This article uses artivist methods such as feminist cartooning and body mapping to examine the diversity of racialised women’s menopause knowledge and experiences in the UK, Sweden and India, noting how these are varied and need to be understood contextually against the larger frame of their life experiences. We take as our starting point the menopause discourse prevalent in mainstream media and workplace initiatives in the UK, noting that it is still largely white and middle-class. To widen and decolonise this anglophone discourse, we employ artivist methods in enunciating the menopause experiences of racialised immigrant women in Sweden and Dalit working-class women in India. In both Sweden and India, we deployed feminist cartooning to produce comic strips in one case and body mapping in the other to elicit marginal women’s experiences to not just broaden the anglophone discourse but also to reimagine menopause. We argue that between them, UK, Sweden and India are representative of the unevenness of menopause discourse and activism. In comparison to the UK, a forerunner, Sweden represents a middle ground where the questions of menopause have begun to emerge in the last decade via the issue of women’s health and sick leave, whereas in India the discourse and menopause policy is yet to concretise. This article is grounded in our involvement in the AHRC-funded research network, MAUSI Net: Menopause Artivism in the UK, Sweden and India , which brings together feminist scholars from these three different country contexts.

This paper explores migrants' experiences of settling in Greenwich, London, using peer research and taking into account the socio-political context and specific place-based politics unfolding in local communities. Resulting from a research collaboration between academic researchers, two civil society organisations, and four people of migrant origins as peer researchers, this paper interrogates community, reflecting on its dichotomous understandings in sociological literature. By cautioning against idealised notions of community, we foreground Greenwich's history of racial violence and show how communities function as liminal spaces where everyday interactions with local government and services unfold, and where forms of intra-migrant solidarity emerge. Yet it is within communities that, despite London's diversity, racism continues to order residents into hierarchies of belonging, affecting migrants and racialised citizens. In articulating this paradox, we argue that assessments of personal trajectories of integration must tend to local specificities, including the tensions migrants experience in their everyday.

The UK-based City of Sanctuary movement claims to create welcoming conditions for those who had to flee their homes. Despite the well-documented efforts to integrate migrants, refugees and asylum seekers at a local level, the movement's practices have been criticised by scholars as reproducing government-prescribed passivity and exclusion of these groups. Through document analysis and participant observation in a Borough of Sanctuary group in London, we examined the City of Sanctuary's self-representation and mobilisation practices and how participation of sanctuary seekers is discussed and enacted by those involved. We found that the movement's institutional collaborations have led to an increased professionalisation of the movement which on the one hand offers greater impact and on the other hand risk excluding the very groups the movement is advocating for. Yet by providing material and institutional spaces to enable participation and citizenship, the movement ensures migrants can assert their rightful presence, achieving greater participation as well as amplifying migrants' voices within and beyond the movement.

As states have increasingly restricted family migrations and questioned the authenticity and genuineness of relationships, diverse temporal conditionalities have been imposed in the past decade on crossing borders and acquiring residence. Time periods have been stipulated for demonstrating proof of resources, not being reliant on welfare benefits, for the couple remaining together and prolonging the time taken by the spouse to obtain independence. While most attention has been paid to the impact of socioeconomic demands for entry and residence, the negative experiences of dependency faced by marriage migrants, and especially women, has been understudied. During this time, a number of states in Europe have extended the period lasting as long as five years in which the spouse is tied to the sponsor. In this chapter, we focus on the implications of prolonged dependency or the aptly named probationary period in the United Kingdom (UK), during which women in particular may be entrapped in failing relationships and domestic violence and thus with the threat of deportation. In order to unpack the lived experiences of prolonged dependency inscribed in the UK family migration regime, we mobilise border theories to explain how internal borders operate to extend and institutionalise dependency as a mode of control.

The article explores welfare and health practitioners’ representations of work practices and professional values underpinning their engagement with forced migrants within a polyfunctional health service in an Italian metropolitan city. It explores the integrated approach developed to cater for asylum seekers and beneficiaries of international protection’s specific needs. Building on interviews with health professionals and welfare workers, the article aims to critically discuss how concepts of care and responsibility are talked about and what kind of values underpin their work ethics. Humanitarian representations emerging from the narratives of health and welfare workers suggest that care and compassion are asymmetric and inherently racialised emotions and the use of vulnerability to depict service users can work to legitimise problematic practices as well as maintaining a focus on the compassionate saviours, whilst at the same time silencing people in need.

This chapter is based on qualitative data collected in the course of a research project characterized by the use of a range of participatory methods with the purpose of providing a creative space for migrant, refugee and asylum-seeking women discussing familial practices. The ambiguities of the term 'safe space' are explored in light of the fact space cannot be entirely safe as is imbued with power relations including racialized and gendered hierarchies, among others. The fieldwork for the project discussed here revealed potential uncertainties and pitfalls in the creation of a space which is safe enough to share personal experiences in the context of a research project.

The paper critically examines the way diversity is conceptualised as a dominant discourse and as a paradigm for understanding the present, which has gradually replaced multiculturalism in academic and policy discourse. Using our interviews with third sector practitioners providing mental health support to a wealth of migrant populations in London, the paper offers key examples of how TSOs (Third Sector Organisations) address migrant women's diverse needs, showing how diversity is practised in the everyday of community groups. This paper's novelty consists in exposing overlaps and divergences between diversity discourses and diversity practices and its added value lays in the combination of academic and practitioner perspectives in the study of TSOs supporting migrant, refugee and asylum seeker women in London.

The paper explores London-based third sector practitioners' engagement with vulnerability in their work with refugee and migrant women during pregnancy and in the post-natal period. Practitioners draw on notions of vulnerability that signal weakness and passivity as a strategy, which enables them to secure resources for the women they support as well as to sustain their own organisational existence in a third sector landscape that has been transformed by a range of neoliberal measures. Despite this invoking of essentialised vulnerability practitioners possess an awareness of how the broader context of women's lives, including government policies and structural disadvantage, acts to shape their vulnerability. The paper argues practitioners' contextual understanding of refuge and migrant women's vulnerability resonates with theoretical approaches that conceptualise vulnerability as an ontological characteristic of human existence. Strategic use of essentialised vulnerability is central to accessing resources, while an ontological understanding of vulnerability as a universal potential activated by socially mediated unequal power relations enables practitioners to address the specific factors that are producing women's vulnerability to harm. Crucially, this includes challenging the effects of the UK government's anti-immigrant 'hostile environment' policy and neoliberal austerity measures.

This chapter discusses collage making is an art-based, non-textual form of representation. The process of engaging in a group activity has the potential to elicit verbal explanations that alone might otherwise be too narrow and not necessarily include broader life experiences. Collage-making was used to engage migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking women in order to elicit personal stories about individual experiences of sensitive nature, such as accessing mental health services. It should be noted that participants' subject position of vulnerable women is not an essential feature of their personality but a structurally determined, and hopefully transient, material condition. Most of the women are strong, assertive, and resourceful migrants who have been able to negotiate and embody their experiences of displacement in different ways.

of the Editorial In “The right to the city” Henri Lefebvre (1968/1996) analysed the dialectic tension between the implosion of historic centres and the explosion of the urban beyond existing city boundaries under capitalist industrialization. The context of his intervention almost 50 years ago was the development of a national technocratic planning and the beginnings of gentrification in Paris' historic city centre. The city as a space occupied by productive labour, by oeuvres and festivities was being lost. The neocapitalist city had replaced the historic core, which once represented the centre of decision-making according to the Western democratic imaginary, into a centre of consumption. The right to the city cannot be conceived simply as a visiting right or a call for a return to traditional cities. It can only be formulated as a transformed and renewed right to urban life for the whole of society and especially for those who inhabit it. The right to the city is open to all urban dwellers and not just citizens according to their social contract with the state (Lefebvre and Groupe de Navarrenx (1990/2003). In conjunction with the right to difference and the right to information, the right to the city should work towards establishing a right for citizens as urban dwellers, especially with regards to their right to use of the centre, a privileged space compared to the ghettos for workers, immigrants, marginalised and for the wealthy who live in suburbs. The right to the city can be claimed by those who contribute to its daily production and social reproduction and are therefore empowered by it. The resurgence of Lefebvre's Right to the City is in part linked to the increasing recognition that the city provides a more relevant focus to explore social relations as well as socio-economic issues than the nation-state (Massey, 2005). Although a wealth of literature has been produced about the right to the city across the globe (Brenner & Schmid, 2015; Harvey, 2012; Kipfer, Saberi, & Wieditz, 2013; Purcell, 2002; Sugranyes & Mathivet, 2010), we argue that the right to the city as conceived by Lefebvre necessitates more than ever an engagement and re-contextualision given the fact that some of these concepts have changed, others have been revised, and importantly did not take into account gender.

links between Germany’s historically hegemonic role in shaping the regime and its current role relating to EU migration, borders control, and asylum policy. For instance, if Germany was historically considered a “benevolent” hegemon of the regime, has it played the same role in the unfolding of the current migration crisis? Another underexplored point relates to the time frame chosen: Comte argues that by the end of the study period (1947–1992), the European migration regime had achieved a “full-blown configuration” (7) as we knew it before 2015. Yet the regime arguably experienced major changes after 1992: most importantly, with the Treaty of Amsterdam, the Lisbon Treaty, and the gradual formation of a Common European Asylum System. Acknowledging the explanatory power of regime changes after 1992 could have strengthened the author’s argument. All in all, Comte succeeds in the daunting task of delivering a clear argument based on more than 40 years of history without getting lost in pluri-annual archival research, undertaken in multiple languages. His book represents an important contribution to the existing literature as an easy-to-read text fit for a wide audience of both academic scholars and policymakers interested in how and to what extent the current European migration regime was shaped by German influence and which other underlying national interests it came to represent over time. For anyone interested in the intergovernmental origins of the European migration regime and in European integration in the policy areas of migration, borders control, and asylum, Comte’s new book is an unmissable read and promises to be a reference text for many years to come.

of the Foreword Commencing with some recent examples drawn from Anglophone media, this introductory article reflects on the multiple ways in which crisis and migration have been interconnected over the last decade in public discourse, political debates and academic research. It underlines how crisis has not simply become a key descriptor of specific events, but continues to operate as a powerful narrative device that structures knowledge of migration and shapes policy decisions and governance structures. It explains the rationale for choosing Europe as a multidimensional setting for investigating the diverse links between migration and crisis. It ends with a summary of the contributions that are divided into four thematic strands: relationships between the economic crisis and migrant workers and their families; the Mediterranean in crisis; political and public discourses about the post-2015 ‘migration crisis’; and ethnographies of everyday experiences of the ‘refugee crisis’ on the part of migrants, activists and local people.

This chapter looks back at the intellectual traditions within which embodiment is situated, that is, the phenomenological tradition on the one hand and the overcoming of the phenomenological tradition through Foucauldian understandings of the body on the other. It interrogates embodied research by looking at the embodied positionalities of researcher and research participants during the research process. It discusses affect and the sensory as examples of embodied epistemologies that stem from phenomenology and post-phenomenology, and the specific contribution of feminist research to embodiment theory is highlighted. Attempts at embodying research are becoming more common and the field is expanding in several directions. The chapter engages with the origin of this approach and with its current debates.

This article draws on the creative methods deployed in the course of a research project aimed at mapping community-based mental health service provision and other specific services migrant, refugee and asylum seeking women regularly access in London. Although the study made use of a mixed method research design, only the art-based approach deployed as part of the focus groups is discussed. The article contributes to developing embodied research methods in that it explores the bodily engagement of research participants in making a collage and unpacks the implications of this approach for collecting qualitative data involving experiential activity. The body plays a central role in generating qualitative data through the making of the collage and collage-making represents an embodied experience suggesting that how we feel, how we perceive, how we relate to our own bodies and the place they have in the order of things – is contextual, gendered, relational, historically and culturally situated.

In this article, we look at Digital Storytelling (DS) as a specifically feminist epistemology within qualitative social research methods. Digital Storytelling is a process allowing research participants to tell their stories in their own words through a guided creative workshop that includes the use of digital technology, participatory approaches, and co-production of personal stories. The article draws on a 2-day Digital Storytelling workshop with migrant women which was set up to understand the life stories and work trajectories of volunteers working in the women’s community and voluntary sector in London. By outlining this innovative approach, the article highlights its potential and makes a case for Digital Storytelling as a feminist approach to research while taking into account epistemological, practical, and ethical considerations.

This chapter provides examples of creative and participatory work done when qualitatively researching race, gender, and migration. The ground-breaking practices developed by voluntary and community organisations and NGOs to help the communities they target is constantly evolving, differs according to the area of intervention, and is not systematically documented or mapped in a coherent body of work. Rather, it is fragmented, unevenly developed within organisations and highly dependent on the context in which these experimentations with creative methods take place. The chapter reviews the experience of third-sector organisations using embodied approaches to engage their service users and discusses examples of research conducted using participatory and creative research methods in the social sciences, before focusing specifically on research which has dealt with embodied methodologies in the field of migration. Colonial relationships in research are considered from a critical perspective.

The definition of data in qualitative research is expanding. This book highlights the value of embodiment as a qualitative research tool and outlines what it means to do embodied research at various points of the research process. It shows how using this non-invasive approach with vulnerable research participants such as migrant, refugee, and asylum-seeking women can help service users or research participants to be involved in the co-production of services and in participatory research. Drawing on both feminist and post-colonial theory, the author uses her own research with migrant women in London, focusing specifically on collage making and digital storytelling, whilst also considering other potential tools for practicing embodied research such as yoga, personal diaries, dance, and mindfulness. Situating the concept of ‘embodiment’ on the map of research methodologies, the book combines theoretical groundwork with actual examples of application to think pragmatically about intersectionality through embodiment.

Commencing with some recent examples drawn from Anglophone media, this introductory article reflects on the multiple ways in which crisis and migration have been interconnected over the last decade in public discourse, political debates and academic research. It underlines how crisis has not simply become a key descriptor of specific events, but continues to operate as a powerful narrative device that structures knowledge of migration and shapes policy decisions and governance structures. It explains the rationale for choosing Europe as a multidimensional setting for investigating the diverse links between migration and crisis. It ends with a summary of the contributions that are divided into four thematic strands: relationships between the economic crisis and migrant workers and their families; the Mediterranean in crisis; political and public discourses about the post-2015 ‘migration crisis’; and ethnographies of everyday experiences of the ‘refugee crisis’ on the part of migrants, activists and local people.

With its late-night work requirements and prevalence of women employees, the Indian information technology industry is firmly embedded within urban middle-class imaginaries of the mobile woman traversing the city after dark. This article analyses the emergence of the office taxi, a legally-mandated provision to facilitate night-time travel, as a crucial site for the enactment of gendered automobility. Drawing on qualitative research conducted in the South Indian city of Chennai, it explores the textures of women’s mobility by grappling with ‘respectability’, an important analytical framework for unpacking embodied modes of class and caste consolidation. It highlights how corporate and state praxis work together to create the structural conditions of mobility, and examines the multifaceted ways in which women themselves negotiate these measures. Moreover, it interrogates distinctly neoliberal interpretations of the taxi that result in particular forms of gendered (im)mobility. In doing so, it suggests that thinking with and beyond normative frameworks such as respectability can offer new insights into gendered articulations of mobility, work and urban life.