Politically motivated former prisoner groups: community activism and conflict transformation

Aims and objectives: This study represents the first sustained quantitative and qualitative attempt to involve both Republicans and Loyalists in an investigation of the impact of imprisonment and the role of politically motivated former prisoners in the process of conflict transformation in Northern Ireland. The overall aim of the project is to examine the ways in which groups of former prisoners are involved in peace-building and conflict transformation work and to evaluate the constraints and impediments placed upon their activities by the effects of the imprisonment process, politically motivated release and residual criminalisation. In pursuing the evaluation of the role of politically motivated former prisoners working within and without their own communities, the research has six specific objectives: To trace the evolution and development of former prisoner groups; To evaluate the impacts of imprisonment and release on the personal lives of former prisoners; To assess the constraints imposed on former prisoners as agents of change by the residual criminalisation arising from their status; To determine the potential of the former prisoner community in challenging intra-community tensions and evaluate their potential and actual contribution to conflict transformation at the inter-community level; To compare and contrast the effectiveness of Loyalist and Republican former prisoners as agents of change within their own communities; To explore the notion of former prisoners as agents of social and communal transformation within broader political processes through grounding the knowledge and practical experience of the former prisoner community within the broader conceptual context of conflict transformation.

Work, class and conflict: a comparative study of three Cork factories, incorporating oral testimony

This dissertation presents a comparative study of three factories in Cork Harbour area, Sunbeam Wolsey (1927-90), Irish Steel (1939-2001) and the Ford Marina Plant (1917-84). All three factories were significant industrial employers in both a domestic (Irish) and a local (Cork) context and are broadly representative of the Irish manufacturing industry that was developed under the policies of tariff protection introduced in the 1930s and gradually phased out between the late 1950s and the mid-1980s. Sunbeam Wolsey was a textile and clothing concern located on the north side of Cork City that possessed a borderline monopoly within its economic sector and was among the largest private employers of female labour in twentieth century Ireland. Irish Steel was the country’s only steel mill, located on Haulbowline island, a brief ferry-ride from the seaside town of Cobh, and was unusual in being one of the few manufacturing concerns operated as a nationalised industry under the auspices of the state. The Ford Marina plant predated the introduction of protectionism by more than a decade and began as the centre of the Ford empire’s tractor manufacturing business, before switching to the production of private motor vehicles for the Irish market in 1932. All three industries were closed or sold off when the state withdrew support, either in the form of tariff protection (Ford, Sunbeam) or direct funding (Irish Steel). While devoting much attention to the three firms, the central concern of this dissertation is not the companies themselves (though the economic history portion of the dissertation is substantial), but the workers they employed, examining the lives of these individuals both as members of the Irish working class, and, more specifically, as employees of the three factories under consideration. The project can be best described as a comparative factory study, comparing and contrasting the three workforces, focusing primarily on industrial relation and the experience of work. This dissertation utilises both documentary evidence and a significant quantity of oral testimony, breaking new ground by making the workplace the central focus of its investigation. The principal aims of the study are: 1. To document the lives of those who worked in these factories, capturing through oral testimony their subjective experiences of social class and factory life, as well as differences among narrators in terms of gender and status. In achieving this aim, the study will provide a broader social context for its detailed analysis of work and industrial relations in each firm. 2. To analyse the three workplaces and determine how and why each developed such distinct systems of industrial relations at the factory level, as well as to compare and contrast these systems. 3. To examine the nature of work in each factory and to determine how work and industrial relations in each firm developed over time, relating these changes both to internal and external factors. Additionally, the project will provide a comparative analysis of these changes.

Gambling and violence in a nationally representative sample of UK men

The relationship between violence and problem gambling in general population samples is under-researched and requires further attention to inform treatment and prevention efforts. We investigated the relationship between gambling problems and violence among men and sought to determine if the link can be accounted for by mental disorders, alcohol and drug dependence and impulsivity.

Language legislation in Ireland and the United Kingdom: Exploring the gaps between theory and practice

The central objective in this thesis is to explore the gaps between the normative justifications advanced for language rights and language legislative protection and the effective realisation of those rights and legislative provisions in practice. This objective is achieved by examining the scope and application of language rights and legislative provisions within language legislation in Ireland and the United Kingdom. Drawing on Canadian jurisprudence advocating for language rights to be recognised as “purposeful”, the thesis considers the extent to which Ireland and the United Kingdom have limited the acceptance of positive obligations as they relate to the provision of language services in the public sphere. In arguing that language rights are distinct in nature, the thesis suggests that in order for language rights to be effectively realised, an approach to language rights and language legislation more generally must be underpinned by a substantive vision of equality, otherwise language rights and legislative provisions merely amount to symbolic recognition and vacuous rhetoric as opposed to being substantive and enabling rights and provisions. Having said that, the thesis also recognises and elucidates the practical difficulties that arise in the realisation of language rights and language legislative provisions and in doing so seeks to stimulate further dialogue about the nature and limits of language rights and language legislation.

Scientism and instrumentalism After the Bomb: Dr Strangelove, End Zone, Crash and The Wire

This thesis argues that through the prism of America’s Cold War, scientism has emerged as the metanarrative of the postnuclear age. The advent of the bomb brought about a new primacy for mechanical and hyperrational thinking in the corridors of power not just in terms of managing the bomb itself but diffusing this ideology throughout the culture in social sciences, economics and other such institutional systems. The human need to mitigate or ameliorate against the chaos of the universe lies at the heart of not just religious faith but in the desire for perfect control. Thus there has been a transference of power from religious faith to the apparent material power of science and technology and the terra firma these supposedly objective means supply. The Cold War, however was a highly ideologically charged opposition between the two superpowers, and the scientific methodology that sprang forth to manage the Cold War and the bomb, in the United States, was not an objective scientific system divorced from the paranoia and dogma but a system that assumed a radically fundamentalist idea of capitalism. This is apparent in the widespread diffusion of game theory throughout Western postindustrial institutions. The inquiry of the thesis thus examines the texts that engage and criticise American Cold War methodology, beginning with the nuclear moment, so to speak, and Dr Strangelove’s incisive satire of moral abdication to machine processes. Moving on chronologically, the thesis examines the diffusion of particular kinds of masculinity and sexuality in postnuclear culture in Crash and End Zone and finishing up its analysis with the ethnographic portrayal of a modern American city in The Wire. More than anything else, the thesis wishes to reveal to what extent this technocratic consciousness puts pressure on language and on binding narratives.

Between respectability and disgrace: schismogenesis and the regeneration of inequality, stigma and social exclusion in Limerick

The thesis examines cultural processes underpinning the emergence, institutionalisation and reproduction of class boundaries in Limerick city. The research aims to bring a new understanding to the contemporary context of the city’s urban regeneration programme. Acknowledging and recognising other contemporary studies of division and exclusion, the thesis creates a distinctive approach which focuses on uncovering the cultural roots of inequality, educational disadvantage, stigma and social exclusion and the dynamics of their social reproduction. Using Bateson’s concept of schismogenesis (1953), the thesis looks to the persistent, but fragmented culture of community and develops a heuristic ‘symbolic order of the city’. This is defined as “…a cultural structure, the meaning making aspect of hierarchy, the categorical structures of world understanding, the way Limerick people understand themselves, their local and larger world” (p. 37). This provides a very different departure point for exploring the basis for urban regeneration in Limerick (and everywhere). The central argument is that if we want to understand the present (multiple) crises in Limerick we need to understand the historical, anthropological and recursive processes underpinning ‘generalised patterns of rivalry and conflict’. In addition to exploring the historical roots of status and stigma in Limerick, the thesis explores the mythopoesis of persistent, recurrent narratives and labels that mark the boundaries of the city’s identities. The thesis examines the cultural and social function of ‘slagging’ as a vernacular and highly particularised form of ironic, ritualised and, often, ‘cruel’ medium of communication (often exclusion). This is combined with an etymology of the vocabulary of Limerick slang and its mythological base. By tracing the origins of many normalised patterns of Limerick speech ‘sayings’, which have long since forgotten their roots, the thesis demonstrates how they perform a significant contemporary function in maintaining and reinforcing symbolic mechanisms of inclusion/exclusion. The thesis combines historical and archival data with biographical interviews, ethnographic data married to a deep historical hermeneutic analysis of this political community.

Reading Lydgate's Troy Book: patronage, politics, and history in Lancastrian England

This thesis, Reading Lydgate's Troy Book: Patronage, Politics and History in Lancastrian England, discusses the relationship between John Lydgate as a court poet to his patron Henry V. I contend that the Troy Book is explored as a vehicle to propagate the idea that the House of Lancaster is the legitimate successor to King Richard II in order to smooth over the usurpation of 1399. Paul Strohm's England's Empty Throne was a key influence to the approach of this thesis' topic. I examine that although Chaucer had a definitive impact on Lydgate's writing, Lydgate is able to manipulate this influence for his own ambitions. In order to enhance his own fame, Lydgate works to promote Chaucer's canon so that as Chaucer's successor, he will inherit more prestige. The Trojan war is seen in context with the Hundred Years War, and can be applied contextually to political events. Lydgate presents characters that are vulnerable to human failings, and their assorted, complicated relationships. Lydgate modernises the Troy Book to reflect and enhance his Lancastrian society, and the thesis gives a contextual view of Lydgate's writing of the Troy Book. Lydgate writes for a more varied target audience than his thirteenth-century source, Guido delle Colonne, and there is a deliberation on the female characters of the Troy Book which promulgates the theory that Lydgate takes a proactive and empathetic interest in women's roles in society. Furthermore Lydgate has never really been accepted as a humanist, and I look at Lydgate's work from a different angle; he is a self-germinating humanist. Lydgate revives antiquity to educate his fifteenth-century audience, and his ambition is to create a memorial for his patron in the vernacular, and enhance his own fame as a poet separate from Chaucer's shadow.

Geografia emocional d'un exode: La retirada republicana de 1939

This thesis proposes to trace and explore an emotional geography and cartography of the republican withdrawal at the end of the Spanish Civil War in Catalonia during the months of January and February 1939. Thus, it complements existing historiographical scholarship on the Spanish Civil War and Spanish Republican Exile, especially with regard to what was experienced in Catalan territory. However, its main purpose is not that of the historian, to reveal and explain unexplored stories, but to locate existing narratives, memoirs, journals and testimonies carefully in the landscape in which they took place, exposing their emotional bonds with the places and spaces of the withdrawal of the protagonists of the Republican exodus of 1939. Whilst there has been significant work in recent years to “recover” spaces associated with violent of traumatic memories of conflict and displacement, including the creation of a network of “Democratic Memory” places in Catalonia, the spaces explored in this thesis have not so far been construed as places of memory. In part, this is because of the diversity of emotions and affective responses they provoked and continue to evoke, but also because the geography of the Retirada is characterized by mobility and multiplicity. So instead of an historical approach, despite being influenced by Walter Benjamin's concept of history, this thesis draws on existing methods and approaches related to cultural geography, in particular, the emerging interdisciplinary field known as emotional geographies. In order to create a vision of La Retirada that is sensitive to its mobility and multiplicity, the primary methodology used has been that of interdisciplinary assemblage, juxtaposing images, documents and stories of past and present, in a process redolent of that which Marianne Hirsch calls "post-memory".

Nancy Spero: pain and politics, 1966-1976

The ten-year period that started with Nancy Spero’s War Series (1966-70) and ended with the completion of Torture of Women (1974-6) were of vital importance to the development of this key figure of feminist art. This was the moment when Spero turned her focus to politics, departing from a practice that was concerned with personal disaffection, instead focusing on profoundly social concerns. Essential to this evolution is a focus on pain. From the War Series through the Artaud Paintings (1970-71), Codex Artaud (1971-2), and Torture of Women, pain, both internal and external, was imagined in multiple forms. In Spero’s explorations of the theme, pain becomes metaphoric of the experience of women living under patriarchy, an amorphous but still profoundly disabling sensation that attacks both body and mind. This thesis explores Spero’s use of physical pain during moment of feminist art’s emergence, seeing it as a political metaphor for the way in which patriarchy invisibly controls and undermines women. Framed broadly by the question of art's relationship with politics during this turbulent period of anti-war and feminist activism, this thesis closely examines the way in which an analogy to pain figures the body in the work in complex terms, pursuing an ideological ambition through recourse to feeling.

The Kyoto School and Confucianism: a Confucian reading of the philosophy of history and political thought of Masaaki Kosaka

This dissertation examines the philosophy of Masaaki Kōsaka (1900-1969) from the East Asian perspective of Confucianism, which I believe is the most appropriate moral paradigm for comprehending his political speculations. Although largely neglected in post-war scholarship, Kōsaka was a prominent member of the Kyoto School during the 1930s and 40s. This was a group of Japanese thinkers strongly associated with the philosophies of Kitarō Nishida and Hajime Tanabe. Kōsaka is now best known for his participation in the three Chūō Kōron symposia held in 1941 and 1942. These meetings have been routinely denounced by liberal historians due to the participants’ support for the Pacific War and the Co-Prosperity Sphere. However, many of these liberal portrayals have failed to take into account the full extent of the group’s resistance to the military junta of Hideki Tōjō. Adopting the methods and techniques of the empirical disciplines of academic history and Orientalism, I develop an interpretative framework that is more receptive to the political values that mattered to Kōsaka as a Confucian inspired intellectual. This has necessitated the rejection of moral history, which typically prioritises modern liberal values brought a priori to the historical record of wartime Japan, as well as recognition of the different ontological foundations that inform the unique political theories of the East Asian intellectual tradition. Reinforced by the prior research of Michel Dalissier and Graham Parkes, as well as my own reading of the Confucian canon, I adopt David Williams’s thesis of ‘Confucian Revolution’ as my principle schema of interpretation. This, I believe, is better able to reconcile Kōsaka’s support for the war with his strong condemnation of the imperialist practices of the Japanese military. Moreover, acknowledging the importance of Confucianism allows us to fully appreciate Kōsaka’s strong affinity for Kant’s practical metaphysics, Hegel’s political philosophy and Ranke’s historiography.