The black minority ethnic third sector: a resource paper

Contributing towards building a foundation of knowledge on the black minority ethnic (BME) third sector, this paper offers an introductory resource on research in this field. The paper begins with discussion on the (contested) concept of a BME third sector (BME TS) and the existing narrative of distinctiveness; it then goes on to highlight the importance of robust comparative analyses to identify empirical trends of difference between subsectors in order to examine the policy implications for the different subsectors. In an attempt to bring together a disparate collection of material on the BME third sector the remaining section of the paper provides brief overviews of material about different types of organisation that might constitute the BME TS in the broadest sense of the term. These include: refugee and asylum seeker organisations (RCOs), faith based organisations, diasporic immigrant community organisations, black organisations, gypsy and traveller organisations and multicultural organisations. In closing, the paper identifies gaps in the current research base that will be of interest to the wider research community and will inform TSRC's cross-cutting equality research programme

Asylum and refugee support in the UK : civil society filling the gaps?

The vast majority of asylum seekers in the UK are not permitted to enter the labour market. In the absence of the right to work asylum seekers receive welfare support, which amounts to less than a third of the weekly spend of the poorest 10% of British citizens. This article presents new research on the third sector response to the poverty created by this policy regime. Through a four-pronged methodological design we map the scale of this response, and in doing so offer an alternative critical perspective on the inadequacies of government policy, inadequacies which lead to the human rights of some who are within, or who have been through the system, being breached

Complexity reduction and policy consensus: asylum seekers, the right to work, and the ‘pull factor’ thesis in the UK context

Since the early 2000s, asylum policy in Western states has become increasingly dominated by the concept of the ‘pull factor’—the idea that the economic rights afforded to asylum seekers can act as a migratory pull, and will have a bearing on the numbers of asylum applications received. The pull factor thesis has been widely discredited by researchers but remains powerful among policymakers. Through an analysis of the pull factor in the UK context, and drawing on insights from Cultural Political Economy, this article argues that the hegemony of the pull factor thesis is best understood as a ‘policy imaginary’ which has become sedimented through both discursive and extra-discursive practices and processes. The article offers a means of understanding how a common sense assumption—which is challenged by a large body of evidence—has come to dominate policymaking in a key area of concern for politicians and policymakers

Asylum Seekers and the Labour Market: Spaces of Discomfort and Hostility

This article examines the relationship in the UK between asylum-seeking and the labour market. Since 2002, asylum-seekers have not been allowed to work unless they have waited over twelve months for an initial decision on their asylum claim. This policy change occurred as employment was considered a ‘pull factor’ encouraging unfounded asylum claims. Despite not having the right to work, asylum-seekers – and especially those whose applications for refugee status have been refused by the UK government – interact with the labour market in manifold ways. Drawing on an ESRC-funded study in the UK's Yorkshire and Humber region and related studies, this article argues that both asylum-seekers and refused asylum-seekers form a hyper-exploitable pool of ‘illegalised’ and unprotected workers. As a vital part of their survival terrain, work is largely experienced as for-cash labouring in low-paid labour market sectors where the spectre of exploitation and even ‘modern slavery’ are perpetual threats. Recent policy shifts are deepening such threats through creating increasingly ‘uncomfortable’ and ‘hostile’ environments for certain categories of migrants

Engendering a future for the Catholic Church

The future of women in the Catholic Church, and indeed of the Church itself, is a point of heated contention. This article explores how the climate emergency is causing Catholics not only to reposition the human subject in relation to the natural world, but to re-evaluate and redefine the nature of the actors within it. Within this emerging sphere of Catholic environmentalism, institutional priorities have been slowly reconfigured, allowing arguments for greater liturgical inclusivity to resurface in novel ways. This process has been particularly pronounced in the Church of Latin America, where questions of sex and gender have become more polarized than ever

Afterword

The study of religion has come a long way since the bad old days of bold, universalizing theory. The claim that religion can be readily recognized across time and place because it has a sort of ‘essence’ is today viewed as preposterous. What we would much rather insist on is the notion that religion as a category is shifting and complex, with vagueness kept at the center of our analyses. In this article, I play devil’s advocate by asking what (more) we can possibly gain by continuing to foreground religion’s conceptual shiftiness. Reflecting on this collection, I explore how a focus on genealogies and biographies might offer us new insight on the distinction between religiosity and religion. Defining religiosity as a species of attention that inheres in persons, I suggest that writing about and researching religion engages the religiosity of the author, and that religiosity, in turn, may (or may not) bring about definitions or assemblages we might recognize as ‘religion’

Ways of Seeing: Sexism the Forgotten Prejudice?

Recent developments in feminism, charted in Gender, Place and Culture over the past 21 years, have stressed the relational, differentiated and contested nature of gender. This has led to the rejection of the unified category women, and with this the right for feminism to make claims on behalf of all women. This paper argues that an unintended consequence of this development in ways of thinking about gender is that patriarchy as a form of power relations has become relatively neglected. It draws on research from a European Research Council project (including biographical interviews and case studies of a gym and workplace) to demonstrate that while the development of equality legislation has contained the public expression of the most blatant forms of gender prejudice, sexism persists and is manifest in subtle ways. As a consequence, it can be difficult to name and challenge with the effect that patriarchy as a power structure which systematically (re)produces gender inequalities,is obscured by its ordinariness. Rather, sexism appears only to be ‘seen’ when it affords the instantiation of other forms of prejudice, such as Islamophobia. As such, we argue that Gender, Place and Culture has a responsibility going forward to make sexism as a particular form of prejudice more visible, while also exposing the complexity and fluidity of its intersectional relationship to other forms of oppression and social categories

Beyond discipline:Discipline and lenience in religious practice. Introduction.

Questions of discipline are, today, no less ubiquitous than when under Foucault’s renowned scrutiny, but what does ‘discipline’ in diverse religious systems actually entail? In this article, we take ‘lenience’ rather than discipline as a starting point and compare its potential, both structural and ideological, in religious contexts where disciplinary flexibility shores up greater encompassing projects of moral perfectionism as opposed to those contexts in which disciplinary flexibility is a defining feature in its own right. We argue that lenience provides religious systems with a vital flexibility that is necessary to their reproduction and adaptation to the world. By taking a ‘systems’ perspective on ethnographic discussions of religious worlds, we proffer fresh observations on recent debates within the anthropology of religion on ‘ethics’, ‘failure’, and the nature of religious subjects

RESPOSTA AO ARTIGO DE MANOELA CARPENEDO: "PIEDOSAS E POLICULTURAIS: CONVERSÃO, AGÊNCIA E TORMENTO MORAL ENTRE MULHERES EVANGÉLICAS JUDAIZANTES NO BRASIL"

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Necropolitics and the slow violence of the everyday: Asylum seeker welfare in the postcolonial present

This article responds to dual calls for researching and theorising everyday social phenomena in postcolonial studies on the one hand, and serious engagement with the postcolonial within the discipline of sociology on the other. It focuses on the everyday lives of asylum seekers living on asylum seeker welfare support in the UK. Asylum seekers offer a good case study for exploring the postcolonial everyday because they live in poverty and consequently experience daily harms at the hands of the state, despite the UK fulfilling its obligations to them under human rights law. The article proposes a conceptual framework drawing together sociologies of the everyday, necropolitics and slow violence in tracing how hierarchical conceptions of human worth impact on the everyday