Opportunities and Limitations for Collective Resistance Arising from Volunteering by Asylum Seekers and Refugees in Northern England

This article asks whether volunteering by refugees and asylum seekers holds potential to foster collective resistance to the British state’s increasingly punitive asylum policies. It draws on research that included four organizational case studies and in-depth qualitative interviews with refugees and asylum seekers volunteering in a city in Northern England, and analyses this data using inter-related concepts of contradiction, hegemony and social capital. This research found that volunteering by refugees and asylum seekers had potential to contribute to cohesive social blocs that might form a basis for resistance, yet also exhibited tendencies to divide refugees and encourage individualised forms of action, which reinforced a subordinate position for the majority. The article concludes that realizing the potential of voluntary activity as a basis for collective resistance to the state’s asylum policies may require it to be combined with political education and organization

The European Union as a Gated Community: The Two-faced Border and Immigration Regime of the EU

Contains fulltext : 46253.pdf (publisher's version ) (Closed access) Contains fulltext : 46253a.pdf (author's version ) (Open Access)19 p

The complete Heyting algebra of subsystems and contextuality

noThe finite set of subsystems of a finite quantum system with variables in Z(n), is studied as a Heyting algebra. The physical meaning of the logical connectives is discussed. It is shown that disjunction of subsystems is more general concept than superposition. Consequently, the quantum probabilities related to commuting projectors in the subsystems, are incompatible with associativity of the join in the Heyting algebra, unless if the variables belong to the same chain. This leads to contextuality, which in the present formalism has as contexts, the chains in the Heyting algebra. Logical Bell inequalities, which contain "Heyting factors," are discussed. The formalism is also applied to the infinite set of all finite quantum systems, which is appropriately enlarged in order to become a complete Heyting algebra

Walking Again Lively: Towards an Ambulant and Conversive Methodology of Performance and Research

This peer-reviewed article is part of my on-going research of walking and spatial narrative practices as participatory mechanisms that engage percipients in co-production and co-presentation of knowledge of complex social issues and geographies. Solicited by the Nomadic Work/Life in the Knowledge Economy Research Team (University of Limerick) and editors of the journal special issue, the article presents new findings and analysis of the method of walking, talking and mapping developed through my practice-based research project way from home (http//:www.wayfromhome.org) and applied in a workshop and walks with refugee and arts organisations in four locations in the UK Midlands, which I led as a consultant on the AHRC KT project ‘Trans-national Communities: A Sense of Belonging’ led by Maggie O’Neill and Phil Hubbard (Loughborough University). I developed the method discussed in partnership with refugee support organisations in Plymouth between 2002-2006 as a way to elicit and present refugees and asylum seekers’ experiences and practices of home memories and home-making. It has been applied in various international and national contexts including a workshop with practitioners, NGO’s and government workers for the Meeting of Creative Community Development Projects in Catalonia event organized by Servei de Cultura de l’Ajuntament de Granollers in Spain (2006). The special issue of Visual Studies referenced in Output 3 contains O’Neill and Hubbard’s analysis of their replication of my method in ‘Trans-national Communities’. Further references to the way from home project are included in Mike Pearson’s Site-Specific Performance (2010), Deirdre Heddon and Cathy Turner’s survey of women walking artists in Performance Research Journal (April 2011), and in a chapter in Women, the Arts and Globalization: Eccentric Experience (2013) where I am interviewed by curator Tracey Warr. This output follows on from my article published in the Research in Drama Education special issue on Performance and Asylum in 2008