Striking Women

Striking_Women_Cover‘Striking Women: South Asian workers’ struggles in the UK labour market from Grunwick to Gate Gourmet‘ is a Follow-on project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and undertaken by Sundari Anitha (University of Lincoln), Ruth Pearson (University of Leeds) and Linda McDowell (University of Oxford).

There are three kinds of resources in the project – the first is an educational site about migration, women and work, rights and responsibilites at work and the story of the action by South Asian women during the Grunwick and Gate Gourmet industrial disputes. These resources can be found on www.striking-women.org.

The second resource is a two-part comic which depicts the life stories of two South Asian women involved with these disputes, downloadable from the site.  The third is a mobile exhibition which can be borrowed by community groups and organisations. For further information, contact sanitha@lincoln.ac.uk

Somewhere nowhere: lives without homes

Somewhere Nowhere post

The graphic novel Somewhere nowhere: lives without homes has been worked on by a number of researchers including Professor Peter Somerville and has provided readers with a unique insight into the lives of homeless people. The abstract of the book – or rather, the abstract of the graphic novel outlines the content as “real experiences of people who have experienced homelessness”. Researcher Gareth Morris gives a great account of the graphic novel’s conception on his blog, whilst illustrator Sam Dahl has images from the novel on his blog. Copies of the novel can be bought at lulu.com.

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Images Courtesy of Sam Dahl – http://www.samdahl.co.uk/

 

Interpreting Rurality: Somerville’s multidisciplinary Research

Interpreting Rurality

Professor Peter Somerville has a wealth of experience practising in multidisciplinary research. With psychologists and sociologists at the University of Salford on multiple exclusion homelessness research, as well as with practitioners working for homelessness organisations; Somerville has also co-edited a book (with Bosworth in the Lincoln Business School) on Interpreting Rurality (Routledge, 2013), with chapters from disciplines that include economics, social policy, criminology, tourism, business studies, history, literary criticism, and rural sociology.

Within these chapters, contributors present research across a range of subjects allowing critical reflections upon their personal and disciplinary interpretations of “rural”. This resulting volume means that chapters give an emergent sense of how the notion of “rural” changes and blurs as the disciplinary lens is adjusted. Somerville’s contribution will draw from a wide range of research including housing, community (including rural community, community enterprise, and community policing), cooperatives, equalities, homelessness, participation and social theory.

You can find out more by visiting the Rural and Regional Research blog:

White’s work to be published by Routledge in early 2014

Dr Lisa White’s work on state violence experienced by political detainees in Northern Ireland lies in the field of transitional justice at the intersection between criminology and politics. White’s work and original postgraduate paper, available here will be adapted and published as a sole-authored book by Routledge in early 2014. The abstract below is taken from White’s postgraduate  paper:

Using a synthesis of documentary analysis and interviews involving former
detainees, this article explores the sociology of denial in relation to
narratives of state violence which emerged from the conflict in and around
Northern Ireland. It argues that three interrelated levels of denial
described by Cohen (2001) – literal, interpretive and implicatory – can be
observed within the ‘official discourse’ surrounding the conflict, and that
these denials are experienced by former detainees in diverse and different
ways. The article contributes to the literature on state violence within the
discipline of criminology through its exploration of the lived consequences
of state denial narratives alongside former detainees who have made their
private experiences of victimhood part of a contested public history

– White, Lisa (2010) Discourse, denial and dehumanisation: former detainees’ experiences of narrating state violence in Northern Ireland. Papers from the British Criminology Conference, 10 . pp. 3-18. ISSN 1759-0043

Dobbernack’s contribution to ACCEPT

Dr Jan Dobbernack has recently contributed to ACCEPT Pluralism, a 15-country FP7 project that brought together researchers from a number of countries as well as disciplinary backgrounds (including political science, sociology, anthropology, philosophy) to look into levels of tolerance in European countries (http://www.accept-pluralism.eu).

I work with Tariq Modood and Nasar Meer on the British contribution to ACCEPT.  I am also in the final stages of my doctoral researc h, which deals with how ‘social cohesion’ has become a central component of recent social policy language. (read more)

– Dr Jan Dobbernack