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

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

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

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

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Imagining asylum, governing asylum seekers : complexity reduction and policy making in the UK home office

Drawing on elite interviews with UK asylum policymakers, this article entails a detailed elaboration of how policy programmes are produced by particular ways of imagining asylum seeking in an effort to reduce the complexity of the phenomenon and thus devise policy responses to it. The article explores how such processes can lead to the curtailment of the economic rights of asylum seekers with specific reference the UK policy of severely restricting labour market access for asylum seekers. The policy imaginary—the story which is utilized in reducing the complexity of irregular migration in this context—is the idea of the ‘economic pull factor’. That is that disingenuous asylum seekers (economic migrants in disguise) are ‘pulled’ to particular countries by economic opportunities. This construal of what drives irregular migration for asylum is not natural or inevitable, it is the outcome of institutionally embedded ways of viewing the world and Britain’s place within it. This discussion brings insights from critical policy studies to bear on asylum policy making, offering new ways of understanding the practices and processes of policy making in this field