultural geography in the Australian context. It takes as its example the transition from research which examines a category group identified as ‘urban Aborigines’ to more recent research of our own which looks at the theme of how Aboriginality is articulated in and through the space of the city. This transition provides a way of registering some broader changes within the sub-disciplinary field of cultural geography. The paper also reflects on recent criticism that a cultural emphasis detracts from the political edge of geographical research. The influential work of Fay Gale suggests that this claim is somewhat misplaced in the context of the development of the sub-discipline in Australia.     

LABORING FOR LOVE? A COMMENT ON ACADEMICS AND THEIR HOURS OF WORK

Evidence would suggest that for those in work, the rigors of the contemporary labor market require them to work longer and harder than was previously the case. While new workplace cultures of obsessive over-work have been documented amongst professionals in the private sector, the parallels have rarely been drawn with academic work. This paper uses original research material collated by students at Southampton University to discuss the changing nature of academic work and illustrate the social costs resulting from long hours of labor.