Maggie O'Neill

University of York · Department of Sociology

This article presents personal stories from a participatory biographical arts-based study with a specific category of racialised migrants: individuals seeking asylum, in the North East of England. Responding to the important questions posed by this special issue, the article explores individual experiences of navigating the UK's hostile environment...

This article seeks to show that activism for racialised, black and migrant women stems from their embodied lived experiences and the need for creating practices and spaces for these to manifest, be validated and expand on. Forum Theatre practice that includes the racialised body, collective reflection and reparative action can address the neo-colon...

This paper introduces notions of conviviality as both a research practice and a research outcome through an exploration of the racialised and gen-dered experiences of migrant mothers and young girls in the current hostile environment for migrants in the UK. We argue that innovative, participatory theater and walking methods constitute a convivial p...

This chapter examines and reflects on the value, history and role of biographical research methods for Cultural Sociology, defines what the concept ‘Culture’ means for Cultural Sociology. In sharing two examples that illustrate the practical application of biographical research as a method for Cultural Sociology I suggest that these examples reveal...

This article critically discusses the experiences of women who are seeking asylum in the North East of England and women who are mothers with no recourse to public funds living in London to address the questions posed by the special issue. It argues both epistemologically and methodologically for the benefits of undertaking participatory arts-based...

This chapter examines and reflects on the value, history and role of biographical research methods for Cultural Sociology, defines what the concept ‘Culture’ means for Cultural Sociology. In sharing two examples that illustrate the practical application of biographical research as a method for Cultural Sociology I suggest that these examples reveal...

his research project addresses the UK social science community's need to gain a better understanding of how participatory action research approaches engage marginalised groups in research as co-producers of knowledge. Funded by the National Centre for Research Methods/ Economic and Social Research Council, it combines walking methods and participat...

This chapter provides an overview of developments and new dimensions in biographical research in the UK. Building upon the comprehensive review of biographical research centres and individual researchers by Brian Roberts in 2010, which created a framework for current analysis, we focus, on the definition(s) of biographical methods, followed by the...

This virtual roundtable gathers together scholars across a range of geographies, subdisciplines, and points in their careers to consider what it means to them to map gendered violence in transnational and global ways.

In The Sociology of Deviance: an Obituary (1994:vii) Colin Sumner set out to “portray a history of one of the most developed forms of critical, formal, thought on the subject of moral censure, namely the sociology of deviance” critiquing the sociology of deviance and by introducing a new theoretical field called the sociology of censure. The text b...

This paper discusses a participatory arts-based research project undertaken with a refugee support organization in the United Kingdom, the Regional Refugee Forum North East (RRFNE), and a local women's group. The project used photography, storytelling, and walking methods to explore ways of seeing women's lived experiences, well-being, and sense of...

Committed to exploring democratic ways of doing research with racialized migrant women and taking up the theme of “what citizenship studies can learn from taking seriously migrant mothers' experiences” for theory and practice this paper explores walking as a method for doing participatory arts-based research with women seeking asylum, drawing upon...

This article shares a walk with Faye, who was living in a direct access hostel, and Open Clasp women’s theatre company, to think through the themes of this special edition: the role of vision and imagery in fostering the imagination, ‘creative seeing’ and creative knowing. As a participatory, arts-based methodology, walking has much to recommend it...

While feminist arts-based projects have gained legitimacy, theory guiding the use of visual images in field research has lagged. Drawing on psychoanalytic-feminist theory and participatory action research methods, the article presents a study carried out with women refugee and asylum seekers that focuses on their experiences in seeking a place of s...

Gary Craig and Maggie O’Neill's topical chapter on British national and local policies on ‘race’ argues that due in part to deliberate strategies to water down equality legislation, and partly due to the unintended consequences of ‘race’ policy, especially at the local level, ‘race’ policy has operated to sweep racism under the carpet or, worse, se...

The aim of this chapter is to assess critically contemporary legal reforms that operate according to an abolitionist vision.

Childhood carries a heavy symbolic load. Children embody society’s fears about its present and are also emblems of its hopes and dreads regarding the future (Jenks, 2007). When they either commit — or are the victims of — crime, this symbolic freight becomes even heavier. Their transgression or victimisation appears to highlight not just the failur...

The criminal woman occupies an anomalous cultural position. Not only does she transgress society’s legal codes, she also transgresses its norms of gender as the active flouting of rule and convention that criminality entails is perceived as at odds with feminine passivity. This conception of the female criminal as ‘doubly deviant’, a term coined by...

In this chapter, psychosocial analyses (Gadd and Jefferson, 2007) are used to explore representations of madness and liminality. We focus our attention upon filmic representations to generate new knowledge and understanding of the poetics and possibilities of transgressive imaginings of madness in the context of mediated constructions of deviance,...

Refugees and asylum seekers have become the folk devils of the twenty-first century. This chapter explores research undertaken with people situated in the asylum-migration nexus (refugees, asylum seekers and undocumented people), through participatory and biographical research and selected filmic texts. Key themes addressed in the chapter include t...

In the late twentieth century, the figure of the serial killer became culturally ubiquitous and ‘a flashpoint in contemporary society’ (Seltzer, 1998, p. 2). He (serial killers are usually male) was depicted across a profusion of films, television programmes and novels (Jarvis, 2007) and narratives based on serial killing developed into a genre of...

The first quotation by Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet in 1836 illuminates the fact that prostitution is accepted by bourgeois society (selling sex is not illegal) but the prostitute, the whore is not accepted, she is ‘other’ perceived as immoral, a danger, a threat to ‘normal’ femininity and, as a consequence suffers social exclusion, marginalisation...

This final chapter takes as its starting point the need to uncover the counter-narratives, the hidden histories of the people labelled as deviants and criminals in inner-city neighbourhoods. In doing so, the chapter draws upon community arts-based research conducted by O’Neill and Stenning (2011) in downtown eastside Vancouver (skid row) where ‘com...

Where might the kind of critical and cultural criminological research and analysis we undertake in Transgressive Imaginations take us1? In a recent talk at Durham University, Zygmunt Bauman (2011) offered the audience an invitation to develop an agenda for sociology. Drawing upon four of Bauman’s key points, we close this book by offering an invita...

Transgressive Imaginations focuses upon the breaking of rules and taboos involved in ‘doing crime’, including violent crime, as represented in fictive texts and ethnographic research. Here transgression is understood not only as exceeding boundaries or limits (Jenks, 2003, p. 7) but as resistance, protest and escape. Particular emphasis is placed u...

This article reflects on a ten-year trajectory of research, predominantly in the East Midlands, funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The projects all employed participatory action research methods that involved working in partnership with forced migrants (those situated in the asylum–migration nexus) and community arts organizations...

Following Matthews’ (2005) recent examination of prostitution’s changing regulatory framework, we offer a critical account of the move from ‘enforcement’ (punishment) to ‘multi-agency’ (regulatory) responses as, in part, a consequence of new forms of governance. We focus on the increasing salience of exiting - a move favoured by Matthews as signali...

This paper outlines the origins of this special issue: a UK Economic and Social Research Council supported seminar series on ‘Careers and Migration’. The series elucidated a number of salient (though under-researched) issues: migration as a diverse and complex process; the loss, recovery and reconstruction of career capital as central in the migrat...

In response to the precarious and disadvantaged position of forced migrants in the United States and the UK, marked by unemployment, under employment and loss of career capital, this paper draws upon a relational cultural paradigm and a life design career model in order to understand migrant work life, shape the career intervention process and exam...

Issues of asylum, migration, humanitarian protection, and integration/belonging are of growing interest beyond the disciplines of refugee studies, migration, and social policy. Rooted in more than two decades of scholarship, this book uses critical social theory and the participatory, biographical, and arts-based methods used with asylum seekers, r...

This chapter provides a documentation of the key findings from research. It examines in detail the experiences of children, young people, and unaccompanied young people, who narrate their own experiences through participatory arts- and arts-based research. This research raises themes of relational needs, poverty, community-based support, and humili...

This chapter considers the refused asylum seekers and discusses destitution, poverty, and social networks. It begins with a discussion of the European policy context and the status of destitution in the UK. The chapter ends with a section on some asylum seekers who do not return for voluntary assisted return due to fear of persecution and those who...

This chapter centres on the creative ways refugee communities in the UK have survived and managed to construct lives for themselves in host countries. It is also concerned with the representation of asylum seekers and refugees in the mainstream media and the research that has occurred in documenting this. The discussion focuses on two examples: the...

This chapter discusses the process of globalisation and the international context to the movement of people across borders. It also studies the important role of humiliation in processes that lead to migration, and the humiliation experienced in seeking asylum and refuge. The chapter provides a description of the international network for human dig...

This chapter clarifies the importance of ‘understanding’ experiences of humiliation and mis-recognition that are experienced by people in the asylum–migration nexus. It examines the importance of fostering human dignity and social justice both globally and locally, and addresses some questions on social justice and the asylum–migration nexus. The c...

This chapter reviews the methodological issues that were raised in Chapters Three and Four. It documents a research trajectory that was conducted for over a decade using the ethno-mimetic research, participatory-action research and participatory-arts methods with the new-arrival groups and communities. These communities were situated in the asylum–...

While walking has long been implicated in ethnography and arts practice, in recent years it has become increasingly central as a means of both creating new embodied ways of knowing and producing scholarly narrative. This introduction explores this cross-disciplinary coalescence of interest in peripatetic practice. It raises a series of questions in...

This article outlines a research project that used participatory action research (PAR) and arts practice (ethno-mimesis) to explore the senses of belonging negotiated by asylum seekers, refugees and undocumented migrants in the English East Midlands. At the core of this project was a walking event in which refugees and new arrivals guided long-term...

Taking a feminist cultural criminological analysis to the regulation of sex work in the United Kingdom, this paper argues against the dominant deviancy and the increasingly abolitionist criminal justice model for regulating sex work. The paper begins by offering a critique of the dominant regulatory regimes which have operated since the Victorian e...

This chapter questions the current focus on exiting sex work (Home Office, 2006) from a framework informed by intersectionality (Jackson, 2005), emphasising the importance of biographical and participatory action research (PAR) methodologies that foreground the voices and images of sex workers.1 This framework involves a cultural-materialist analys...

This article considers the likely success of recent reforms of prostitution policy by reflecting on a recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation-funded study that examined the experiences of those living and working in areas of street sex work. This empirical work points to some of the dangers of policy frameworks and techniques of control that continue to...

This chapter explores government proposals for a prostitution strategy focusing predominantly on: prevention of involvement; fostering routes out; and protecting communities from street-based sex markets. It discusses the proposals' implications for ‘community safety’ within the broader context of New Labour governance and the potential seeds of tr...

Introduction Recent reforms of prostitution policy in the UK have been abolitionist in tone, with concerns about community safety and violence against women encouraging zero-tolerance strategies. In relation to street sex work, such strategies include a range of interventions – from voluntary referrals to compulsory intervention orders and Anti-Soc...

Many commentators have attempted to analyze and explain the nature of prostitution. However this is the first textbook to offer a complete overview of the way it operates within contemporary society, its characteristics, organizational structures, and cultural contexts. The book also explores how criminal, social, and health policies have sought to...

This paper presents a 10-year trajectory of research in the United Kingdom exploring the asylum-migration nexus and processes of belonging using participatory and arts-based methodologies. The relational dynamics involved in exploring the space between ethnography and arts-based practice (ethno-mimesis) are viewed through the work of critical theor...

This paper focuses upon the transformative role of art and the methodological approach of working with artists to conduct ethnographic research with refugees and asylum seekers. In exploring the space or hyphen between ethnography (sociology) and arts based practice (photos, installations, textual practice) I suggest that the combination of biograp...

There is substantial literature on how fears of Other populations are prompting the increased surveillance and regulation of public spaces at the heart of Western cities. Yet, in contrast to the consumer-oriented spaces of the city centre, there has been relatively little attention devoted to the quality of the street spaces in residential neighbou...

Measures to tackle anti-social behaviour and nuisance to residents, particularly in urban areas, have been a major focus of UK Government policies over recent years. The Crime and Disorder Act 1998 and subsequent legislation such as the Anti-Social Behaviour Act 2003 introduced stricter powers, particularly through the use of anti-social behaviour...

This chapter examines the impact of gentrification and prostitution on urban neighbourhood space. The studies in five British cities suggest there are a multitude of tensions that may arise in areas of street sex working, and, irrespective of the cause of these tensions, the result is a differentiated landscape of tolerance. The chapter argues that...

Conceived as a series of policies intended to bring people back into cities, urban renaissance offers a new vision of environmentally sustainable, socially balanced, and aesthetically inspired urban regeneration. While clearly informed by New Labour's specific concerns about active citizenship, social inclusion, and community participation, urban r...

Following Matthews' (2005) recent examination of prostitution's changing regulatory framework, we offer a critical account of the move from ‘enforcement’ (punishment) to ‘multi-agency’ (regulatory) responses as, in part, a consequence of new forms of governance. We focus on the increasing salience of exiting—a move favoured by Matthews as signallin...

This article considers the likely success of recent reforms of prostitution policy by reflecting on a recent Joseph Rowntree Foundation-funded study that examined the experiences of those living and working in areas of street sex work. This empirical work points to some of the dangers of policy frameworks and techniques of control that continue to...

This article argues that there are two main barriers preventing imagining and actioning an inclusive, holistic strategy for prostitution reform in the UK. It identifies five key tenets needed to improve the situations for men and women involved in selling sex. Findings from innovative research methods are used to explore how community safety may be...

This paper focuses upon renewed methodologies for social research in order to explore and re-present the complexity of lived relations in contemporary society. Renewed methodologies can transgress conventional or traditional ways of analysing and representing research data. This paper combines socio-cultural theory; experience (life stories); and p...

Not all the time...but mostly... is the outcome of collaboration across the genres of ethnographic research, and visual and performing arts. In exploring renewed methodologies for social research Maggie sought to develop a methodological model (ethno-mimesis) rooted in feminist thought and practice, that represented in visual artistic forms the mul...

Basada en una investigación etnográfica, esta obra aborda a la prostitución desde la industria del sexo, perspectiva desde la cuál, el asunto deja de ser una forma de explotación y degradación. La autora busca desmitificar la imagen estereotipada de las prostitutas a través de su propio testimonio y otras formas de representación social usadas en e...

This paper undertakes what might be described as an exploratory consideration of Steiner Waldorf education to see what light such an examination might throw upon and contribute to policy debates on spiritual education 1 1 This article is revised version of a paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association in C...

Prostitution will remain a crime in this country, and in other countries which criminalise it, so long as there is no identifiable voting bloc that clamours for change in the law… Prostitutes get scapegoated for AIDS and few people cry out. Prostitutes are murdered and the police tell no-one until ten or more have been killed by one person. And eve...