Suchergebnisse

This article unravels the workings of happiness as integral to knowledge capitalism's 'emotionality of rule' from the perspectives of two cohorts of 'knowledge workers': digital creatives and academics. It analyses the ways in which the study participants make work a site of personal fulfilment and happiness as they strive to become 'happy' labour subjects. Despite their different worklife trajectories, both cohorts appeal to the promise of happy entrepreneurial productivism. This promise attaches workers to the privileges of knowledge work in ways that downplay its costs. However, the dominance of knowledge capitalism's happy labour subject is challenged by the backgrounded significance of work's social benefits in their accounts. As such, this article argues that the individualised depoliticisation of contemporary 'knowledge work' can be challenged by re-valorising work's social contributions.

peer-reviewed ; .This article analyses David Monahan's photographic portrait series of over 120 people before emigrating from post-Celtic Tiger Ireland, entitled 'Leaving Dublin'. As a digital series that circulates across multiple media channels, it moves beyond the tradition of documentary photography into a more hybrid aesthetic, political and media environment. As well as inserting these images in multiple circulatory platforms and replicable formats, the series disrupts the dominant visual culture of emigration by expressively recasting how it is seen and thought. This article argues that the highly stylised and unsentimental aesthetic adopted by Monahan pushes the images beyond the established visual culture of sentimental departure, visualising instead transnational and multicultural histories and politics through complex circuits of migration. As such, it highlights what Mieke Bal sees as the instability of migratory culture in the city landscape. At the same time, however, it re-enacts particular social distinctions and divisions. Just as new trajectories, relationalites and stories 'appear' as constitutive of Dublin and contemporary mobility, so also other trajectories, relationalities and mobilities are disappeared in ways that keep an exclusionary topography and politics of mobility in place. This is evident in the insistent and persistent separation between Irish asylum-seeking/immigration and emigration-focused digital photographic projects. So, although digitisation facilitates reflexive ways of communicating contemporary migration, and Monahan's project succeeds in forging subtle connections, it also re-enacts structured disconnection and forgetting. ; peer-reviewed

peer-reviewed ; The proliferation of migrant social media campaigns calling for a 'Yes' vote in the Irish Marriage Equality referendum (May 2015) raises new questions about the conventions of political participation and non-resident citizenship rights. Via a discourse analysis of these campaigns, this article shows how the algorithmic agency of social media combines with the political agency and affective identifications of campaigners to shape the terms of non-resident citizen claims for enfranchisement and sexual citizenship rights. The article argues that despite their novel political tactics, the central campaign discourses of (im)mobility (leaving/staying-put), connectivity (active engagement) and ongoing stake in an inclusive homeland are underpinned by conventional democratic criteria for enfranchisement. The article addresses how these discourses intersect with state and business regimes of mobility and connectivity to produce a particular ordering of citizenship. It also points to those emergent practices and norms of political participation generally, and of non-resident citizenship in particular, that are foregrounded by these campaigns ; peer-reviewed

The proliferation of migrant social media campaigns calling for a 'Yes' vote in the Irish Marriage Equality referendum (May 2015) raises new questions about the conventions of political participation and non-resident citizenship rights. Via a discourse analysis of these campaigns, this article shows how the algorithmic agency of social media combines with the political agency and affective identifications of campaigners to shape the terms of non-resident citizen claims for enfranchisement and sexual citizenship rights. The article argues that despite their novel political tactics, the central campaign discourses of (im)mobility (leaving/staying-put), connectivity (active engagement) and ongoing stake in an inclusive homeland are underpinned by conventional democratic criteria for enfranchisement. The article addresses how these discourses intersect with state and business regimes of mobility and connectivity to produce a particular ordering of citizenship. It also points to those emergent practices and norms of political participation generally, and of non-resident citizenship in particular, that are foregrounded by these campaigns.

This article investigates the ways in which a shift from post-colonial nation building to neoliberal state restructuring has shaped church and Irish state relations regarding migrant welfare. It develops the extensive work of Bäckström and Davie (2010) and Bäckström et al. (2011) on how majority churches in European countries are reclaiming a social welfare role as the state relinquishes this responsibility: first, by examining the domain of migrant welfare which is not developed in their work; and second, by arguing that majority church pro-migrant service provision, as it has evolved in recent decades, can be understood in relation to an emergent neoliberal mode of collective responsibility for migrant welfare. It suggests that in spite of other factors and forces that undermine Irish Catholic Church authority, the marketization of more domains of life in the first decades of the twenty-first century has given new significance to Catholic Social Teaching and pro-migrant church initiatives.

peer-reviewed ; Feminism and gender studies are re-emerging as significant if fragmented forces in contemporary academic scholarship and bottom-up activism. Following the crises of definition and politics that marked the 1990s and early 2000s, questions of gender justice and equality are now gaining urgency in response to the ever more complex neoliberal capitalist and political appropriations of feminism and gay rights. Indeed, Angela McRobbie sees a triumphant neoliberal popular culture as organising and defining a new sexual world. The founding of Sibéal in 2006 as a network for postgraduate students working in the field of gender studies across disciplines is evidence of the revitalisation of gender studies scholarship and politics. Six years since its foundation, Sibéal continues to create networking opportunities for postgraduate students, run annual conferences, maintain an informative website and keep feminist and gender politics on the agenda.

peer-reviewed ; Peggy Levitt is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Wellesley College. She is also a Research Fellow at the Hauser Center for Nonprofit Organizations and the Weatherhead Center for International Affairs at Harvard University, where she co-directs the Transnational Studies Initiative. Peggy's latest book, God Needs No Passport, is about how immigrants are changing the American religious landscape and was published by The New Press in June 2007. Peggy is also co-editor with Sanjeev Khagram of The Transnational Studies Reader: Intersections and Innovations (Routledge, 2007). It lays the foundation for the new field of Transnational Studies and includes seminal readings from anthropology, sociology, political science, history, economics and cultural studies. Peggy is now working on a project which explores how global ideas about women's rights are used locally in Peru, China, India and the United States. She is also beginning a study of how national artistic and cultural institutions change when nations 'go transnational'.

Recent debates within sociology and feminist theory have identified a need for reflexive research and noted the importance of emotion in the researcher's relationship to the object of research and the research process.This article contributes to these debates by arguing that emotionally mediated apprehensions of the object of study and the practice of critical reflexivity in sociological research cannot be separated. This is because emotional identifications and attachments are central to the (re)framing of the object of study and the politics of knowledge production. Thus, attempts to find more reliable grounds for knowledge claims must be located in the interrelated landscapes of feeling, intellect and politics.

peer-reviewed ; Integration and how it is to be achieved have only recently become objects of policy and discussion in Ireland. Approaches to integration in Ireland are influenced by: the integration policies of those countries with longer experiences of immigration; EU policy; and the specificity of the Irish experience of migration. The Republic of Ireland is an interesting example of a state that is simultaneously involved in policy initiatives that promote the integration of Irish emigrants and their descendents as immigrant communities in their countries of destination and the integration of immigrants in Ireland, including return Irish migrants. This article challenges the assumption that non-integration is the main problem facing emigrants abroad and immigrants to Ireland and argues that the mode and degree of migrant integration (however understood) depends on a wide and changing range of factors and can take place, in spite of, just as much as because of integration policies and initiatives. Taking three policy reports as its focus, the discussion draws on Foucault's notion of governmentality to make explicit the thoughts that are largely tacit in the language, practices and techniques of integration as defined and discussed in these reports. The article argues that integration polices as formulated by the EU and national governments can be seen as nationalist practices of belonging that reproduce national boundaries of inclusion and exclusion. They rely on assumptions about migration and the territorialized nation-state that cannot hold in the face of the speed of capitalist development, which demands a rethinking of the fantasy that national spaces, borders and populations can be managed and controlled.

non-peer-reviewed ; This article investigates the workings of empathy, identification and solidarity across difference and argues that these represent urgent theoretical and political concerns for feminist politics today. It also points to the affective power of memory in political discourse, its potential to bolster identity, and its centrality to differentiation, all of which render the deployments of memory critical to understanding the politics of differentiation and belonging. These topics are addressed via a discussion of selected pro-immigrant discourses in the Republic of Ireland at the turn of the twenty-first century and how these discourses invoke the ethical potential in memorialising past emigration from Ireland. Three questions are addressed: first, what kinds of analogies are drawn between new immigration to Ireland in the present and a past marked by emigration? Second, what can the notion of a 'repressed national memory of emigration' contribute to the promotion of a critical multiculturalism and solidarity with immigrants? And finally, what can debates about difference and identification within feminist theory tell us about how ethnic, familial or national ties might ground or inhibit the development of an ethical relationship to the other? The article concludes with a discussion of the possibilities for feminist solidarity in contexts of the multicultural and the global.