Accidental cosmopolitanism: connectivity, insistence and cultural experience

Processes of globalisation are often associated with a burgeoning consciousness of interconnectedness and interdependence between people in the majority and minority worlds. Areas of everyday life, such as consumption and travel, are held to be increasingly informed by the realisation that micro-practices implicate the person in relation to global Others. It is argued that rhetorical ideas of global awareness - as well as the theoretical assumptions that underpin them - depend heavily on rationalist notions of an unfurling consciousness, and inadequately consider the ambivalences engendered by informational overload, non-linear processes and the unintended consequences of globally significant actions. Thus prevalent ideas of acting ethically in globalised societies are not based on considerations of how people may construct the ‘globe’ as a shifting, imagined and incoherent context. The thesis proposes a new understanding of the idea of imaginative geography to conceptualise the ways in which living in interdependence involves a constant tension between implication and understanding. This is exemplified by the ways in which contemporary tourism - for political, cultural and environmental reasons - has become an experience of accidental cosmopolitanism for many; the experience of becoming unavoidably aware of one’s interconnections in a context where leisure normally guarantees insulation from them. As a case study the thesis analyses the construction of the Caribbean as a particular type of touristic space embedded in western images of the non-modem paradise. Field work in St Lucia reveals a fine-grained picture of the ambiguous ways in which touristic images are mediated, re-accented or contested, and how fantasy spaces can never be insulated from wider socio-political dynamics. It concludes by examining the import of these theoretical innovations and the fieldwork observation for discussions of globalisation and non-formal education

Exclusion through Openness? : A Tentative Anatomy of the Ritual of ‘Migration Debates’

This article examines ‘migration debates’ in Europe as mediated political rituals. It argues that the consistent meta-commentary within such debates-never regarded as sufficiently ‘open’ or ‘honest’ – can be taken as a starting point for exploring the simultaneous trace and disavowal of race and racializing discourses in public debate. It examines the disjuncture between the normative expectations of democratic deliberation and decision-making present in migration debates, and the ways in which migration stands for the transformation of the political conditions on which such normative eexpectations depend. Under these conditions, ‘debate’ must be approached as having ritual forms of value, and these forms of value are explored in a case study of a short-lived ‘burka debate’ in Ireland in late 2011

Media transnationalism in Ireland: an examination of Polish media practices

A divergent range of Polish-language and Polish-oriented media has developed in Ireland since May 2004. These media, and the practices that produce and engage with them, cannot adequately be analysed within conventional categories such as ‘ethnic minority media’. Drawing on qualitative work conducted with Polish journalists and media workers, this article examines Polish media as an emerging transnational field, shaped by a reflexive awareness of the extent of transnational media flows within Polish social networks. It suggests that this field can be approached, and further research based, on concepts of immanent transnationalism, multi-modal address and multicultural reflexivity. Given the incipient condition of transnational media research in Ireland, the article draws on current debates in diasporic and transnational media research to argue that future research should transcend the reductive tendencies of ‘methodological multiculturalism’, and attend to the ways in which transnational practices negotiate situated political discourses concerning migration

Meet the Immigrants is a six-part, observational documentary BBC series, co-produced by the Open University

Yolanta Bikova, a Latvian explorer in Lyme Regis, has no real problem with the BBC/Open University camera that tracks her self-conscious moves. Creeping up to a manicured green she beckons the camera to look over her shoulder at the dollop of fantasia she has discovered; scones, lawn bowls and starched linens. Her arch reaction is suggestive; viewers might be meeting the immigrants, but who is the England/Britain that is doing the meeting

Exclusion through Openness? : A Tentative Anatomy of the Ritual of ‘Migration Debates’

This article examines ‘migration debates’ in Europe as mediated political rituals. It argues that the consistent meta-commentary within such debates-never regarded as sufficiently ‘open’ or ‘honest’ – can be taken as a starting point for exploring the simultaneous trace and disavowal of race and racializing discourses in public debate. It examines the disjuncture between the normative expectations of democratic deliberation and decision-making present in migration debates, and the ways in which migration stands for the transformation of the political conditions on which such normative eexpectations depend. Under these conditions, ‘debate’ must be approached as having ritual forms of value, and these forms of value are explored in a case study of a short-lived ‘burka debate’ in Ireland in late 2011

Global Theory and Touristic Encounters

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the tourist industry is providing one in nine jobs and eighty per cent of travellers come from just twenty countries. In other words, in a changing global economy, tourism is a matter of economic imperative for the Majority World, and privileged mobility for the Minority. The economic dependency of the Eastern Caribbean on tourism has been well- documented (Ferguson 1997, Lea 1998, Patullo 1996). A large element of its attractiveness depends on its connotations of paradise in the Minority World, and therefore it is an economic necessity that paradise is continually simulatable. The widespread development of all-inclusive resorts, or what Bauman has termed ‘reservation-style experiences’ (1998: 58), organises social space as a simulacra of widely circulated images, and it is a structuration which approaches culture as a factor of risk and uncertainty. Furthermore, not only does a large amount of tourist/host contact take place within this confinement, but it is increasingly the normative setting for representations of the Caribbean in media texts. In this paper I do not wish to re-examine arguments concerning the social unsustainability of this form of tourism, as I think that can be taken as read. My focus will be the way in which this kind of tourism provides a framework for imagining and gazing upon the Caribbean, and the problems this presents for island identities. Central to this is the question of identity and globalisation, that nebulous process which drives the increase in the type of tourism which is under discussion. An influential current in global theory is to analyse the way in which processes engendered in the economic sphere result in cultural phenomenon which are delinked from any simplistic notion of economic causality. While this is generally sustainable, I wish to argue that the precise form of tourism which defines the Caribbean’s entry into this global market has a structuring influence on the cultural, precisely because it is the cultural which has been fundamentally commodifie

Global Theory and Touristic Encounters

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the tourist industry is providing one in nine jobs and eighty per cent of travellers come from just twenty countries. In other words, in a changing global economy, tourism is a matter of economic imperative for the Majority World, and privileged mobility for the Minority. The economic dependency of the Eastern Caribbean on tourism has been well- documented (Ferguson 1997, Lea 1998, Patullo 1996). A large element of its attractiveness depends on its connotations of paradise in the Minority World, and therefore it is an economic necessity that paradise is continually simulatable. The widespread development of all-inclusive resorts, or what Bauman has termed ‘reservation-style experiences’ (1998: 58), organises social space as a simulacra of widely circulated images, and it is a structuration which approaches culture as a factor of risk and uncertainty. Furthermore, not only does a large amount of tourist/host contact take place within this confinement, but it is increasingly the normative setting for representations of the Caribbean in media texts. In this paper I do not wish to re-examine arguments concerning the social unsustainability of this form of tourism, as I think that can be taken as read. My focus will be the way in which this kind of tourism provides a framework for imagining and gazing upon the Caribbean, and the problems this presents for island identities. Central to this is the question of identity and globalisation, that nebulous process which drives the increase in the type of tourism which is under discussion. An influential current in global theory is to analyse the way in which processes engendered in the economic sphere result in cultural phenomenon which are delinked from any simplistic notion of economic causality. While this is generally sustainable, I wish to argue that the precise form of tourism which defines the Caribbean’s entry into this global market has a structuring influence on the cultural, precisely because it is the cultural which has been fundamentally commodifie

Global Theory and Touristic Encounters

According to the World Travel and Tourism Council, the tourist industry is providing one in nine jobs and eighty per cent of travellers come from just twenty countries. In other words, in a changing global economy, tourism is a matter of economic imperative for the Majority World, and privileged mobility for the Minority

Fanning, Bryan (2009) New Guests of the Irish Nation

Bryan Fanning’s new book is a book in search of an argument, in three productive senses. A collection of essays written between 2001 and 2008, it presents the gradual accretion of conceptual possibilities adequate to the consequences of rapid transformative migration in the Republic of Ireland. As these conceptual resources develop over time, a more fundamental search emerges from their contours; for a situated normative project of what comes to be called ‘adaptive nation-building’, capable of promoting cultural recognition, future social cohesion and a political reckoning with the structural discrimination and ethnocentricism which renders non-citizens as ‘guests of the nation’. Of course, you can’t adapt a nation without stoking some rows, and Fanning’s book is eager to call out what he sees as inadequate trajectories of critical thought and political re-imagining; the ‘blithe’ and mechanistic transpositions of ‘racial state’ theory, the lingering hubris of modernisation, the expansive insularity of Irish Studies. There is much to admire in his field of engagement, and much to disagree with in the engagements themselves

Overview / Editorial

‘Integration’ has been established as the preferred rubric for academic discussions, popular polemics and political proposals concerning migration, difference and social futures in globalised nation-states, particularly in western Europe. This amplification owes much to its perceived, corrective relationship to ‘multiculturalism’, widely – and erroneously – regarded as a ‘failed experiment’ requiring rehabilitative action on issues such as social cohesion, ‘shared values’ and variously grounded common ‘ways of life’. While this shift far exceeds any ordinary etymological or definitional controversy, both terms invite similar forms of ambivalent reading. In Shohat and Stam’s discussion of the wild polysemy of multiculturalism, the idea, they argue, is useful because it can be made to insist on a ‘constitutive heterogeneity’ (2008: 3) that refuses the foundational constructions of a national ethnos. The converse is equally plausible; much of the scattergun opprobrium directed at and through the idea of multiculturalism is a consequence of its pronounced sense of imposition, an unwelcome and unasked for amendment to a pre-existing monoculturalism. For this reason, ‘the very idea of multiculturalism, the ideology, disturbs out of proportion to what in fact it may be’ (Elliot and Lemert 2006: 137)