Addressing the concept and evidence of institutional racism in Irish education

This proceedings document tells a critical story of the event. Using a social and cultural perspective on racism, power and education, it provides a set of questions for ongoing public, policy-maker and research debate. The publication and dissemination of this document was planned as part of the ‘New Ideas’ proposal. Its intended audience includes education and social policy-makers, and education and community practitioners, including anti-racism activists

Justifying school- and self :an ethnography on race recognition and viability in Ireland

This study draws on theorisation of ethnographic data generated in a suburban Dublin\ud community school, during the 2007/2008 school year. `Dromray', the pseudonym for\ud the school, is situated in a region of county Dublin fictitiously named `Termonfort'.\ud Termonfort has experienced some of the highest levels of change in population terms in\ud Ireland in the past decade. Twenty-two percent of Termonfort's inhabitants are 'non-\ud Irish nationals' according to the 2006 Census, which is double the country average.\ud Between one and two days per week were spent in the school, particularly with Junior\ud Certificate (3rd year, usually 15 year-old) students. Time was spent observing lessons\ud and chatting with staff and students in the staffroom, on the corridor, on the yard and\ud while going for lunch. Recorded interviews were also conducted with students and staff,\ud and records of 3rd year student achievement on school-set tests were taken.\ud The study analyses key school-social and global-local discursive relations that render\ud institutional racism as a highly mobile process in meritocratic times. It puts forward the\ud concept of racist effects as a means of analysing how 'race' (hierarchy), school and peer\ud practices may be co-constructed in overt, but also oblique and contradictory ways.\ud Concepts of global-state-school-exigency, subjectivation and identity performance,\ud recognition and viability underpin these processess. The notion of (respectable) white-\ud Irishness is put forward as an ambiguous normative core which is often re-effected both\ud in oblique relations, but also directly through national/newcomer, good/bad migrant\ud dichotomies. The study encourages a praxis which interrupts 'racist effects' with and\ud beyond 'cause-effect' models of marginalised identities. This praxis requires the\ud deployment of deconstructive strategies, which interrupt the privileging of white-\ud Irishness co-constructed via self (e.g. class, gender, subculture) and school shifts (e.g.\ud mixed ability banding and language support). The approach fundamentally\ud demonstrates how Self and Other are situated, vulnerable and mutually implicated in\ud processes of recognition and viability

Supporting LGBT lives in Ireland: A study of the mental health and well-being of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people

This research set out to examine mental health and well-being, including an investigation of suicide vulnerability (risk) and resilience, among LGBT people in Ireland. A survey instrument, which took approximately 15-20 minutes to complete online, was designed to capture the experiences of LGBT people living in Ireland in a variety of settings and contexts. This instrument included demographic variables, schooling experiences, perceptions of belonging, victimisation and harassment, workplace experiences, and patterns of alcohol use. Indicators of mental health and well-being were also ascertained, including history of self-injurious behaviour and attempted suicide. In the community assessment process phase of the research a total of 14 interviews were conducted. Specific interview topics and questions targeted experiences that may have been challenging, difficult or stressful (e.g. experiences of discrimination, homophobic bullying, stress associated with ‘coming out’ to family and peers). Questions also focussed where relevant on respondents’ experience of depression, anxiety and loneliness and on their use of alcohol and/or drugs. Other sections of the interview concentrated on positive experiences and protective factors. P.16 Alcohol use Prevalence • Ninety two percent of the survey sample were current drinkers, about half of whom consumed alcohol on a weekly basis. • The vast majority of survey respondents who drank (84%) also reported that they engaged in heavy episodic or ‘binge’ drinking either intermittently or regularly, a fifth of whom did so at least twice a week. Problem drinking • Over 40% of survey respondents reported that their alcohol consumption made them ‘feel bad or guilty’ and that almost 60% felt they should reduce their intake of alcohol. • Responses to standardised measures of alcohol use (CAGE and AUDIT-C) suggest that the alcohol consumption patterns of a significant minority of online survey participants could be characterised as problematic, as they exceeded the threshold for hazardous drinking or probable alcohol misuse. • Qualitative findings suggest that regular or heavy alcohol consumption was strongly associated with a felt need to ‘mask’ distressing emotional states and that some used alcohol as a coping mechanism or a form of self-medication

Education policy and ‘free speech’ on race and faith equality at school

Right-wing populists have recurrently created moral panics inter-nationally about the supposed need to ‘protect free speech’ in higher education (HE), and ‘protect children’ from progressive speech in schools. This paper presents the first systematic analysis of how such dynamics function with respect to race and faith equality in a national school policy context. Drawing on a critical post-structural framework, we conceptualise the policy problematisation of speech as situated in a wider set of coercion-consent governing strategies used to manage contemporary authoritarian neoliberal contradictions, and to narrow the speakability of anti- racist and faith equality concerns. We present a two-stage thematic and discursive analysis of a corpus of primarily school-focused English policy texts from successive Conservative-led governments (2010–2022). The analysis outlines three main policy strategies which narrow speakability: the defining of ‘good’ schools and citi-zens with limited/oppositional reference to race equality, the pro-blematising of ‘dangerous’ speech, and the indexing of school/HE subjects who are truly vulnerable to political speech. The paper offers an urgent case study of how possibilities for progressive race and faith-based expression are shaped beyond explicitly speech-focused policies, and argues that engagement of the com-plex governance of speakability offers nuanced possibilities for analysing bans on progressive education internationally

Walking and talking with girls in their urban environments: A methodological meandering

Young people spend a lot of time in their neighbourhood, yet little is known about the relationship between wellbeing, belonging and place from their own perspective. Our study sought to understand how young people navigate their neighbourhood and perceive various aspects of its health environment in its broadest sense. In this article we reflect on the walking methodology we used as part of a Participatory Photo Mapping (PPM) exercise with 11-year-old girls from a working-class school community who were participants in the PEACH Project. It was through walk-along interviews that students were able to tell us where events that matter to them happen; what these experiences look like (via photos that they took while we walked); and how these experiences unfold (via narratives and stories that they shared with us along the way). We reflect on the use of walking methodologies as both an emplaced approach and dynamic exercise that allowed us to access and generate visual and verbal data that privileged these young girls’ community knowledge. We conclude that this method facilitated the discussion of sensitive and political issues, as well as the emergence of unexpected data on child cultures, family and community life, belonging, wellbeing and futures

Sweets are "my best friend": belonging, bargains and body-shaming in working class girls food and health relationships

Research and policy on children’s food consumption commonly highlights the unequal impact of obesogenic environments on their health. Yet obesogenic theories risk pathologising certain communities, when assuming fixed relationships between ‘unhealthy’ environments and ‘obese’ bodies, and neglecting children’s multi-layered relationships to food and health. Drawing on participatory photomapping with 11–12-year-old girls in an urban Irish working-class neighbourhood, this study conceptualises children’s food environments as dynamic, regulatory assemblages which involve multi-layered ‘pushes and pulls’ of ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ foods, experiences and norms. Such foods, experiences and norms are related to in a variety of ways in the girls’ negotiation of belonging, bargain-hunting and body-shaming. The analysis challenges fixed, binary, adult-centred, classed and gendered ideas about healthy/unhealthy child bodies, foods and environments. We argue that viewing food environments as assemblages invites ‘obesogenic’ policy and research to inclusively engage children’s dynamic and multi-layered capacities to act, feel and desire around food

Young girls experiences of "good" food imperatives in a working class school community: rethinking food desire?

Education policy internationally positions schools as central sites of intervention on ‘obesity epidemics’, particularly in working class communities. This article presents a moral geographies approach which examines how such obesity-focused healthy food imperatives are experienced in specific places and times. The authors draw on data from a participatory photo mapping exercise with 11-year-old girls in a working class school setting in Ireland. Rather than focus on the girls’ food consumption through classed, deficit-based discourses of individual restraint or pleasure, they consider their food desires to be an ethico-political force for connection, identification and potential reconstruction of what constitutes ‘good’ food. The participants were adept at performing officially ‘good’ food knowledge, but also constructed food-based identities and relationships that challenged prevailing, individualised imperatives to ‘make healthy choices’. The findings underline the importance of critical pedagogies of food desire, which could engage factors such as the strengths of family and community food cultures

Parents displaying family consumption in Ireland

This article considers qualitative data collected from 78 parents in an Irish study on the commercialisation and sexualisation of children. It makes a distinctive contribution in showing that the framework of family display (Finch, 2007) can be productively applied to the entire field of family consumption. It shows that consumption narratives can be viewed as a tool that is used to display family – in other words, showing how family is done – to internal family members and to outsiders. While family display has been more often applied empirically with non-conventional families, its relevance for all families is reasserted by our data. Our application of the family display framework shows that middle-class parenting ideals are stretched and can become unstuck when displayed by middle-class parents, the constituency most associated with their production and propagation