89 research outputs found
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 âglobeâ 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 oneâs 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 âMigration Debatesâ
This article examines âmigration debatesâ in Europe as mediated political rituals. It argues that the consistent meta-commentary within such debates-never regarded as sufficiently âopenâ or âhonestâ â 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, âdebateâ must be approached as having ritual forms of value, and these forms of value are explored in a case study of a short-lived âburka debateâ 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 âethnic
minority mediaâ. 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
âmethodological multiculturalismâ, 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 âMigration Debatesâ
This article examines âmigration debatesâ in Europe as mediated political rituals. It argues that the consistent meta-commentary within such debates-never regarded as sufficiently âopenâ or âhonestâ â 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, âdebateâ must be approached as having ritual forms of value, and these forms of value are explored in a case study of a short-lived âburka debateâ 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
âreservation-style experiencesâ (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 Caribbeanâs 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
âreservation-style experiencesâ (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 Caribbeanâs 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 Fanningâs 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 âadaptive nation-buildingâ, capable of promoting cultural recognition,
future social cohesion and a political reckoning with the structural discrimination and
ethnocentricism which renders non-citizens as âguests of the nationâ. Of course, you canât
adapt a nation without stoking some rows, and Fanningâs book is eager to call out what
he sees as inadequate trajectories of critical thought and political re-imagining; the
âblitheâ and mechanistic transpositions of âracial stateâ 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
âIntegrationâ 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 âmulticulturalismâ, widely â and erroneously â regarded as a âfailed
experimentâ requiring rehabilitative action on issues such as social cohesion, âshared valuesâ and variously grounded common âways of lifeâ. While this shift far exceeds any ordinary etymological or definitional controversy, both terms invite similar forms of ambivalent reading. In Shohat and Stamâs discussion of the wild polysemy of multiculturalism, the idea, they argue, is useful because
it can be made to insist on a âconstitutive heterogeneityâ (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, âthe very idea of multiculturalism, the ideology, disturbs out of proportion to what in fact it may beâ (Elliot and Lemert 2006: 137)
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