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research is emotional and sensual, immigration is a subject that arouses strong feelings across social and political divides, bringing with it particular methodological and ethical challenges. It is what methodologists sometimes call a ‘sensitive topic’, meaning that it can feel threatening to both research participants and researchers. Among the challenges of researching sensitive topics, Julie Brannen ( 1988 ), drawing from the ideas of the sociologist
practices of society. Diversity when mentioned is not celebrated; it may be used as the stick to beat Muslims with, because of their perceived fear of pluralism and diversity. People consume news media in such a way as to be compatible with their own personal outlook. Yet there is no mention, by participants, of media sources encouraging them to act in a criminal or violent manner. Following Shibutani's approach, what we can detect in participant responses is that when participants find themselves in a state of ambiguity due to a lack of information
This scene sets the stage for subsequent chapters. It includes two parts: first, it introduces the basic elements of the current British citizenisation process. Second, it details the fieldwork conducted for this study. The latter provides not only information about the type of material gathered and a general profile of participants, but the contextualisation of the fieldwork also adds more information to the citizenisation process itself, and the people and spaces that populate the waiting room of citizenship. British
freedom dreaming . 5 To freedom dream is to embrace a politics which has ‘more to do with imagining a different future than being pissed off about the present’, though the latter certainly holds strong. This dreaming of a better world is not entirely abstract, but rather is built out of a long history of Black resistance. It is a recovery of the scraps and fragmentary visions left behind by revolutionaries. In this book, we combine the insights of our participants with the lessons of activists, intellectuals, and
their dual British-French heritage with pride and affection, the impact of the referendum was particularly powerful and inescapably personal. Importantly, its repercussions also extended to the findings presented in this book. I have asked myself whether my participants’ rose-tinted view of London and their normative criticisms of France still ring true today. Or have the tables been turned? Could the effects of one fateful day have shattered their sense of belonging to such an extent that they no longer feel welcome in London and have sought refuge in
Introduction In an increasingly mediated society, the importance of discovery and questioning of the mundane becomes vital to ground actions, individually and collectively, in alternative ways. Memory Work is an approach developed to help explore the mundane by problematising the things we take for granted. Through recalling and documenting stories of memories and experiences, participants, researchers and research-subjects are invited to look for variety – in one's own stories as well as in relation to the stories of the others – regarding
for civil rights that persisted throughout those decades beneath the din of political violence. We also wanted to address the continued struggles for civil rights into recent times, which our project participants represented in various ways. If CCCR sought to explore how creativity was being and could be used by these groups in the present, part of our project was also to connect its theatre process with how civil rights groups had used creativity fifty years ago: we interviewed former civil rights activists about the inspiration they drew from and uses they made
was introduced to her by someone who she has a good relationship with. Nevertheless, in the given research context, any precaution on behalf of participants seems sensible and can be easily justified. Conflict and post-conflict contexts are extremely challenging environments to undertake research in. On the one hand they present a potential risk to physical safety to participants and researchers; on the other, they are characterised by an atmosphere of suspicion, uncertainty and distrust. Conflict reaches the very micro-level of people’s lives and greatly affects social
and theorised, or to uncritically perpetuate discourses of idealised activism. Nor is it our intention to homogenise our participants, or to ignore the terminologically and conceptually contested nature of ‘scholar-activist’. Indeed, in a variety of ways and to different extents, participants were quick to problematise and question the scholar-activist label. In this chapter, we consider the uneasiness that the label ‘scholar-activist’ evokes amongst our participants. Their reluctance or hesitance in adopting the scholar-activist identity makes
Introduction Having considered the objectified habitats of my London-French participants, I now address the habituation component of the habitus triad. It is worth noting that all three elements have been explicitly alluded to in reference to Bourdieusian habitus, if never – to my knowledge – combined under a triadic analytical framework. Maton ( 2012 ) deconstructs habitus into a model with two etymologically related dimensions: habitat and habit, whereas Jenkins contends that the ‘power of the habitus derives from the thoughtlessness of habit and