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

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

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

Lancashire to Lahore - Exhibition 1

An international exchange of original postcard artworks between communities in Lancashire, UK, and Lahore, Pakistan

Cultivating Habitats of Meaning: Broadcasting, Participation and Interculturalism

At the time of writing, buenas vistas of the digital landscape are far fewer than when this publication was first conceived. The last year (2002) has witnessed high profile European digital failures, a fraught domestic franchising process and a serious financial crisis at RTE. These factors, combined with the as yet ambiguous direction of postelection policy, conspire to make the future of digital terrestrial television very uncertain. More broadly, reports from Ireland1 and abroad suggest that there is still a significant battle for the ‘hearts and minds’ of potential digital converts. At least partially this involves convincing people that proposed analogue switch-offs are somehow in their best interests, and not heavy-handed (and failing) attempts at technological determinism. Nevertheless, the uncertain appeal and future of a service that may not be able to offer anything more than a diet of re-runs and interactive shopping for abcrunchers creates at least a usable vacuum. It provides a space to focus and regroup energies around the key values and debates on the philosophy and practice of public service, at a time when the concept of public in Ireland contains recurrent and emergent complexities

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