Search

As legal structures for same-sex relationships are introduced in many contexts, the politics of sexuality are negotiated along religious/secular lines. Religious and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBT-Q) rights are pitted against one another such that LGBT-Q lives often assumed to be secular. Schools are crucibles of intermingling religious, secular and equality discourses and this complexity is carefully negotiated by LGBT-Q teachers in their everyday lives. Drawing on a study with LGB teachers as they entered into a Civil Partnership in Ireland (a legal structure in place for five years prior to enactment of Marriage Equality in 2015), this paper captures a 'structure of feeling'--new cultural work done as sexuality norms were in a state of flux. The teachers' accounts unravel the religious/secular binary and provide insight of universal interest into the ambivalent, messy ways in which the politics of sexuality are (re)negotiated across the overlapping social fields of religion and education.

This paper draws together [Hochschild's (1979) "Emotion Work, Feeling Rules and Social Structure." "American Journal of Sociology" 85: 551-575; (1983) "The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling." London: University of California Press] concepts of "emotional labour" and "feeling rules" with Ahmed's "affective economies" [(2004a) "The Cultural Politics of Emotion". New York: Routledge; (2004b) "Affective Economies." "Social Text" 22 (2): 117-139; (2008) "Sociable Happiness. Emotion, Space and Society" 1: 10-3; (2010) "The Promise of Happiness." Durham: Duke University Press] and "queer phenomenology" [(2006a) "Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others." London: Duke University Press; (2006b) "Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology." "GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies" 12 (4): 543-574] as a way to address wider questions about sexuality and schooling. It highlights the value of the everyday politics of emotion for elucidating and clarifying the specificities, pertinence and complementarities of Hochschild's and Ahmed's work for reimagining the relationship between sexualities and schooling. The combination of their approaches allows for a focus on the individual, bodily management of emotions while demonstrating the connectedness of bodies and spaces. It enables disruption of "inclusive" and "progressive" educational approaches that leave heterosexuality uninterrupted and provides insight into how power works in and across the bodies, discourses, practices, relations and spaces of schools to maintain a collective orientation towards heterosexuality. It also counters linear narratives of progressive change, elucidating how change is a hopeful but messy process of simultaneous constraint, transgression and transformation. Key moments from a three-year study with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBT-Q) teachers entering into civil partnerships in Ireland serve as exploratory examples of the theoretical ideas put forward in this paper.

In this article we argue that transnational social protection (TSP) is becoming the norm in the context of globalisation, heightened mobility and neoliberalism, but cannot be understood without addressing its religious components. TSP differs significantly from national welfare state regimes, which place the responsibility for providing social support firmly on the shoulders of the state. In contrast, TSP regimes involve multiple actors and opportunities in origin and receiving states and place most of the onus for social protection on individuals and families. This article investigates church and state interaction in the development of TSP across the Italian, Mexican and Filipino contexts. It advances scholarship in three key ways: first, it showcases how TSP is replacing state social welfare arrangements and brings to light those shifting church-state entanglements that are central to this shift; second, it highlights the historically rooted trajectories of church-state entanglements that these three cases have in common; and third, it shows that as TSP becomes a state tool in governing non-resident citizens, the church's critical stance in relation to state provisioning is central to TSP as a mode of migration government. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. KEY WORDS Bourdieu / emotion / migration / reflexivity / research / structure of feeling

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2004.10.009 Byline: Breda Gray Abstract: 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 proimmigrant discourses in the Republic of Ireland at the turn of the 21st century and how these discourses invoke the ethical potential in memorializing 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. Author Affiliation: Department of Sociology, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a timely publication as it coincides with the signing of the Downing Street Declaration and marks the 25th anniversary of the Northern Irish conflict. The book highlights the [...]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As legal structures for same-sex relationships are introduced in many contexts, the politics of sexuality are negotiated along religious/secular lines. Religious and Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer (LGBT-Q) rights are pitted against one another such that LGBT-Q lives often assumed to be secular. Schools are crucibles of intermingling religious, secular and equality discourses and this complexity is carefully negotiated by LGBT-Q teachers in their everyday lives. Drawing on a study with LGB teachers as they entered into a Civil Partnership in Ireland (a legal structure in place for five years prior to enactment of Marriage Equality in 2015), this paper captures a ‘structure of feeling’ - new cultural work done as sexuality norms were in a state of flux. The teachers’ accounts unravel the religious/secular binary and provide insight of universal interest into the ambivalent, messy ways in which the politics of sexuality are (re)negotiated across the overlapping social fields of religion and education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws together [Hochschild's (1979) Emotion Work, Feeling Rules and Social Structure.”American Journal of Sociology85: 551–575; (1983)The Managed Heart: Commercialisation of Human Feeling. London: University of California Press] concepts ofemotional labourandfeeling ruleswith Ahmed'saffectiveeconomies[(2004a)The Cultural Politics of Emotion. New York: Routledge; (2004b) “Affective Economies.”Social Text22 (2): 117–139; (2008) “Sociable Happiness.”Emotion, Space and Society1: 10–13; (2010)The Promise of Happiness. Durham: Duke University Press] andqueer phenomenology[(2006a)Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. London: Duke University Press; (2006b) “Orientations: Towards a Queer Phenomenology.”GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies12 (4): 543–574] as a way to address wider questions about sexuality and schooling. It highlights the value of the everyday politics of emotion for elucidating and clarifying the specificities, pertinence and complementarities of Hochschild's and Ahmed's work for reimagining the relationship between sexualities and schooling. The combination of their approaches allows for a focus on the individual, bodily management of emotions while demonstrating the connectedness of bodies and spaces. It enables disruption of ‘inclusive’ and ‘progressive’ educational approaches that leave heterosexuality uninterrupted and provides insight into how power works in and across the bodies, discourses, practices, relations and spaces of schools to maintain a collective orientation towards heterosexuality. It also counters linear narratives of progressive change, elucidating how change is a hopeful but messy process of simultaneous constraint, transgression and transformation. Key moments from a three-year study with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBT-Q) teachers entering into civil partnerships in Ireland serve as exploratory examples of the theoretical ideas put forward in this paper. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Placing social reproduction at the heart of the experience of migration, this article attempts to move beyond regulatory discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice or ‘the Skype generation’. Following a review of feminist literature on social reproduction, the article returns to research with Irish women migrants and non-migrants in the 1990s to demonstrate how technologically mediated ‘time-space compression’ and its promise of transnational proximity actually gave rise to the experience of gendered ‘time-space expansion’.The Irish Times' ‘Generation Emigration’ (GE) project is then introduced as a site in which similar gendered dynamics emerge as contemporary technologically mediated connections between emigrants and the homeland are celebrated through a compensatory (trans)nationalist discourse that competes with but also compensates for framings of emigration as national tragedy. The article suggests that discourses of emigration as tragedy, lifestyle choice, or new globalised practice serve to bring emigration into being in circumscribed ways and to produce emigrants as particular kinds of ‘recognisable’ subjects. It asks how the work of social reproduction in the context of emigration might be posed anew in ways that challenge dominant assumptions regarding the location and composition of the population to be reproduced. By moving beyond these regulatory discourses of emigration, and by emphasising the dynamics of technologically mediated transnational social reproduction, the article identifies the racialised heteronormative assumptions that intersect with national and global projects of economic production and social reproduction to produce uneven gendered effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article examines how the international mobility of corporate professionals is entwined with the rise of the knowledge economy within a 'flexible' capitalist system. As telecommunication technologies transform the economy, transnational organizations have been employing mobility strategies that affect the work and life of highly-skilled professionals and their families. Evidence is reviewed through a perspective of mobile labor studies, assuming international professional mobility as a privileged site of analysis. The article outlines the corporate expatriate population as the background for comparing mobility practices and regimes adopted by conventional and information-intensive industries. This comparison seeks to identify what is specific and new about professional mobility in the knowledge economy. The analysis confirms that patterns of mobility in information-intensive industries are more dynamic, unstable and contingent - in a word, more 'flexible' - than those found in conventional or mature industries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with associate professor Peggy Levitt of the Wellesley College Sociology Department is presented. Levitt says that transnational does not always refers to the process that happens across the national boarders. She agrees that the term national in transnational sometimes produces lack of clarity due to transborders events. Levitt also considers transnational migration studies as a more powerful tool than globalisation.

An introduction to the journal is presented in which the editor discusses various articles on transnational flow of sociology including the proposed concept-metaphor of mobilities, methodological nationalism, and the analytical purchase of transnational studies.

Migrant chaplains are key mediators in the Catholic Church's ministry to its mobile flock. In this article we draw on field-work with migrant chaplains in Ireland, scholarship in transnationalism and Bourdieu's concepts of field, habitus and capital to examine the transnational and local relations by which this ministry is shaped. Three themes are addressed: first, how the dispositions or positions of migrant chaplains as visitors or guests are produced in the negotiation of nationally inflected religious capital; second, the ways in which migrant chaplains challenge the Catholic Church field as manifest in Ireland via calls for recognition of migrant church religious capital; and third, the ways in which the Catholic Church as a universal church reinstates the logic of the Catholic Church religious field across national differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates the ways in which potential migrants in 1950s Ireland negotiated motility and in doing so it attempts to unsettle the workings of the modernity/tradition binary which tends to map easily onto the binaries of migrant/non-migrant and men/women. Focusing on the stage of young adulthood when many imagined potential homes elsewhere but in the event found themselves making homes for themselves in Ireland, this article considers the re-making of self and home in the absence of migrant family members and friends. Family, friendship and community relations have to be reappraised as those who stay wait in the mode of hope for a liveable outcome, or life plan. This is 'waiting-as-event' or 'active waiting'; being alive to the world and the possibilities for making a future. Waiting here is a social norm or aspect of the established family and community relations which, in 1950s Ireland, involved negotiating over time who was to stay and who was to emigrate. The narratives constitute women as women and men as men through relationships to potential migration and associated everyday temporalities of waiting mediated by family obligation (in relation to gendered norms of inheritance, caring and negotiations of autonomy). Moreover, the unpredictability of the outcome of waiting and coming to terms with staying produces unexpected self-encounters in the familiar place of a home changed by the absence of others, but also by their presence in new ways via letters, remittances, return visits and potential return. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article introduces a collection of methodological reflections on mobilities research, and additionally discusses the general status of methodology in the scholarship. Fast advancements on empirical and conceptual levels of mobilities studies have not been equivalently matched by efforts on the methodological front. While microsociological and phenomenological approaches are predominant in the scholarship, large-scale studies on mobility tend not to systematically analyse research frameworks used in the process of knowledge production. The articles featured in this special section examine some of the methodological challenges and innovations arising within several topical strains of mobilities studies. This introductory article argues that multi-scalar and critical methodologies are necessary for further expanding the analytical and interventional possibilities of a mobilities research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This chapter is concerned with identifying an ethical emotional grammar in the forging of feminist solidarities. While acknowledging the potential for the modern emotion of empathy to work in patronising and appropriative ways, the aim is to recuperate empathy's more progressive, ethical and transformative moments. This discussion is located in the contemporary context of global capitalism which is identified in some accounts with post-emotionalism, social numbness, disconnection and the failure of empathy. Noting that the workings of empathy have always been haunted by its potential failure, it is argued that such precariousness can keep responsibility, difference and critical reflexivity at the heart of feminist empathic identification. In this view, empathy can bring emotion, ethics and politics together to facilitate contextually sensitive, contingent and, hopefully, politically effective feminist solidarities. Thus understood, empathy creates the effects of certain boundaries but also enables solidaristic connections across those boundaries. It is in the encounter itself, the connection, or contact zone, that progressive empathic solidarities are forged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an increasingly mobile world, territorially bounded notions of the nation are being rethought, but so are the rationalities of governing mobility and migration. Emigration has become a target of governance in new ways in recent years in the Republic of Ireland with specific implications of the governance of contemporary immigration. This article discusses how emigration has constituted the national ‘we’ in the past and present in order to show how familiar, if changing, relationships between emigration and the Irish nation are now being unsettled through the more contradictory juxtaposition of emigrants, immigrants and the national. The article questions the political potential of this destabilisation of national belonging in the context of neo‐liberal rationalities of governance at a distance, and argues that the interplay of pastoral and economic rationalities of migration governance offers Irish nationals continued economic prosperity without being disturbed by the proximity of the unfamiliar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the norms of migration and settlement as shown by Irish women who migrated to London, England in the 1980s. The author suggests that the trend of emigration relied upon particular normative notions of Irish culture. He believes that the transnational interactions between Ireland and London have created migrancy based on multiple transnational attachments and connections, which produced Irish migrant subjectivities.

This article investigates the multilocated belonging(s) of Irish women in England and how these are mediated by what Alison Bailey (1998) calls 'whitely scripts'. The concept of belonging(s) and theoretical approaches to 'whiteness' frame the discussion of gendered Irish migrancy in England. Belongings are broken down into 'political', 'cultural' and 'ethnic' forms of membership in late 20th-century England. The article argues that slippages between inclusion and exclusion, identification and (dis)identification, constitute Irish women's belongings in England as gendered, migrant, national and transnational in contradictory ways. In response to their positioning by a gendered migrant labour market and postcolonial stereotypes of a feminized culture, some women embrace masculine discourses of national identity and mobility as a means of asserting an agentic self. Simultaneously, the adoption of 'whitely scripts' by some women locates them within the gendered constraints and privileges of the category 'white women'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I consider some of the overlaps and distinctions between the uses of the term diaspora in social/cultural theory and its circulation in the specific socio-political site of the Republic of Ireland in the 1990s and early 2000s. I argue that diaspora can be seen both as mediating Irish national culture in an increasingly globalised world and as a reassuring site of cultural continuity. A number of sources are used to argue that discourses of the Irish diaspora are both complicit with agendas of global capital and potentially resistant to these. While the recent use of diaspora as a heuristic devise for rethinking contemporary belonging should not be embraced uncritically, this term opens up new spaces within which the often emotive politics of transnational and transgenerational affiliation and belonging can be addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discusses the national identity of Irish women who emigrated to England in the 1980s, and their peers who remained in the Republic of Ireland. Focus on the women's relationships to and experiences of Irishness and Irish womanhood; Ways in which the women's accounts are discursively constructed; Specific relationships between national place making and national identity.

Investigates the ways in which national identity competes with other identifications with particular reference to Irish women's emigration from the Republic of Ireland to London, England in the 1980s. Postcolonial theories of diaspora; Gendered constructions of Irishness; Social relations of nationality, migration and transnationalism.