"On our way": identities and representations of African women seeking asylum in Ireland

This thesis provides the first explicit Postcolonial study of asylum in the Irish context that integrates Black Feminist analyses of intersectional identity with Postcolonial Feminist theories of representation. African women seeking asylum in the Republic of Ireland were key political instruments used by the state to re-draw racial lines. The study examines how, for a group of African women “On their Way” through asylum, identity and representation work hand in hand to force identities, subaltern spaces and bodies to occupy them. Rich biographical data is gathered through mixed art and drama methods over two intensive participatory research projects conducted in a small Irish city. Data analysis critically examines the poetics (practices that signify) and politics (the powers that govern these practices) and affective economies of global and local NGO visual representations, exposing how they consume, fragment, and appropriate African women’s identities and bodies. Though hypervisible, the women themselves “cannot speak”. The women in the study reported feeling “tired” and “used”. Asking “What work are they doing as they do asylum?” the study finds that black female identities and bodies are forced to perform political, cultural, emotional and material labour on their way through this context of Irish asylum. The author argues that Postcolonial Asylum is a performative encounter that re-scripts colonial race/class/gender discourse through a humanitarian alibi to naturalize European/white supremacy, reinscribe patriarchal power and justify racialised incarceration of bodies seeking asylum in the North. This study takes an interdisciplinary approach that centralizes Black and Postcolonial Feminist theory and innovates Participatory Art-Based Action methodology. Black and Postcolonial feminisms can recognize, theorize and replenish black female political and intellectual agency. Participatory Action research, if grounded in Black feminist epistemology and ethics, can allow participants to “speak back” to what is already said about them in spaces of convivial self-representation.

Defending the 'public interest': an assessment of competing actor representations of 'solutions' to growing natural resource deficiencies.

This paper applies a SRT framework to the study of two case studies, namely the recent campaign of opposition to the legalization of hydraulic fracking in the State of New York and the more ongoing debate on land leasing in Africa. In relation to both campaigns, the analysis accounts for the arguments of a major financial institution and industry representatives who stress the safe and value-adding dimensions of these practices, as well as the views of opponents who refute the validity of industry's position and point to the unacceptable risks posed to the community, health and the environment. In spite of a number of obvious differences between these two case studies, not least differences arising from contrasting socio-economic and geo-political settings, there were also some notable similarities. First, was a tendency amongst protesters in both cases to formulate their role as contemporaries in a historically extended struggle for democratic justice. All perceived of themselves as guardians of their community's right to resist a corporate 'invasion' of their territories, like their forefathers and mothers before them. A theme of colonialism was explored in both settings through various identity and thematic anchoring devices that deliberately evoked shared understandings and historical memories of exploitation and human suffering. The evocation of powerful symbols of identity through visual narratives of protest further reinforced the cultural comprehensibility of opponents' message of protest in both contexts.