Kate Hardy - Academia.edu (original) (raw)
Papers by Kate Hardy
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2021
An increasing amount of sex work in the United Kingdom is now digitally mediated, as workers and ... more An increasing amount of sex work in the United Kingdom is now digitally mediated, as workers and clients identify each other, agree prices and services, undertake security checks, and often make payment through various platforms and websites. Existing accounts of “digital sex work” have been both overly technological deterministic and optimistic, largely invisibilizing capital and the new forms of power and control it enables. The authors argue that the dominant platform for digital sex work in the United Kingdom, AdultWork, is reshaping the market in direct sexual services, driving down standards and prices, and normalizing risky behaviors. The article posits that these changes in the sex industry are symptomatic and reflective of wider shifts in labor-capital relations and technology and therefore argues that bringing research on platform work and sex work into closer dialogue is mutually productive. Studies of digital sex work would benefit from critical insights into power and c...
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2021
Urban scholars have traditionally associated displacement in cities of the global North with gent... more Urban scholars have traditionally associated displacement in cities of the global North with gentrification, generally understood as a class-based process of neighbourhood change. This article expands this scalar focus and adopts the larger scale of the local authority district (in this case the London borough) as its epistemological starting point to study the displacement of homeless people by the local state. Participatory action research was undertaken with housing campaigners in the East London borough of Newham to explore who is being displaced, their experiences of displacement and the impacts of displacement on their lives. Empirically, the article argues that displacement in this case is a product of national welfare state restructuring – or ‘austerity urbanism’ – implemented through a localised regime of ‘welfare chauvinism’ in which some groups are framed as economically unproductive and therefore undeserving of access to social housing. Displacement has the effect of rei...
American Behavioral Scientist, 2018
A “partial renaissance” of self-employment in labor markets of the global North has attracted pol... more A “partial renaissance” of self-employment in labor markets of the global North has attracted policy concern within national, supranational, and global arenas, yet sociological thought has been somewhat slower to respond to this phenomenon. In response, this special issue focuses on everyday self-employment among workers drawn from countries across the world. The collection of articles in this volume originated, in part, from a recent symposium that took place at City, University of London, which highlighted the contribution of sociology and cognate disciplines to the study of self-employment. The volume considers the social and structural forces that condition this economic activity as an ideology and practice, as well as the constraints and opportunities for its maintenance and reproduction. It also examines the everyday lives of self-employed workers and in particular the ways in which self-employment is experienced across a range of geographical, occupational, and industrial con...
Work, Employment and Society, 2018
In this Foreword to the special issue ‘In, Against and Beyond Precarity’ the guest editors take s... more In this Foreword to the special issue ‘In, Against and Beyond Precarity’ the guest editors take stock of the existing literature on precarity, highlighting the strengths and limitations of using this concept as an analytical tool for examining the world of work. Concluding that the overstretched nature of concept has diluted its political effectiveness, the editors suggest instead a focus on precarization as a process, drawing from perspectives that focus on the objective conditions, as well as subjective and heterogeneous experiences and perceptions of insecure employment. Framed in this way, they present a summary of the contributions to the special issue spanning a range of countries and organizational contexts, identifying key drivers, patterns and forms of precarization. These are conceptualized as implicit, explicit, productive and citizenship precarization. These forms and patterns indicate the need to address precariousness in the realm of social reproduction and post-wage p...
Medical Tourism and Transnational Health Care, 2013
Gender, Place & Culture, 2013
Cosmetic surgery tourism is a significant and growing area of medical tourism. This paper explore... more Cosmetic surgery tourism is a significant and growing area of medical tourism. This paper explores the gendered construction of cosmetic surgery tourism in different geographical locations through an analysis of destination websites in Spain, the Czech Republic and Thailand. We examine the ways in which gender and other intersections of identity interact with notions of space, place and travel to construct particular locations and cosmetic surgery tourist experiences. The relational geographies of skill, regulation and hygiene in discourses of cosmetic surgery risk are also explored. We conclude that accounts producing cosmetic surgery tourism as undifferentiated experience of 'nonplace' fail to acknowledge the complex constructions of specific destinations in promotional materials targeting international consumers in a global marketplace.
British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2013
Robust academic research on the topic of students involved in the sex industry is in its infancy,... more Robust academic research on the topic of students involved in the sex industry is in its infancy, yet the relationship appears consistent and permanent. This paper draws on findings from the largest study into the stripping industry in the United Kingdom to explore the relationships between students, sex work and consumption. To make sense of the relationship between students and participation in the sex industry, a deeper understanding of other social and cultural processes is needed. In this discussion we argue that the following points are relevant and interlinked: changes to the nature of sexual commerce and sexual consumption as they become part of the marketplace; changes in social attitudes and the rise of 'respectability' in sexual commerce; the 'pleasure dynamic' amongst students; and changes in the higher education structure that place students as consumers as well as financially fragile. We set out a future research agenda given that this relationship is set to grow as the individual bares the cost of higher education.
The “collaborative economy”, “platform” or “gig economy”, encompassing workon-demand via apps lik... more The “collaborative economy”, “platform” or “gig economy”, encompassing workon-demand via apps like Uber and crowdwork like Amazon Mechanical Turk, has grown exponentially in recent years, thanks to the development of highspeed networks, the exploitation of big data and the availability of mobile devices, which have cut down transaction costs and allow for real-time effective matching of supply and demand.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
This article reflects on an occupation led by single mothers to contest the destruction of social... more This article reflects on an occupation led by single mothers to contest the destruction of social housing in post-Olympics East London. In the process, it argues for a more gendered theorisation of the urban commons. Drawing on auto-ethnography, participant observation and qualitative interviews, the article argues three central points: First, that the occupation demonstrates the gendered nature of the urban commons and the leadership of women in defending them from enclosure; second that the defence of an existing urban commons enabled the creation of a new temporary commons characterised by the collectivisation of gendered socially reproductive activities; and third that this commoning has had a lasting impact on housing activism at the city scale and beyond. This impact is conceptualised as an ‘Olympic counter-legacy’ that is characterised by the forging of new relationships and affinities, the strengthening of networked activism and circulation of tactics between campaign groups.
Work, Employment and Society, 2015
The visibility of striptease (‘lap dancing’) as a workplace and site of consumption has grown sig... more The visibility of striptease (‘lap dancing’) as a workplace and site of consumption has grown significantly over the past 15 years in the UK. This article draws on the first large scale study of stripping work in the UK, exploring original empirical data to examine why women continue to seek work in an industry that is profoundly precarious and often highly exploitative. It suggests that rather than either a ‘career’ or a ‘dead end’ job, many women use lap dancing strategically to create alternative futures of work, employment and education. It is argued that precarious forms of employment such as lap dancing can be instrumentalized through agentic strategies by some workers, in order to achieve longer term security and to develop opportunities outside the sex industry. As such, it is averred that engagement in the industry should instead be understood in a wider political economy of work and employment and the social wage.
Work, Employment and Society, 2016
Inequalities in the creative industries are known to be persistent and systemic. The model of pro... more Inequalities in the creative industries are known to be persistent and systemic. The model of production in UK film and television (UKF&TV) is argued to exclude on the basis of gender, race and class. This article considers a social category that has been overlooked in these debates: disability. It argues that workers with impairments are ‘doubly disabled’ – in both the labour markets and labour processes of UKF&TV. It concludes that disability cannot simply be incorporated in an additive way in order to understand the exclusion of these workers, but that they face qualitatively different sources of disadvantage compared with other minorities in UKF&TV workplaces. This has negative implications for workers with impairments in other labour markets, as project and network-based freelance work, a contributor to disadvantage, is seen as both increasingly normative and paradigmatic.
Inequalities in the creative industries are known to be persistent and systemic. The model of pro... more Inequalities in the creative industries are known to be persistent and systemic. The model of production in UK film and television (UKF&TV) is argued to exclude on the basis of gender, race and class. This article considers a social category that has been overlooked in these debates: disability. It argues that workers with impairments are 'doubly disabled' – in both the labour markets and labour processes of UKF&TV. It concludes that disability cannot simply be incorporated in an additive way in order to understand the exclusion of these workers, but that they face qualitatively different sources of disadvantage compared with other minorities in UKF&TV workplaces. This has negative implications for workers with impairments in other labour markets, as project and network-based freelance work, a contributor to disadvantage, is seen as both increasingly normative and paradigmatic.
British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2016
A large scale study of working conditions in UK based strip dancing clubs reveals that dancers ar... more A large scale study of working conditions in UK based strip dancing clubs reveals that dancers are against de facto self-employment as it is defined and practiced by management, but in favour of de jure self-employment that ensures sufficient levels of autonomy and control in the workplace. While dancers could potentially seek 'worker' or 'employee' status within the existing legal framework, their strong identification with the label 'self-employed' and their desire for autonomy will likely inhibit these labour rights claims. We propose an alternative avenue for improving dancers' working conditions, whereby self-employed dancers articulate their grievances as a demand for decent work, pursued through licensing agreements between clubs and local authorities and facilitated by collective organization.
Globalizations, 2016
and edited collections, as well as regularly featuring on radio and in magazines and newspapers. ... more and edited collections, as well as regularly featuring on radio and in magazines and newspapers. She has co-authored a monograph with Teela Sanders, entitled Flexible Workers labour regulation and the political economy of stripping industry Overall, she is committed to developing methodologies which work alongside research participants, in order to undertake socially and politically transformative research. Acknowledgements: The author would like thank Jane Wills, Cathy McIlwaine and Camille Barbagallo for the formation of early ideas for this paper and Tom Gillespie for comments on a later version of it. She would also like to thank the ESRC for funding this research and Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change (CERIC-University of Leeds) for follow-up financial support.
Work, Employment and Society, 2014
Journal of International Development, 2011
Repeatedly struck by the improving political status of women in contrast to their continuing soci... more Repeatedly struck by the improving political status of women in contrast to their continuing social and economic marginalisation, Shirin Rai could equally have entitled this book 'What hopes, why despair?'-the subtitle of the conclusion. Such a title would have alluded to the two sources from which this new collection is born. The first draws on Rai's broad and prolific scholarly writing on gender and development across issues from governance to women's activism. The second influence on the book is related yet somewhat more emotive, springing from a profound sense of pessimism about the slow rate of change towards equality between men and women. A guiding principle of the book is that the gendered nature of nation-state building in post-colonial societies has produced the bases for a 'fractured modernity'. Such fractures, Rai argues, create deep fissures and pressures for social and political development in general and for women in particular. Using the heuristic device of separating the world into the political, the social and the economic, Rai identifies one such fissure between the increasing formal political and institutional rights of women and continuing uneven distributions of wealth, educational levels and workloads and violence against women. The tension between structure and agency is framed well by the consistent inclusion of the themes of women's activism, movements and struggles. Such a juxtaposition of structural and agential aspects of women's lives greatly enriches the book's contribution and Rai's commitment to exploring women's struggle is refreshing and makes for a compelling read. The book also offers an original critique of theories of agency in arguing that while women's resistance and struggle is often uniformly represented as 'a good thing', a large number of costs accompany women's empowerment. Rai proposes marrying measurements of agency with those which quantify vulnerability. In doing so, she begins to bridge some of the arguments over agency and victimhood, offering instead a more nuanced picture in which women are victims, as well as actors and agents, in their participation in development programmes and struggles for empowerment. The chapters focus thematically on the specific contexts in which women in post-colonial India have engaged in the politics of development. Rai begins at the scale of the nation-state, examining in Chapters 1 and 2 the themes of nationalism, nation-building and women's relationship with the postcolonial state. In this section she argues that women, alongside other subaltern groups, have been coopted into the elite nationalist programme through the universalist language of economic and political man. Chapter 3 surveys feminist scholarship on democratisation, concluding that the theoretical contributions it has made allow us to see the gendered nature of the state through challenging the boundaries between the public and private and placing emphases on difference, situated experience and patriarchy. Continuing with the theme of gender and democratisation, Chapter 4 examines gender mainstreaming and national state machineries for women, arguing that women in post-colonial states have no choice but to engage with state institutions if they are to be considered in policy making. Quotas for women are the single most important outcome of such gender mainstreaming, Rai states in co-authored Chapter 5, which specifically deals with electoral quotas. It concludes that the outcomes of quotas are complex and that their importance becomes anaemic without other strategies including the redistribution of socioeconomic resources. The second half of the book from Chapters 6 to 8 jumps scale, to consider the impact of globalisation. In Chapter 6 Rai contributes to theorising on global governance by adding the arena of
Emotion, Space and Society, 2012
Movimento para a liberdade das mulheres na prostituição (Movimento) and União para a protecção do... more Movimento para a liberdade das mulheres na prostituição (Movimento) and União para a protecção dos direitos dos trabalhadores (União) are mobilising for human rights around sex work and prostitution in Latin America. After a year of working with both groups, my relationship with Movimento broke down; meanwhile the relationship with União flourished and from it emerged intensive and productive ethnographic experiences and a large and rich dataset. The paper asks why this happened and why the two groups responded so differently to the same research proposal. The paper contributes to understandings of emotional methodologies in three related ways. Firstly, it emphasises the importance of considering collective emotion, emotional hues and identities at the organisational scale when designing and implementing research projects. Secondly, it demonstrates how affective ties based on these emotional hues produce space. Thirdly, it argues that incorporating emotions into both our analyses and methodologies can challenge orthodox constructions of subjects in development as rationalistic and atomistic actors.
Criminal Justice Matters, 2013
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2021
An increasing amount of sex work in the United Kingdom is now digitally mediated, as workers and ... more An increasing amount of sex work in the United Kingdom is now digitally mediated, as workers and clients identify each other, agree prices and services, undertake security checks, and often make payment through various platforms and websites. Existing accounts of “digital sex work” have been both overly technological deterministic and optimistic, largely invisibilizing capital and the new forms of power and control it enables. The authors argue that the dominant platform for digital sex work in the United Kingdom, AdultWork, is reshaping the market in direct sexual services, driving down standards and prices, and normalizing risky behaviors. The article posits that these changes in the sex industry are symptomatic and reflective of wider shifts in labor-capital relations and technology and therefore argues that bringing research on platform work and sex work into closer dialogue is mutually productive. Studies of digital sex work would benefit from critical insights into power and c...
Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space, 2021
Urban scholars have traditionally associated displacement in cities of the global North with gent... more Urban scholars have traditionally associated displacement in cities of the global North with gentrification, generally understood as a class-based process of neighbourhood change. This article expands this scalar focus and adopts the larger scale of the local authority district (in this case the London borough) as its epistemological starting point to study the displacement of homeless people by the local state. Participatory action research was undertaken with housing campaigners in the East London borough of Newham to explore who is being displaced, their experiences of displacement and the impacts of displacement on their lives. Empirically, the article argues that displacement in this case is a product of national welfare state restructuring – or ‘austerity urbanism’ – implemented through a localised regime of ‘welfare chauvinism’ in which some groups are framed as economically unproductive and therefore undeserving of access to social housing. Displacement has the effect of rei...
American Behavioral Scientist, 2018
A “partial renaissance” of self-employment in labor markets of the global North has attracted pol... more A “partial renaissance” of self-employment in labor markets of the global North has attracted policy concern within national, supranational, and global arenas, yet sociological thought has been somewhat slower to respond to this phenomenon. In response, this special issue focuses on everyday self-employment among workers drawn from countries across the world. The collection of articles in this volume originated, in part, from a recent symposium that took place at City, University of London, which highlighted the contribution of sociology and cognate disciplines to the study of self-employment. The volume considers the social and structural forces that condition this economic activity as an ideology and practice, as well as the constraints and opportunities for its maintenance and reproduction. It also examines the everyday lives of self-employed workers and in particular the ways in which self-employment is experienced across a range of geographical, occupational, and industrial con...
Work, Employment and Society, 2018
In this Foreword to the special issue ‘In, Against and Beyond Precarity’ the guest editors take s... more In this Foreword to the special issue ‘In, Against and Beyond Precarity’ the guest editors take stock of the existing literature on precarity, highlighting the strengths and limitations of using this concept as an analytical tool for examining the world of work. Concluding that the overstretched nature of concept has diluted its political effectiveness, the editors suggest instead a focus on precarization as a process, drawing from perspectives that focus on the objective conditions, as well as subjective and heterogeneous experiences and perceptions of insecure employment. Framed in this way, they present a summary of the contributions to the special issue spanning a range of countries and organizational contexts, identifying key drivers, patterns and forms of precarization. These are conceptualized as implicit, explicit, productive and citizenship precarization. These forms and patterns indicate the need to address precariousness in the realm of social reproduction and post-wage p...
Medical Tourism and Transnational Health Care, 2013
Gender, Place & Culture, 2013
Cosmetic surgery tourism is a significant and growing area of medical tourism. This paper explore... more Cosmetic surgery tourism is a significant and growing area of medical tourism. This paper explores the gendered construction of cosmetic surgery tourism in different geographical locations through an analysis of destination websites in Spain, the Czech Republic and Thailand. We examine the ways in which gender and other intersections of identity interact with notions of space, place and travel to construct particular locations and cosmetic surgery tourist experiences. The relational geographies of skill, regulation and hygiene in discourses of cosmetic surgery risk are also explored. We conclude that accounts producing cosmetic surgery tourism as undifferentiated experience of 'nonplace' fail to acknowledge the complex constructions of specific destinations in promotional materials targeting international consumers in a global marketplace.
British Journal of Sociology of Education, 2013
Robust academic research on the topic of students involved in the sex industry is in its infancy,... more Robust academic research on the topic of students involved in the sex industry is in its infancy, yet the relationship appears consistent and permanent. This paper draws on findings from the largest study into the stripping industry in the United Kingdom to explore the relationships between students, sex work and consumption. To make sense of the relationship between students and participation in the sex industry, a deeper understanding of other social and cultural processes is needed. In this discussion we argue that the following points are relevant and interlinked: changes to the nature of sexual commerce and sexual consumption as they become part of the marketplace; changes in social attitudes and the rise of 'respectability' in sexual commerce; the 'pleasure dynamic' amongst students; and changes in the higher education structure that place students as consumers as well as financially fragile. We set out a future research agenda given that this relationship is set to grow as the individual bares the cost of higher education.
The “collaborative economy”, “platform” or “gig economy”, encompassing workon-demand via apps lik... more The “collaborative economy”, “platform” or “gig economy”, encompassing workon-demand via apps like Uber and crowdwork like Amazon Mechanical Turk, has grown exponentially in recent years, thanks to the development of highspeed networks, the exploitation of big data and the availability of mobile devices, which have cut down transaction costs and allow for real-time effective matching of supply and demand.
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
This article reflects on an occupation led by single mothers to contest the destruction of social... more This article reflects on an occupation led by single mothers to contest the destruction of social housing in post-Olympics East London. In the process, it argues for a more gendered theorisation of the urban commons. Drawing on auto-ethnography, participant observation and qualitative interviews, the article argues three central points: First, that the occupation demonstrates the gendered nature of the urban commons and the leadership of women in defending them from enclosure; second that the defence of an existing urban commons enabled the creation of a new temporary commons characterised by the collectivisation of gendered socially reproductive activities; and third that this commoning has had a lasting impact on housing activism at the city scale and beyond. This impact is conceptualised as an ‘Olympic counter-legacy’ that is characterised by the forging of new relationships and affinities, the strengthening of networked activism and circulation of tactics between campaign groups.
Work, Employment and Society, 2015
The visibility of striptease (‘lap dancing’) as a workplace and site of consumption has grown sig... more The visibility of striptease (‘lap dancing’) as a workplace and site of consumption has grown significantly over the past 15 years in the UK. This article draws on the first large scale study of stripping work in the UK, exploring original empirical data to examine why women continue to seek work in an industry that is profoundly precarious and often highly exploitative. It suggests that rather than either a ‘career’ or a ‘dead end’ job, many women use lap dancing strategically to create alternative futures of work, employment and education. It is argued that precarious forms of employment such as lap dancing can be instrumentalized through agentic strategies by some workers, in order to achieve longer term security and to develop opportunities outside the sex industry. As such, it is averred that engagement in the industry should instead be understood in a wider political economy of work and employment and the social wage.
Work, Employment and Society, 2016
Inequalities in the creative industries are known to be persistent and systemic. The model of pro... more Inequalities in the creative industries are known to be persistent and systemic. The model of production in UK film and television (UKF&TV) is argued to exclude on the basis of gender, race and class. This article considers a social category that has been overlooked in these debates: disability. It argues that workers with impairments are ‘doubly disabled’ – in both the labour markets and labour processes of UKF&TV. It concludes that disability cannot simply be incorporated in an additive way in order to understand the exclusion of these workers, but that they face qualitatively different sources of disadvantage compared with other minorities in UKF&TV workplaces. This has negative implications for workers with impairments in other labour markets, as project and network-based freelance work, a contributor to disadvantage, is seen as both increasingly normative and paradigmatic.
Inequalities in the creative industries are known to be persistent and systemic. The model of pro... more Inequalities in the creative industries are known to be persistent and systemic. The model of production in UK film and television (UKF&TV) is argued to exclude on the basis of gender, race and class. This article considers a social category that has been overlooked in these debates: disability. It argues that workers with impairments are 'doubly disabled' – in both the labour markets and labour processes of UKF&TV. It concludes that disability cannot simply be incorporated in an additive way in order to understand the exclusion of these workers, but that they face qualitatively different sources of disadvantage compared with other minorities in UKF&TV workplaces. This has negative implications for workers with impairments in other labour markets, as project and network-based freelance work, a contributor to disadvantage, is seen as both increasingly normative and paradigmatic.
British Journal of Industrial Relations, 2016
A large scale study of working conditions in UK based strip dancing clubs reveals that dancers ar... more A large scale study of working conditions in UK based strip dancing clubs reveals that dancers are against de facto self-employment as it is defined and practiced by management, but in favour of de jure self-employment that ensures sufficient levels of autonomy and control in the workplace. While dancers could potentially seek 'worker' or 'employee' status within the existing legal framework, their strong identification with the label 'self-employed' and their desire for autonomy will likely inhibit these labour rights claims. We propose an alternative avenue for improving dancers' working conditions, whereby self-employed dancers articulate their grievances as a demand for decent work, pursued through licensing agreements between clubs and local authorities and facilitated by collective organization.
Globalizations, 2016
and edited collections, as well as regularly featuring on radio and in magazines and newspapers. ... more and edited collections, as well as regularly featuring on radio and in magazines and newspapers. She has co-authored a monograph with Teela Sanders, entitled Flexible Workers labour regulation and the political economy of stripping industry Overall, she is committed to developing methodologies which work alongside research participants, in order to undertake socially and politically transformative research. Acknowledgements: The author would like thank Jane Wills, Cathy McIlwaine and Camille Barbagallo for the formation of early ideas for this paper and Tom Gillespie for comments on a later version of it. She would also like to thank the ESRC for funding this research and Centre for Employment Relations Innovation and Change (CERIC-University of Leeds) for follow-up financial support.
Work, Employment and Society, 2014
Journal of International Development, 2011
Repeatedly struck by the improving political status of women in contrast to their continuing soci... more Repeatedly struck by the improving political status of women in contrast to their continuing social and economic marginalisation, Shirin Rai could equally have entitled this book 'What hopes, why despair?'-the subtitle of the conclusion. Such a title would have alluded to the two sources from which this new collection is born. The first draws on Rai's broad and prolific scholarly writing on gender and development across issues from governance to women's activism. The second influence on the book is related yet somewhat more emotive, springing from a profound sense of pessimism about the slow rate of change towards equality between men and women. A guiding principle of the book is that the gendered nature of nation-state building in post-colonial societies has produced the bases for a 'fractured modernity'. Such fractures, Rai argues, create deep fissures and pressures for social and political development in general and for women in particular. Using the heuristic device of separating the world into the political, the social and the economic, Rai identifies one such fissure between the increasing formal political and institutional rights of women and continuing uneven distributions of wealth, educational levels and workloads and violence against women. The tension between structure and agency is framed well by the consistent inclusion of the themes of women's activism, movements and struggles. Such a juxtaposition of structural and agential aspects of women's lives greatly enriches the book's contribution and Rai's commitment to exploring women's struggle is refreshing and makes for a compelling read. The book also offers an original critique of theories of agency in arguing that while women's resistance and struggle is often uniformly represented as 'a good thing', a large number of costs accompany women's empowerment. Rai proposes marrying measurements of agency with those which quantify vulnerability. In doing so, she begins to bridge some of the arguments over agency and victimhood, offering instead a more nuanced picture in which women are victims, as well as actors and agents, in their participation in development programmes and struggles for empowerment. The chapters focus thematically on the specific contexts in which women in post-colonial India have engaged in the politics of development. Rai begins at the scale of the nation-state, examining in Chapters 1 and 2 the themes of nationalism, nation-building and women's relationship with the postcolonial state. In this section she argues that women, alongside other subaltern groups, have been coopted into the elite nationalist programme through the universalist language of economic and political man. Chapter 3 surveys feminist scholarship on democratisation, concluding that the theoretical contributions it has made allow us to see the gendered nature of the state through challenging the boundaries between the public and private and placing emphases on difference, situated experience and patriarchy. Continuing with the theme of gender and democratisation, Chapter 4 examines gender mainstreaming and national state machineries for women, arguing that women in post-colonial states have no choice but to engage with state institutions if they are to be considered in policy making. Quotas for women are the single most important outcome of such gender mainstreaming, Rai states in co-authored Chapter 5, which specifically deals with electoral quotas. It concludes that the outcomes of quotas are complex and that their importance becomes anaemic without other strategies including the redistribution of socioeconomic resources. The second half of the book from Chapters 6 to 8 jumps scale, to consider the impact of globalisation. In Chapter 6 Rai contributes to theorising on global governance by adding the arena of
Emotion, Space and Society, 2012
Movimento para a liberdade das mulheres na prostituição (Movimento) and União para a protecção do... more Movimento para a liberdade das mulheres na prostituição (Movimento) and União para a protecção dos direitos dos trabalhadores (União) are mobilising for human rights around sex work and prostitution in Latin America. After a year of working with both groups, my relationship with Movimento broke down; meanwhile the relationship with União flourished and from it emerged intensive and productive ethnographic experiences and a large and rich dataset. The paper asks why this happened and why the two groups responded so differently to the same research proposal. The paper contributes to understandings of emotional methodologies in three related ways. Firstly, it emphasises the importance of considering collective emotion, emotional hues and identities at the organisational scale when designing and implementing research projects. Secondly, it demonstrates how affective ties based on these emotional hues produce space. Thirdly, it argues that incorporating emotions into both our analyses and methodologies can challenge orthodox constructions of subjects in development as rationalistic and atomistic actors.
Criminal Justice Matters, 2013