Researchers navigate a complex network of relationships, positions, and responsibilities that are determined by their discipline, funding bodies, and the research community they are studying. Tensions often emerge between and across each of these different spaces. This paper uses reflexive autobiographical writing to discuss some of the ongoing challenges faced with engaging a diverse group of stakeholders in relation to sociological research on the gender inequalities of bridge as a serious leisure activity. Drawing on the researchers' personal notes and exchanges during a project on sexism and the card game bridge, as well as the survey data from this project, this paper explores the ways that a combined team of insider/outsider researchers strive to balance the relationship and commitment they have to the pursuit of knowledge and the user community. Many projects face this balancing act which can permeate every stage of the research process and can be witnessed frequently in project meetings, yet there is still little published in relation to these conversations that take place between research team members.
While international and national policies, strategies and legislation have been designed to address the problems of forced displacement they also form a vital role in the discursive construction, governance and regulation of those who have been displaced. This paper critically interrogates the 'UK Safeguarding Strategy: Unaccompanied Asylum Seeking and Refugee Children' to highlight the ways in which unaccompanied asylum seeking children (UASC) are implicitly constructed as a policy problem. Drawing on Foucault, and using Bacchi's (2009) 'What's the problem represented to be'-'WPR'-a novel analytic method for studying problematisation within policy, this paper moves beyond the policy definition of an unaccompanied asylum seeking child to unearth characterisations that the policy ascribes to this group of children, and in particular the conceptual boundaries established for the way society thinks about UASC. These conceptual boundaries are divisive in nature, including suspicion around routes of arrival to the UK; constructions of risk; and questions about the responsbility of providing care and of being in need of care. The significance of the paper lies in its aim to use the examination of the discursive practices of the UK's Safeguarding Strategy as a starting point in order to open a broader discussion around how UASC are constructed and governed, nationally and internationally.
Drawing on findings of an original 12-month ethnographic study, this article presents the challenges that Bolivian women face in accessing a new law that has been designed to protect them, Law 348 to “Guarantee Women a Life Free from Violence.” Data reveal that while the law creates opportunities for the (re)conceptualization of violence, mobilizing the law is fraught with difficulties and a culture of impunity prevails. The challenges of implementation are both nationally and internationally significant as other countries seek to enact similar legal strategies. In Bolivia, this article suggests, civil society organizations and women’s voices are central to the full realization of the law.
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