Dear all
Far be it from me to impugn responses to questionnaires, but I think that
we have to be a little careful of taking people's fears of Big Issue
sellers at face value (Dave Clarke reported that ESRC research provided
"objective reports of the fears of urban residents"). Clearly there are
some Big Issue sellers who are aggressive when people don't buy their
magazine (and given that many of them are homeless (although not always
roofless) people with a history of abuse and rejection and see selling the
BI as a way out of poverty, this is hardly surprising). However, many
urban residents can't or don't differentiate between BI sellers and other
homeless people who frequently are more aggressive. There is also a strong
issue of guilt in the way we look at the urban poor - either immediate
guilt in not buying the mag (even if we've just bought a copy from another
seller) or more abstract guilt about our relative affluence - which may
result in a pyschological process of projection, which turns this guilt
into a belief that they've been aggressive thus justifying our avoidance of
them. And lets not forget that this avoidance can be total - people can
occupy the same streets and by subconsciously or consciously averting our
gaze we can not notice people as we step over them.
All this said, Dave Clarke is one of the very few people I know, critical
geographers or other, who has spent time talking to urban destitute people
in a non-professional capacity!
Adam Tickell
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Adam Tickell
Department of Geography
University of Southampton
Southampton SO17 1BJ
UK
+44 (0)1703 595 496
http://www.soton.ac.uk/~egrg
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