Cultural politics and the racial cartographics of human origins

Discussions about human origins, both scientific and pre-scientific, have frequently been freighted with the cultural politics of race relations and questions about human equality. In one way or another, maps have played a critical role in these enterprises by presenting in visual form narratives of human genesis and patterns of human ancestral lineages. In this paper I discuss how a sequence of cartographic representations of human beginnings have transacted racial power from the middle ages to the present day.

A Shared Future? Exclusion, Stigmatization, and Mental Health of Same-Sex-Attracted Young People in Northern Ireland

For more than a decade the Peace Process has fundamentally changed Northern Irish society. However, although socioreligious integration and ethnic mixing are high on the political agenda in Northern Ireland, the Peace Process has so far failed to address the needs of some of the most vulnerable young people, for example, those who identify as gay, lesbian, or bisexual. Public debates in Northern Ireland remain hostile to same-sex-attracted people. Empirical evidence from the annual Young Life and Times (YLT) survey of 16-year-olds undertaken by ARK shows that same-sex-attracted young people report worse experiences in the education sector (e.g., sex education, school bullying), suffer from poorer mental health, experience higher social pressures to engage in health-adverse behavior, and are more likely to say that they will leave Northern Ireland and not return. Equality legislation and peace process have done little to address the heteronormativity in Northern Ireland.

‘Making Older People Equal: Reforming the Law on Access to Education and Other Services’

Age-based discrimination in the supply of goods and services (including educational services) has only very recently been outlawed in the United Kingdom by the Equality Act 2010, the relevant sections of which have not yet been brought into force. This paper critically considers the Act and its implications, as well as the current proposal for an EU Directive on Goods and Services.The greatest immediate potential of the Equality Act lies in the general prohibition against age discrimination and the scope of the exceptions to it. The paper argues that exceptions permitting service providers to discriminate against older people (i.e. negative exceptions) should be very specifically set out in the reforming legislation.There should be no general defence to a claim of age discrimination based around the concept of ‘reasonableness’, which would not be consistently interpreted by courts and tribunals in a way that steers clear of traditional ageist assumptions and stereotyping.The paper argues that service providers should be permitted to discriminate in favour of older people (i.e. make positive exceptions) if the reason for doing do so satisfi es legislative criteria which are designed, amongst other things, to meet the particular needs of older persons or to promote social inclusion. Under this proposal, preferential treatment such as age-related concessionary fees for adult education courses and programmes would be lawful.

Translating ‘gaytown’: the collision of global and local in bringing Australian queer play Bison to Belfast.

Sydney playwright Lachlan Philpott’s Bison (2000/2009) is immersed in a sweaty, summery Antipodean scene of bronzed and toned bodies. It is located in the flora and fauna of gum trees and biting ants. Yet, despite this, it could be argued that at its heart it is not a specifically Australian site, but an all-too translatable scene that seems to be played out in gay clubs, bars, chatrooms and saunas around the Western world: men repeating patterns, looking for sex or love; checking out bodies, craving perfection; avoiding, and occasionally seeking, disease. At least, that was my assumption when I decided to direct the play in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 2009. Philpott came to Belfast to workshop the play with the actors and, as a group, we restructured the play and tried to find a way to ‘de-Australianise’ it without necessarily placing it in a new geographical place - Northern Ireland - through linguistic clues in the text. As Philpott put it: ‘Let’s not make this play about Belfast or Sydney or London or anywhere because it is not a fair reflection of these scenes. Maybe we should just identify the generic elements of this world and then make Bison a play that reflects gaytown – because the rituals are all the same in Western society’. The experience of doing the play in Belfast made clear, however, that ideas of a global gay identity/experience –though highly marketed – fail to account for the vastly different situations of embodied gay experience. And the Northern Irish gay experience, while it has imported the usual ‘generic’ tropes of gayness, sits within a specific cultural context in which the farsighted legislation on equality for gays (imposed by either London or the EU) vastly outstrips wider societal thinking. For many in Northern Ireland, erstwhile MP Iris Robinson’s comments about homosexuality being an ‘abomination’ were a reason to support her, rather than to reject her. For me, the comments were the catalyst to doing Bison in Belfast.

Measuring workforce segregation: religious composition of private-sector employees at individual sites in Northern Ireland

In this paper I examine the scope of publicly available information on the religious composition of employees in private-sector companies in Northern Ireland. I highlight the unavailability of certain types of monitoring data and the impact of data aggregation at company as opposed to site level. Both oversights lead to underestimates of the extent of workplace segregation in Northern Ireland. The ability to provide more-coherent data on workplace segregation, by religion, in Northern Ireland is crucial in terms of advancing equality and other social-justice agendas. I argue that a more-accurate monitoring of religious composition of workplaces is part of an overall need to develop a spatial approach in which the importance of ethnically territorialised spaces in the reproduction of ethnosectarian disputation is understood.

The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability:Human Flourishing in a Climate-Changed, Carbon-Constrained World

Going against both the naive techno-optimist of ‘greening business as usual’ and a resurgent ‘catastrophism’ within green thinking and politics, The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability offers an analysis of the causes of unsustainability and diminished human flourishing. The books locates the causes of unsustainability in dominant capitalist modes of production, debt-based consumer culture, the imperative for orthodox economic growth and the dominant ideology of neoclassical economics. It suggests that valuable insights into the causes of and alternatives to unsustainability can be found in a critical embracing of human vulnerability and dependency as both constitutive and ineliminable aspects of what it means to be human. The book defends resilience, the ability to ‘cope with’ rather than somehow ‘solve’ vulnerability. The book offers a trenchant critique of the dominant neoclassical economic ‘groupthink’, viewing it not as some value-neutral form of ‘expert knowledge’, but as a thoroughly ideological ‘common sense’. Outlining a green political economic alternative replacing economic growth with economic security, it argues economic growth has done its work in the minority, affluent world, which should now focus on improving human flourishing, lowering socio-economic equality and fostering solidarity as part of a new re-orientation of public policy. Complementing this, a, ‘green republicanism’ is developed as an innovative and original contribution to contemporary debates on a ‘post-growth’ economy and society. The Politics of Actually Existing Unsustainability draws widely from a range of disciplines and thinkers, from cultural critic Susan Sontag to the critical theory of the Frankfurt School, contemporary debates in green political thinking, and the latest thinking in heterodox and green economics, to produce a highly relevant, timely, and provocatively original statement on the human predicament in the twenty-first century.

Attitudes towards women in politics: Gender, generation and party identification in Ireland

This article analyzes the effects of gender, generation and party support towards a greater inclusion of women in politics in the Republic of Ireland and Northern Ireland. It explores attitudes on this issue using the same question in the Irish National Election Study (INES) and the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey (NILT). The article documents a consistent gender gap in both polities that persists across the generations, despite controls for socio-demographic factors. It also reveals an unexpected generational effect that we explain as the enduring legacy of politicization to women’s rights during the 1970s. Support among party identifiers for more women in politics follows predictable lines, yet gender and generational patterns persist. The gender gap and generational patterns found in the two polities on the island provide reason for concern among those committed to gender equality in representation.

Using public procurement to achieve social outcomes

The use of public procurement to achieve social outcomes is widespread, but detailed information about how it operates is often sketchy and difficult to find. This article is essentially a mapping exercise, describing the history and current use Of government contracting as a tool of social regulation, what the author calls the issue of 'linkage'. The article considers the popularity of linkage in the I 9,h century in Europe and North America, particularly in dealing with issues of labour standards and unemployment. The use of linkage expanded during the 20(th) century, initially to include the provision of employment opportunities to disabled workers. During and after World War 11, the use of linkage became particularly important in the United States in addressing racial equality, in the requirements for non-discrimination in contracts, and in affirmative action and set-asides for minority businesses. Subsequently, the role of procurement spread both in its geographical coverage and in the subject areas of social policy that it was used to promote. The article considers examples of the use of procurement to promote equality on the basis of ethnicity and gender drawn from Malaysia, South Africa, Canada, and the European Community. More recently, procurement has been used as an instrument to promote human rights transnationally, also by international organizations such as the International Labour Organisation. The article includes some reflections on the relationship between 'green' procurement, 'social' procurement, and sustainable development, and recent attempts to develop the concept of 'sustainable procurement.