Young Women’s Positive and Negative Perceptions of Self in Northern Ireland

This paper represents analysis of one aspect of a larger research project examining the everyday lives and experiences of young women in Northern Ireland. As an introductory exercise within focus groups, 48 young women considered and discussed the good and not so good things about being a young woman in Northern Ireland. Through these accounts many issues emerged, some in direct contrast and contradiction to one another. The area focused upon for the purpose of this paper is the body, particularly with regard to body image (self-expression versus pressure) and becoming a woman (growing up versus menarche). The aim is to illustrate that what young women cite as being potentially positive aspects of growing up or being a young woman often have negative experiences and implications attached to them. In light of the advancements made by young women in Northern Irish society, an opening of opportunities and their awareness of the persistence of gendered messages regarding their bodies, many young women are of the belief that such messages have less impact upon them today and that gender is a barrier that can be overcome. It is illustrated and argued here, however, that dominant cultural messages regarding women’s bodies are more subtle, confusing and perhaps pervasive than they ever have been. As a consequence, this has created more pressure and confusion for young women and tensions exist in terms of young women’s beliefs and their actions. In light of these research findings, this paper considers practice implications for those working with and for young women.

A Review of Demographic Ageing in the UK: Opportunities for Rural Research

Demographic ageing is a global phenomenon. UK policy and research have, until recently, focused on national trends and implications and largely viewed ageing as a 'pensions and care' problem. While other and more positive aspects are beginning to be acknowledged, regional, local, and rural impacts remain underinvestigated. This paper, by reviewing the literature from several disciplines and countries, introduces a series of research questions that could usefully inform future geographical inquiry. It argues that the nature, experiences, and consequences of demographic ageing will vary across space, stage in the life course and numerous aspects of our everyday lives. Our current knowledge and understanding are but the tip of the iceberg in terms of the research opportunities that lie ahead.

Sectarian and Nonsectarian Violence: Mothers' Appraisals of Political Conflict in Northern Ireland

Past research on peace and conflict in Northern Ireland has focused on politically motivated violence. However, other types of crime (i.e., nonsectarian) also impact community members. To study the changing nature of violence since the signing of the Belfast Agreement in Northern Ireland, we used a qualitative approach and the Constant Comparative Method to analyze focus group discussions with mothers from segregated Belfast neighborhoods. Participants articulated clear differences between sectarian and nonsectarian violence, and further distinguished sectarian violence along 2 dimensions—overt acts and perceived intergroup threat. Although both sectarian and nonsectarian antisocial behavior related to insecurity, participants described pulling together and increased ingroup social cohesion in response to sectarian incidents. The findings have implications for the study of violence and insecurity as experienced in the everyday lives of mothers, youth, and families in settings of protracted conflict.

Animal maiming, intimacy and the politics of shared life: the bestial and the beastly in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England

The everyday lives of many farm workers in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century England were intricately and often intimately bound with the lives of animals, the ebb and flow of human life being inseparable from that of animal life. Farmyards, fields, folds as well as barns and stables were all spaces where animals transcended being the mere instruments of capital to instead being obvious co-constituents of the rhythms of existence. Living and working in such close proximity meant that the ‘species barrier’ was crossed and intimacies developed in everyday agricultural practices. Still, the relationship was based upon, if not reducible to, the workings of capital: the animal enrolled as a form of embodied capital, the labourer engaged by the farmer to act upon the animal. And in such relationships intimacies are mirrored by violences: the keeping captive, slaughter, and – occasionally – abuse. In this formative period in which the discourses and policies that continue to inform animal welfare were first formulated, the declining economic and material fortunes of farm workers when juxtaposed to farm animals’ fortune as increasingly ‘cosseted capital’ gave a particular charge to these abuses. Farm animals, and especially horses and cattle, so it is shown, were subjected to a series of violences. Many cases of animal maiming parodied tenderness in their brutality, whilst other attacks on the sexual organs of animals represented complex statements about the ways in which agrarian capitalism regulated all culture. Analysing the changing relationship between humans and animals therefore also helps us to better understand how capitalism mediates – and is mediated by – the non-human as well as the human, and how it defines cultural relations.

Contact, trust and social capital in Northern Ireland: a qualitative study of three mixed communities

In a recent paper, Robert Putnam (2007) challenges the contact hypothesis by arguing that ethnic diversity causes people to ‘hunker down’ and essentially withdraw themselves from society. Drawing on
qualitative data collected from three mixed communities in Northern Ireland, this paper explores the extent and quality of contact experienced by Protestants and Catholics in their everyday lives. Themes emerging from our data are generally consistent with the contact hypothesis. There is also some support for Putnam’s theory that mixed environments can induce ‘hunkering down’ and that inter-group trust may be compromised. However, our data challenge Putnam’s argument that these responses are a consequence of ‘anomie’ or ‘social malaise’. Rather, we find that withdrawal from social activity in the neighbourhoods we observed was a calculated response at times of threat, often aimed at protecting existent positive inter-ethnic relations.

The meaning of medications:another look at compliance

Most research on compliance with medical regimens takes a doctor-centered perspective and proceeds from certain assumptions. This paper presents an alternative, patient-centered approach to managing medications, using data from 80 in-depth interviews of people with epilepsy. This approach focuses on the meanings of medication in people's everyday lives and looks at why people take their medications as well as why they do not. I argue that from a patient's perspective the issue is more one of self-regulation than compliance. When we examine 'noncompliance' beyond difficulties with 'side effects' an drug efficacy, the meanings of self-regulation include testing, controlling dependence destigmatization and creating a practical practice. What appears to be noncompliance from a medical perspective may actually be a form of asserting control over one's disorder.

Frontline Leisure::Securitizing tourism in the War on Terror

This article argues that the terrorist bombings of hotels, pubs and nightclubs in Bali in October 2002, and in Mombasa one month later, were inaugural moments in the post-9/11 securitization of the tourism industry. Although practices of tourism and terrorism seem antithetical – one devoted to travel and leisure, the other to political violence – this article argues that their entanglement is revealed most clearly in the counter-terrorism responses that brought the everyday lives of tourists and tourism workers, as well as the material infrastructure of the tourism industry, within the orbit of a global security apparatus waging a ‘war on terror’. Drawing on critical work in international relations and geography, this article understands the securitization of tourism as part of a much wider logic in which the liberal order enacts pernicious modes of governance by producing a terrorist threat that is exceptional. It explores how this logic is reproduced through a cosmopolitan community symbolized by global travellers, and examines the measures taken by the tourism industry to secure this community (e.g. the physical transformations of hotel infrastructure and the provision of counter-terrorism training).

The Sociology of Children, Childhood and Generation

Outlining sociology’s distinctive contribution to childhood studies and our understanding of contemporary children and childhood, The Sociology of Children provides a thought provoking and comprehensive account of the connections between the macro worlds of childhood and the micro worlds of children’s everyday lives.

Examining children’s involvement in areas such as the labour market, family life, education, play and leisure, the book provides an effective balance between understanding childhood as a structural phenomenon, and recognising children as meaning makers actively involved in constructing, co-constructing and reconstructing their everyday lives.

Through the concept of 'generagency' Madeleine Leonard offers a model for examining and illuminating how structure and agency are activated within interdependent relationships influenced by generational positioning. This framework provides a conceptual tool for thinking about the continuities, challenges and changes that impact on how childhood is lived and experienced.

Teenagers' Perceptions and Experiences of Belfast as a Divided City

In this ‘research project’ case study, we provide an empirical example of how quantitative and qualitative methods were combined within a single study and discuss some of the strengths and weaknesses of our combined methodology which included questionnaires, photo-prompts and focus-group interviews. Our intention in using mixed methods was to enhance understandings of the meanings of space, place and territory on the everyday lives of young people growing up in Belfast. How do young people negotiate space in politically divided cities such as Belfast? Is territory important, and if so, why is it important? How do we construct an appropriate and relevant study design that can not only describe, but explain what place, space and territory mean to young people, and more importantly, how it impacts on their everyday lives? How useful is it to apply a mixed-methods approach to finding answers to these questions? We explain why and how we used a mixed-methods approach and illuminate some of the issues we encountered. We demonstrate how mixed methods can provide not just complementary but also new insights into the topic under investigation. We hope that the case study encourages you to experiment, or at least consider, the potential of using mixed methods.

Making Ireland Modern

Making Ireland Modern is a cross-disciplinary, inter-institutional, inter-media design and research project which emerged from an open competition (won by Boyd and McLaughlin) to commission/curate the Irish pavilion for the Venice biennale 2014. It explores the relationship between architecture, infrastructure and technology in the building of a new nation. Constructed as a demountable, open matrix of drawings, photographs, models and other artefacts, the exhibition (12 x 5 x 6 metres) presents ten infrastructural episodes – Negation, Electricity, Health, Transportation, Television, Aviation, Education, Telecommunications, Motorways, Data – spanning a period of one hundred years from 1916-2016. Exploring a range of scales from the detail design of objects to entire landscapes and other territories, Making Ireland Modern describes architecture’s role in transforming the physical and cultural identity of the new state through its intersession in the everyday lives of its population. In 2015, we were commissioned by the Arts Council of Ireland to expand and develop the pavilion for a three cities tour of Ireland as one of the five major strands of the Arts Council’s Art2016 programme of Irish State’s 1916-2016 centennial celebrations (2016).

Violence in the Lives of Children and Youth in “Post-Conflict” Northern Ireland

While Northern Ireland experiences relative peace and political stability, its violent past is normalized in murals and commemorations, the language and posturing of opposition politics, segregated communities and social life. In “post-conflict” Northern Ireland, children and youth disproportionately experience paramilitary-style attacks and routine sectarian violence. The violence of poverty and restricted opportunities within communities debilitated by three decades of conflict is masked by a discourse of social, economic and political progress. Drawing on qualitative research, this paper illustrates the continued legacy and impacts of violence on the lives of children and youth living in post-ceasefire Northern Ireland. It discusses the prominence of violence—sectarian, racist, political, “everyday,” domestic, “informal”—in young people's accounts and the impacts on their safety, sense of belonging, identity formation, use of space and emotional well-being. The paper concludes by challenging narrow and reductionist explanations of violence, arguing the need to contextualize these within local, historical, political, cultural and material contexts.