ORCID Profile
0000-0001-6073-0820
Current Organisation
University of Leicester
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Publisher: Cambridge University Press (CUP)
Date: 05-2003
DOI: 10.1080/1353294032000074098
Abstract: This article analyses the shifting ways in which Italy has been strategically represented in Albania during the different key passages of the latter's relatively recent history as a sovereign independent state. As a parallel narrative, the article also examines the way Albania has been equally strategically represented in Italy before and during the two periods in which Italy has been militarily involved in Albania, and the way this has been consistent with an attempt to elaborate and sustain a politically strategic definition of Italian identity and culture. The history of the asymmetrical relationship between Albania and Italy is deeply embedded in the social, cultural and political environments that are on the two shores of the Adriatic Sea. The cultural construction of Albania in Italy and vice versa of Italy in Albania should be linked to seemingly independent instances of domestic reforms. The dynamics of projective identification or dis-identification stemming from these instances should be seen as intertwined within two parallel processes of mutual definition encompassing both the colonial and the postcolonial relations between and within the two countries.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-2009
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-10-2014
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2011
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 04-07-2013
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 17-11-2017
Abstract: Ahmed is a young man working as a ‘professional boyfriend’ in the intimate economy surrounding the tourist industry in Sousse, one of Tunisia’s main tourist destinations on the Mediterranean coast. He and most of his friends and colleagues are also harraga, ‘burners’ in Arabic, a term describing young men burning their documents and yearning for Europe. By performing love to female tourists and by migrating as their spouses, young men in Tunisia embody late modern in idualized and consumerist lifestyles, while providing for their families at home. They also embody their ‘mobile orientations’, a term I coined to refer to how migrants inhabit a desired subjectivity by entering the socially available arrangements of objects, discourses, mobilities and affective practices enabling their agency. For Ahmed and his peer group migration is not a possibility, but an existential necessity to become successful men according to the values set by the neoliberal social ontology. By analysing the forms of intimate labour and the mobile orientations they engage in, I problematize the presumption of exploitability of local people within public and academic debates about ‘sex tourism’. In this article I discuss the heuristic opportunities and predicaments posed by my auto ethnographic experience as a tourist who became an ethnographer and filmmaker. I also reflect on the choices I made while analyzing my ethnographic findings and editing my filmed material during post-fieldwork reflections.
Publisher: Routledge
Date: 15-04-2013
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 05-2005
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-2012
Abstract: Contemporary debates on migration and the sex industry have been characterized by a marked emphasis on the extent of trafficking and exploitation of migrant women in heterosexist contexts and relationships. Migrant sex workers’ complex understandings of exploitation and advantage have been reductively manipulated into a heteronormative dichotomy between free (male) migrants and (female) coerced victims. In the process, non-heteronormative migrant sex workers’ experiences of advantage and exploitation were neglected. This article draws on original research material and findings about the specific life and work trajectories of non-heteronormative people working in the UK sex industry. It focuses on the way they understand the opportunities and predicaments posed by the homonormative and heteronormative worlds they ambivalently reproduce and challenge by migrating and working in the global sex industry.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 2006
DOI: 10.1002/PSP.439
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-2013
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 07-2015
DOI: 10.1002/PSP.1921
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 29-02-2020
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-2003
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 10-03-2021
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-2016
DOI: 10.5153/SRO.4158
Abstract: Migrant sex workers’ experiences of exploitation depend on a dynamic re-evaluation of the working conditions and relationships that frame their entry into the global sex industry according to the subsequent unfolding of their working and wider lives. Contrary to the essentialist obliteration of consent introduced by abolitionist scholarship and policymaking, migrants can decide to endure bounded exploitative deals with people enabling their travel and work abroad in order to meet the economic and administrative (becoming documented) objectives they set for themselves. When this deal is broken as a result of the betrayal of original negotiations, migrants can decide to reframe their migration and work experience as trafficking and denounce their original enablers as traffickers, which gives them a chance to obtain the right to reside and work in the country of destination through asylum.
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 28-10-2020
Abstract: Centred on the slavery trial “Crown vs. Rungnapha Kanbut” heard in Sydney, New South Wales, between 10 April and 15 May 2019, this article seeks to frame the figure of the “Mother Tac” or the “mother of contract”, also called “mama tac” or “mae tac”—a term used amongst Thai migrants to describe a woman who hosts, collects debts from, and organises work for Thai migrant sex workers in their destination country. It proposes that this largely unexplored figure has come to assume a disproportionate role in the “modern slavery” approach to human trafficking, with its emphasis on absolute victims and in idual offenders. The harms suffered by Kanbut’s victims are put into context by referring to existing literature on women accused of trafficking interviews with Thai migrant sex workers, including Kanbut’s primary victim, and with members from the Australian Federal Police Human Trafficking Unit and ethnographic field notes. The article unveils how constructions of both victim and offender, as well as definitions of slavery, are racialised, gendered, and sexualised and rely on the victims’ subjective accounts of bounded exploitation. By documenting these and other limitations involved in a criminal justice approach, the authors reveal its shortfalls. For instance, while harsh sentences are meant as a deterrence to others, the complex and structural roots of migrant labour exploitation remain unaffected. This research finds that improved legal migration pathways, the decriminalisation of the sex industry, and improved access to information and support for migrant sex workers are key to reducing heavier forms of labour exploitation, including human trafficking, in the Australian sex industry.
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 23-12-2019
Abstract: System-involvement resulting from anti-trafficking interventions and the criminalization of sex work and migration results in negative health impacts on sex workers, migrants, and people with trafficking experiences. Due to their stigmatized status, sex workers and people with trafficking experiences often struggle to access affordable, unbiased, and supportive health care. This paper will use thematic analysis of qualitative data from in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork with 50 migrant sex workers and trafficked persons, as well as 20 key informants from legal and social services, in New York and Los Angeles. It will highlight the work of trans-specific and sex worker–led initiatives that are internally addressing gaps in health care and the negative health consequences that result from sexual humanitarian anti-trafficking interventions that include policing, arrest, court-involvement, court-mandated social services, incarceration, and immigration detention. Our analysis focuses on the impact of criminalization on sex workers and their experiences with sexual humanitarian efforts intended to protect and control them. We argue that these grassroots community-based efforts are a survival-oriented reaction to the harms of criminalization and a response to vulnerabilities left unattended by mainstream sexual humanitarian approaches to protection and service provision that frame sex work itself as the problem. Peer-to-peer interventions such as these create solidarity and resiliency within marginalized communities, which act as protective buffers against institutionalized systemic violence and the resulting negative health outcomes. Our results suggest that broader public health support and funding for community-led health initiatives are needed to reduce barriers to health care resulting from stigma, criminalization, and ineffective anti-trafficking and humanitarian efforts. We conclude that the decriminalization of sex work and the reform of institutional practices in the US are urgently needed to reduce the overall negative health outcomes of system-involvement.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-2009
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 21-10-2008
Publisher: MDPI AG
Date: 19-05-2021
Abstract: In 2003, Aotearoa New Zealand (NZ) passed the Prostitution Reform Act 2003 (PRA), which decriminalized sex work for NZ citizens and holders of permanent residency (PR) while excluding migrant sex workers (MSWs) from its protection. This is due to Section 19 (s19) of the PRA, added at the last minute against advice by the Aotearoa New Zealand Sex Workers’ Collective (NZPC) as an anti-trafficking clause. Because of s19, migrants on temporary visas found to be working as sex workers are liable to deportation by Immigration New Zealand (INZ). Drawing on original ethnographic and interview data gathered over 24 months of fieldwork, our study finds that migrant sex workers in New Zealand are vulnerable to violence and exploitation, and are too afraid to report these to the police for fear of deportation, corroborating earlier studies and studies completed while we were collecting data.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 04-05-2010
Publisher: Alliance Against Traffic in Women Foundation
Date: 30-09-2016
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 2004
DOI: 10.1002/PSP.346
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 2009
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
Location: United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland
No related grants have been discovered for Nicola Mai.