Embodied cosmopolitanisms: the subjective mobility of migrants working in the global sex industry

Anti-trafficking rhetoric and policies emphasise the extent of exploitation and coercion of female migrant sex workers and obfuscate the shared ambivalences and contradictions experienced by migrant female sex workers and their male agents and partners. By engaging in the global sex industry, both young men and women negotiate their aspiration to cosmopolitan late modern lifestyles against the prevalence of essentialist patriarchal gender values and sexual mores at home. In the process, established gender normativities, legitimising women's subjection to men, are both reproduced and challenged. The evidence informing this article shows that a minority of women are coerced into the sex industry. There is a direct link between the adherence to essentialist gender/sexual roles and the recourse to violence and exploitation, because migrants' prolonged involvement in the sex industry coincides with the adherence to more cosmopolitan gender/sexual roles, translating into less authoritarian and violent discourses and practices. Hegemonic understandings of migrants' involvement in the global sex industry in terms of ‘trafficking’ erase these important dynamics and dimensions, which underpin intricate feelings and experiences of advantage, disadvantage and exploitation. By failing to engage with the meanings that migrants working in the sex industry ascribe to their working and personal lives, the (anti)trafficking logic of ‘humanitarian intervention’ enforces forms of solidarity and support that appeal to the minority and harm the majority of the people they are supposed to ‘rescue’.     

Enlivened Geographies of Volunteering: Situated,Embodied and Emotional Practices of Voluntary Action

Abstract

Examining the everyday practices and feelings of volunteering, in particular their situated, emotional and embodied nature, serves to place the experiences of volunteers centrally in accounts of what matters in the doing of volunteering and goes beyond service provision or active citizenship. Using qualitative evidence from three collaborative research projects, we present enlivened geographies of volunteering which focus on: the situatedness of formal volunteering in place and the negotiation of local ‘moral economies’ of norms and expectations surrounding access to volunteering opportunities and the practices of volunteering; complex positionings of informal volunteering in biographies of social participation; and intersections of embodiment and emotions in experiences among environmental volunteers. We contribute to the development of social geographies which are ‘more-than-representational’ and argue that connecting insights on everyday practices of volunteering with wider policy and practice agendas requires a focus on the enduring, but also emergent and excessive nature of the spaces of doing volunteering, on the relational nature of volunteering, and on opening up debates in the networks of research-policy-practice which understand spaces of volunteering as entailing more than volunteering.     

From “one world archaeology” to one world,many archaeologies

Bienvenido al primer número de Archaeologies, la revista del World Archaeological Congress. Hay dos aspectos que la convierten en una adición significativa y novedosa a las revistas de literatura especializada hasta ahora disponibles. En primer lugar ejerce como foro de debate y diálogo que facilita las conexiones entre arqueólogos que se identifican con el Norte y el Sur el Este y el Oeste, con contextos desarrollados y sub-desarrollados, con naciones dominantes y subordinadas, con agrupaciones y con individuos. En segundo lugar destaca por el reconocimiento explícito de que esta multiplicidad de voces se halla estructurada por relaciones del poder y de privilegio, debido a las diferencias en cuanto al acceso a los recursos, y por poseer experiencias y memorias históricas diversas. Es este segundo aspecto en particular el que nos mueve más allá de la política de representación hacia algo nuevo y potencialmente más estimulante. Para estos nuevos tiempos proponemos un nuevo lema: no “Una Arqueología Mundial”, sino Un Mundo, Numerosas Arqueologías.

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Résumé Nous sommes heureux de vous présenter le premier numéro de la revue du Congrès Mondial de l'Archéologie. Cette revue contribue de fa?on originale à la littérature grace à deux aspects significatifs. Premièrement, elle agit comme forum de discussions et de dialogues entre les archéologues associés au nord, au sud, à l'est ou à l'ouest, à des contextes développés ou sous-développés, à des nations dominantes ou non et à des regroupements ou des individus. Le deuxième aspect réside dans la reconnaissance explicite, que cette vocation multiple est structurée par des relations de pouvoir et de privilège, par une accessibilité différente aux ressources et par des mémoires collectives et des expériences historiques distinctes. Ce second aspect, en particulier, nous amène au-delà des politiques de représentation vers quelque chose de nouveau et potentiellement plus stimulant. Pour exprimer cette nouvelle vision de l'archéologie nous proposons un nouveau slogan: pas. Une archéologie du monde mais. Un monde, plusieurs archéologies.

     

Changing the Rules to Change the House: Electoral Reform and the 2006 Electoral Contest for the Victorian Legislative Council

On 25 November, 2006, Victorians participated in a general State election in which a new electoral system was being used for the Legislative Council. The electoral reform was part of an overall reform of the upper house undertaken by the Bracks Labor government. This article examines the electoral reform of the Victorian Legislative Council and the politics associated with this major change. It argues that this reform was the product of a Labor commitment to reform Australia's State upper houses that had already been implemented in three other States. It also reviews the outcome of the 2006 election to assess the extent to which the outcome matched the expectation of advocates of reform.     

The Digital Generation?: Children,ICT and the Everyday Nature of Social Exclusion

In this paper we explore the potentially inclusionary and exclusionary implications of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) for children through an examination of ICT policies and practices within UK schools. We begin by outlining the rhetoric of inclusion evident in UK government policy and by reflecting on how these discourses are mobilised in three case-study schools. We go on to consider issues of social exclusion, demonstrating that both material and social factors can prevent access to appropriate computer technology. In particular, we emphasise the importance of the way that children negotiate the meanings and use of computers through their everyday practices within the classroom. The paper concludes by arguing that only when we recognise that children's use of computers is about not only the broad-scale distribution of resources but also children's everyday social relations can we hope to institute policies that promote an inclusive 'information society'.