Responsibility for racism in the everyday talk of secondary students

This article examines the attributions of responsibility for racism in the everyday talk of secondary school students. It draws on focus groups with a cross section of students from different ethnic backgrounds in three, very different, secondary schools. In these focus groups, students deploy six different, sometimes contradictory, racialised discourses. Each discourse attributes responsibility for racism in very different ways that testify to the immanence of the past in the present and students’ positioning in specific social and political conditions. In all but one instance, these discourses work to dismiss, deny and/or deflect responsibility for racism by averting responsibility from the self to other individuals, groups or entities. The empirical data, it is argued, show that the individualisation of responsibility for racism has not seeped its way into students’ race-thinking. This testifies to the persistence of race-thinking, the difficult challenge of finding non-racist ways of being in the world, and cautions against assuming that responsibilisation is a universal descriptor of all contemporary social relations.

How rural criminology informs critical thinking in criminology

Over the past quarter century, a growing volume of rural-focused criminological work has emerged. In this article, the literature related to three rural criminological issues are examined and discussed in terms of their lessons for critical criminology. Research on rural communities and crime is examined as a way to criticize and challenge mainstream criminological theories and concepts like social disorganisation and collective efficacy, and to remind critical criminologists of the importance for developing critical perspectives for place-based or ecological theories of crime. Agricultural crime studies are discussed in terms of the need to develop a critical criminology of agriculture and food. Finally, criminological studies of rural ‘others’ is used to show the need for critical criminologists to give greater analytic attention to divisions and marginalities of peoples living in smaller and more isolated places based on gender, race, and lifestyles, among other factors.

States of play: Irish childhoods, race and belonging

This thesis explores the meaning-making practices of migrant and non-migrant children in relation to identities, race, belonging and childhood itself in their everyday lives and in the context of ‘normalizing’ discourses and spaces in Ireland. The relational, spatial and institutional contexts of children’s worlds are examined in the arenas of school, home, family, peer groups and consumer culture. The research develops a situated account of children’s complex subject positions, belongings and exclusions, as negotiated within discursive constructs, emerging in the ‘in-between’ spaces explored with other children and with adults. As a peripheral EU area both geographically and economically, Ireland has traditionally been a country of net emigration. This situation changed briefly in the late 1990s to early 2000s, sparking broad debate on Ireland’s perceived ‘new’ ethnic, cultural and linguistic diversity arising from the arrival of migrant people both from within and beyond the EU as workers and as asylum seekers, and drawing attention to issues of race, identity, equality and integration in Irish society. Based in a West of Ireland town where migrant children and children of migrants comprise very small minorities in classroom settings, this research engages with a particular demographic of children who have started primary school since these changes have occurred. It seeks to represent the complexities of the processes which constitute children’s subjectivities, and which also produce and reproduce race and childhood itself in this context. The role of local, national and global spaces, relational networks and discursive currents as they are experienced and negotiated by children are explored, and the significance of embodied, sensory and affective processes are integrated into the analysis. Notions of the functions and rhetorics of play and playfulness (Sutton-Smith 1997) form a central thread that runs throughout the thesis, where play is both a feature of children’s cultural worlds and a site of resistance or ‘thinking otherwise’. The study seeks to examine how children actively participate in (re)producing definitions of both childhood and race arising in local, national and global spaces, demonstrating that while contestations of the boundaries of childhood discourses are contingently successful, race tends to be strongly reiterated, clinging to bodies and places and compromising belonging. In addition, it explores how children access belongings through agentic and imaginative practices with regard to peer and family relationships, particularly highlighting constructions of home, while also illustrating practices of excluding children positioned as unintelligible, including the role of silences in such situations. Finally, drawing on teachers’ understandings and on children’s playful micro-level negotiations of race, the study argues that assumptions of childhood innocence contribute to justifying depoliticised discourses of race in the early primary school years, and also tend to silence children’s own dialogues with this issue. Central throughout the thesis is an emphasis on the productive potentials of children’s marginal positioning in processes of transgressing definitional boundaries, including the generation of post-race conceptualisations that revealed the borders of race as performative and fluid. It suggests that interrupting exclusionary raced identities in Irish primary schools requires engagement with children’s world-making practices and the multiple resources that inform their lives.

Race, space and politics in Mid-Victorian Ireland: the ethnologies of Abraham Hume and John McElheran

There has been much scholarly debate about the significance and influence of racialist thinking in the political and cultural history of nineteenth-century Ireland. With reference to that ongoing historiographical discussion, this paper considers the racial geographies and opposing political motivations of two Irish ethnologists, Abraham Hume and John McElheran, using their racialist regimes to query some of the common assumptions that have informed disagreements over the role and reach of racial typecasting in mid-nineteenth-century Ireland. As well as examining in detail the racial imaginaries promulgated by Hume and McElheran, the paper also argues for the importance of situating racialist discourse in the spaces in which it was communicated and contested. Further, in highlighting the ways in which Hume and McElheran collapsed together race, class and religion, the paper troubles the utility of a crisp analytical distinction between those disputed categories.

Re-thinking multiculturalism: performing the Cronulla beach riot

Since 11 September 2001, Australia’s race relations have been an issue of significant cultural concern, particularly relations between Anglo-Celtic and Middle-Eastern Australians. Riots on Cronulla Beach, Sydney, in December 2005 heightened this concern. This paper looks at the events at Cronulla and the debates they catalysed about race relations in Australia, and examines how these discourses have been shaped by arguments from both the Right and the Left. Informed by the discourse of critical multiculturalism, we examine several performance-based arts activities that made the riots their subject matter and argue that these arts practices reflect a larger cultural concern about the currency of traditional forms of multiculturalism, and promote instead an emphasis on understanding racial conflict as a critical negotiation over shared territories and values.

Thinking about difference in student supervision

Over the past decade, educators have given greater recognition to the influence of race and culture on practice and policy. Whilst educators are now including specific courses that take account of diversity, scant attention has been paid to how these issues may be addressed in student supervision. This article reports on a qualitative study examining how three experienced supervisors addressed difference in student supervision. Supervisory approaches were compared examining the supervisors' goals, focus, supervisory strategies, theoretical orientation, contribution made to student learning and the limitation of their particular approach. These findings emphasise the complexity of addressing difference in supervision, and suggest that some additional issues to address in supervision.

Ce qui fait la "race nègre" : note de lecture de Critique de la raison nègre d’Achille Mbembe

Cette note de lecture se donne pour objectif d’établir un précis des thèses centrales de Critique de la raison nègre d’Achille Mbembe. L’héritage de Michel Foucault sur la pensée de Mbembe sera d’abord mis en lumière. Une critique générale de l’utilisation, chez Mbembe, de la notion de « race » sera aussi rapidement formulée. Après un survol historique de la fixation du principe de race, les deux versants du concept de « raison nègre » seront exposés dans le détail. Mbembe montre ensuite que les penseurs de l’identité noire se montrent le plus souvent engoncés dans la hantise d’habiter le double (l’un des profils de la raison nègre) hérité du travail du pouvoir raciste. Celui-ci s’appuie sur un complexe de domination psychique qui sera aussi explicité. Une proposition normative, complémentaire, viendra enfin s’arrimer à ces interprétations avant de conclure sur la dimension prescriptive de l’analyse critique mené dans cet essai.

Ce qui fait la "race nègre" : note de lecture de Critique de la raison nègre d’Achille Mbembe

Cette note de lecture se donne pour objectif d’établir un précis des thèses centrales de Critique de la raison nègre d’Achille Mbembe. L’héritage de Michel Foucault sur la pensée de Mbembe sera d’abord mis en lumière. Une critique générale de l’utilisation, chez Mbembe, de la notion de « race » sera aussi rapidement formulée. Après un survol historique de la fixation du principe de race, les deux versants du concept de « raison nègre » seront exposés dans le détail. Mbembe montre ensuite que les penseurs de l’identité noire se montrent le plus souvent engoncés dans la hantise d’habiter le double (l’un des profils de la raison nègre) hérité du travail du pouvoir raciste. Celui-ci s’appuie sur un complexe de domination psychique qui sera aussi explicité. Une proposition normative, complémentaire, viendra enfin s’arrimer à ces interprétations avant de conclure sur la dimension prescriptive de l’analyse critique mené dans cet essai.