Geographies of stigma : post-trafficking experiences

Funding: UK Economic and Social Research Council (Grant Number(s): RES-062-23-1490).This paper explores the relationship between human trafficking and geographies of stigma. We introduce post-trafficking contexts as important settings for understanding how geographical imaginaries underpin the everyday occurrence of stigma for those who have experienced human trafficking. We show how a focus on trafficking can speak back to some of the core migration literatures in Geography, highlighting new agendas with a particular focus on the how, where and why of stigma. The paper draws on qualitative research in Nepal and interviews with 46 women who have experienced trafficking, to explain how geographies of stigma circumscribe the agency of returnees and affect their livelihoods and mobilities. It examines themes of spatial differentiation, territorialisation and scalar processes in relation to the production and navigation of stigma. It shows how post-trafficking is given meaning and expressed through spatial form and relations, which become manifest in scalar hierarchies of stigma. The argument highlights how these hierarchies are anchored through trafficking routes and destinations. It contrasts village and city settings as potential sites of return, bringing centre stage the role of the city in mediating returnee’s experiences. The analysis indicates how the categories of migrant and trafficked women are co-produced through bureaucratisation processes. The documents and identificatory practices at the heart of state and non-state interventions help produce the terms of in/visibility and social recognition for migrant women who often want to remain hidden. At the same time, they also reproduce some of the practices and mechanisms that underpin trafficking, thereby shaping the rejection, harassment and abuse that comes with geographies of stigma for returnee women.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Returning to sexual stigma : post-trafficking lives

The research for this paper was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council – ESRC Res-062-23-1490: ‘Post Trafficking in Nepal: Sexuality and Citizenship in Livelihood Strategies’. Diane Richardson would also like to acknowledge the support provided by the award of a Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship, ‘Transforming Citizenship: Sexuality, Gender and Citizenship Struggles’ [award MRF-2012-106].This article is concerned with returning to sexual stigma in two key respects. First, it prompts a return to the conceptual understanding of sexual stigma and makes an important contribution to critiques of the individualised frameworks that have dominated much of the literature on stigma to date, through a critical analysis of sexual stigma as a collective process at different scales and locations. Second, using empirical data from a qualitative study of post-trafficking experiences of women in Nepal as a case study to develop theoretical understandings of the production of stigma, it explores modalities of sexualized stigma encountered on return from trafficking situations. Within the trafficking literature there has been very little attention to what happens after trafficking. This article addresses this gap in focusing on lives post-trafficking and, in addition, contributes to the limited research on trafficking in Nepal.PostprintPeer reviewe

Post-trafficking bordering practices : perverse co-production, marking and stretching borders

The research for this paper was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council – ESRC Res-062-23-1490: ‘Post Trafficking in Nepal: Sexuality and Citizenship in Livelihood Strategies’.This paper highlights the significance of post-trafficking scenarios for understanding bordering practices in political geography. In so doing, it addresses two significant research gaps: the lack of attention to trafficking in geography and the failure of wider interdisciplinary debates to engage with post-trafficking specifically. While extensive research in political geography has addressed the related experiences of refugees, asylum seekers and 'illegals', much of this work has centred on policies, processes and practices that aim to keep 'unwanted strangers out'. By contrast, very little research has addressed how the border is configured for and by those who are crossing-back over; those who are 'returning home', in this case from diverse trafficking situations. The paper draws on recent empirical research on post-trafficking citizenship and livelihoods in Nepal which examined how women returning from trafficking situations deal with stigma and marginalisation. Our analysis illuminates how bordering practices circumscribe and shape women's lives in powerful ways as they seek to (re)establish a sense of belonging and respect. We examine the interplay of state and non-state actors (national and transnational) in structuring mobility and anti-trafficking advocacy through a range of bordering practices and explore how the border is (co-)produced by varied actors at different border sites. This includes women returning from diverse trafficking situations, who invoke the border to argue that they are 'not as trafficked' as other women, and others who perform the border differently as agents for trafficking prevention.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Co-producing a post-trafficking agenda : collaborating on transforming citizenship in Nepal

This article discusses how a new agenda on post-trafficking is gaining momentum through academic and activist anti-trafficking collaborations focused on co-producing knowledge with women who have returned from trafficking situations. Co-production of this nature is important as the issues raised by post-trafficking scenarios are largely ignored in anti-trafficking strategies, and the stigmatisation and poverty which women in these circumstances encounter means they rarely have a voice in policy-making. Drawing on research in Nepal, we present four types of co-produced data around transforming citizenship post-trafficking, and reflect on the strategies for generating and using them for advocacy purposes.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Education for disaster resilience : lessons from El Niño

Funding: Scottish Funding Council GCRF funding enabled us to build our Peru-Scotland team. Two Arts and Humanities Research Council projects (AH/T004444/1: “Fishing and farming in the desert'? A platform for understanding El Niño food system opportunities in the context climate change in Sechura, Peru”; “El Nino a phenomenon with opportunities: learning history and valuing community assets for an empowering digital curriculum in northern Peru” AH/V012215/1) enabled us to consolidate and deepen our initial research.This paper calls for greater attention to the role of youth and children as development actors in the context of education for disaster management. Drawing on debates in disaster studies and children’s geographies, we explore the possibilities offered by everyday formal education spaces, often overlooked in disasters management practice, to engage children in disaster preparedness and resilience planning. Using the case study of Peru, we examine the extent to which national responses to the restrictions that the COVID-19 pandemic placed on in-person teaching, opened-up opportunities to engage with disaster management in new ways. We draw on the case of an innovative digital curricula that uses intergenerational storytelling about the El Niño phenomenon to investigate livelihood opportunities and climate change pressures in northern coastal Peru, exploring how the phenomenon benefits desert populations. We assess the role of participatory virtual learning in facilitating disaster knowledge and climate adaptation awareness among students and critically examine the youth subjectivities that are constructed through these processes. We conclude calling for greater engagement with children’s formal education spaces in climate adaptation strategies, while cautioning against conceptualising children and young people as only ‘adults in the making’, rather than as impacted individuals with current agency and everyday capacities.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

International Voluntary Health Networks (IVHNs) : a social-geographical framework

Trans-national medicine, historically associated with colonial politics, is now central to discourses of global health and development, thrust into mainstream media by catastrophic events (earthquakes, disease epidemics), and enshrined in the 2015 Sustainable Development Goals. Volunteer human-resource is an important contributor to international health-development work. International Voluntary Health Networks (IVHNs, that connect richer and poorer countries through healthcare) are situated at a meeting-point between geographies and sociologies of health. More fully developed social-geographic understandings will illuminate this area, currently dominated by instrumental health-professional perspectives. The challenge we address is to produce a geographically and sociologically-robust conceptual framework that appropriately recognises IVHNs’ potentials for valuable impacts, while also unlocking spaces of constructive critique. We examine the importance of the social in health geography, and geographical potentials in health sociology (focusing on professional knowledge construction, inequality and capital, and power), to highlight the mutual interests of these two fields in relation to IVHNs. We propose some socio-geographical theories of IVHNs that do not naturalise inequality, that understand health as a form of capital, prioritise explorations of power and ethical practice, and acknowledge the more-than-human properties of place. This sets an agenda for theoretically-supported empirical work on IVHNs.PostprintPeer reviewe

Transitions to religious adulthood : relational geographies of youth, religion and international volunteering

This paper draws on data from an Arts and HumanitiesResearch Council and Economic and Social Research Council funded Religion and Society Youth Call project (AH/G016461/1).This paper offers important insights into the contemporary nature of youth transitions and the ways in which religious affiliation and engagement with international volunteering influences and interplays with negotiations of the life course. Situated within interdisciplinary debates about youth transitions, as well as discussions about relational geographies of age, religion and voluntarism, we demonstrate the multiple relationalities that are at play as young religious international volunteers negotiate the transition to religious adulthood. We focus on religious, vocational and aged relationalities to explore how these are engaged with, and experienced by, young people 'over there' in Latin America and 'back home' in the UK. Additionally, we explore how these relationalities shape identities within and between religiosity, age (youth) and volunteering, and how these are (re)organised through networks, flows and mobilities. To do so, we draw on our analysis of the experiences of young volunteers who participated in faith-based international volunteering with an evangelical Christian organisation that sends teams of young people on short-term missions to Latin America. We draw on our analyses of two sets of interviews with 22 young volunteers, 14 of whom also completed a diary about their experiences, supplemented by four focus groups. Our analysis points to the ways in which the spatial emphasis of geographical engagements with youth transitions can be well informed through considerations of religion; a key challenge being how young volunteers renegotiate their sense of religious self on returning 'back home'. In addition, although our participants displayed some self-reflexivity about the social construction of age, they did not necessarily exhibit an understanding of the power underpinning their encounters with others. Finally, our findings open up possibilities for appreciating the diversity of volunteering experiences and the role that volunteer organisations have in shaping the expectations and aspirations of those who participate in their programmes.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe