The tree of bixad (suffering) in the Kesajaan tea plantation stands as a powerful symbol of both the cultural memory of struggle and resistance. This representation emerges from complex cultural formations and the historical relationship between colonial powers and plantation labourers. The construction of cultural memory illuminates a specific modality of power relations that persists into postcolonial times. This article examines how these cultural memories evolved into forms of resistance politics that challenge the plantation authorities. The tree holds profound cultural significance for the residents of the Kesajaan plantation. According to the residents, during the colonial period, the punishment inflicted on labourers by planters sometimes resulted in death, and the deceased were subsequently to have transformed into ghostly entities. In contemporary times, residents categorise these dead as protective guardians of the plantation. This article further explores how plantation residents maintain cultural memories of colonial and postcolonial violence through ghostly entities. Through this examination, my central argument emphasises the importance of recognising these previously undocumented cultural memories and their role in shaping resistance politics.
This article outlines a feminist-Foucauldian social–theoretical framework for understanding the relationship between Instagram fitness influencers, the Instagram platform, and their followers. Drawing on digital ethnographic research – including interviews with influencers and followers, content analysis of Instagram posts, and app walk-throughs – the article examines how fitness influencers perform aesthetic labour within algorithmic architectures, with particular attention to how gendered power relations are reproduced and intensified through digital platforms. The analysis applies Foucault's concepts of panopticism, disciplinary power, and biopower to examine how women's bodies become sites of self-surveillance, self-optimisation, and neoliberal self-enterprise within the fitness influencer industry. I argue that Instagram operates as a digital panopticon wherein influencers simultaneously exercise and submit to power, their bodies functioning as both ‘business cards’ and objects of continuous discipline. The article demonstrates how algorithmic biopower circulates norms of health, fitness, and feminine embodiment at unprecedented scale, whilst also considering possibilities for resistance within these regimes. The conclusion briefly considers how Deleuze's concept of ‘control societies’ might extend this analysis in future research.
Following the legalisation of abortion in Ireland (2018) and Northern Ireland (2019), the term ‘self-managed abortion’ (SMA) has become increasingly common and is used to describe a diversity of abortion care models. These include clinical SMA, provided by registered medical practitioners, and autonomous SMA, occurring outside the medico-legal framework. Despite advances in abortion provision, confusion remains about the regulation of distinctive SMA models in Ireland. This paper clarifies these regimes, presenting SMA as a spectrum of care models governed by distinct legal and policy frameworks which differentially influence individual's access to and experience of abortion care. Specifically, the paper reaffirms SMA as both a historical practice and a social movement which emerged within and in response to systems of reproductive control and surveillance across the island of Ireland. It highlights SMA as a form of counter-reproductive governance shaped by women's experiential knowledge, feminist activism, and intersecting religious, social, and legal norms. By examining these factors, this paper argues that the contemporary legal and policy treatment of clinical and autonomous SMA should be understood not as a dismantling but as a reconfiguration of longstanding regulatory logics.
The 2004 Citizenship referendum is a telling index of the nation's sentiment about who is entitled to be Irish. Whether newly arrived or born here Black inhabitants are refused the right to call Ireland home. The exclusion of blackness from constructions of Irishness is strikingly reminiscent of the absence or erasure of black people from Irish diasporic history, particularly in the Americas. This article examines Irish involvement in Caribbean slavery and argues that the slow violence of colonial ideologies of race and race-making contributes to epistemologies of ‘race’ and the exclusion of Blackness from Irish diasporic identity and contemporary national belonging. Irish historiography rarely acknowledges the overlapping processes of Irish migration whitening strategies and African slavery. My inquiry focuses on the connected lives of Irish and African descended women in the Spanish colony of Cuba. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship of slavery, race and gender and reading across the myriad relations between people from Europe and Africa in the Caribbean, this article demonstrates the omission of diasporic complicity in slavery from Irish historiography and in doing so challenges the epistemic erasure of Black people in Irish academic knowledge production.
This article examines hygiene poverty as an under-recognised dimension of material deprivation in Ireland. Presenting four in-depth biographical case studies, the study explores how limited resources constrain access to essential hygiene goods across diverse household contexts. Situating hygiene within social policy debates on relative deprivation, dignity and decommodification, the article argues that hygiene poverty is not reducible to income poverty alone but operates through embodied mechanisms of stigma, respectability and social participation. The findings reveal gendered patterns of sacrifice; cumulative pressures associated with incomplete healthcare universalism and the market dependence of essential bodily goods. The article concludes by outlining structural policy reforms, including enhanced measurement, income adequacy review and movement toward universal basic provision of hygiene essentials.
This paper critically examines the intersection of migrant women's experiences of gender-based violence (GBV), housing insecurity, and Ireland's racial neoliberal framework within the Third National Strategy on Domestic, Sexual, and Gender-Based Violence. Using discourse analysis of the three National Strategies and semi-structured interviews with support services for GBV victims, as well as NGOs and CSOs assisting migrant women, it highlights how the strategy's efforts at intersectionality fall short of addressing the root causes of migrant women's marginalisation. Empirical findings reveal how precarious immigration status, inadequate housing pathways, inconsistent translation services, and the lingering effects of COVID-19 restrictions intersect to deepen migrant women's exclusion and limit their access to support. Drawing on racial neoliberalism, it argues that neoliberal policies prioritise economic growth over social equity, rendering migrant women invisible within welfare and housing systems. While the Third National Strategy acknowledges migrant women's needs, it fails to confront systemic racism and economic exclusion perpetuating their vulnerability. The paper concludes that transformative change must challenge the structural inequalities embedded in racial neoliberalism to create a genuinely inclusive framework for migrant women in Ireland.
This paper focuses on how divergent but interlinked knowledge cultures shape veterinary professionals’ practices. Embodied sensory and emotional knowing, and local and contextual knowledge, often incorporated within cultural scripts and conventions, constitute the paper's focus. Drawing upon biographic narrative interviews, we demonstrate that these different forms of knowing are enmeshed with scientific knowledge and embedded in veterinarian's interactions and work practices, influencing diagnosis, treatment and other interventions. Here, ‘knowing’ is understood as knowledge cultures that influence communication and professional practice, while transgressing boundaries between tacit and explicit, lay and scientific knowledge. We argue that these disparate yet convergent forms of knowing deepen our understanding of the multidimensionality of veterinary practice and are important for the education and training of veterinarians, their knowledge and expertise claims. We hereby expand sociological discussions of the labyrinthine character of veterinarian's knowledge, highlighting the complex, diverse ways that it intersects with science.
This article examines how the Twenty-seventh Amendment of the Constitution Act 2004, by limiting jus soli, redefined membership and legitimised differentiated governance of migrants through Direct Provision. Reading constitutional text, party campaign literature, parliamentary debate, and administrative arrangements alongside scholarship on belonging and necropolitics, it argues that Direct Provision is the administrative realisation of the referendum's distinction between citizen and non-citizen. Direct Provision regulates residence through dispersal and extended administrative delay, instituting suspended status as the ordinary condition of protection. The paper situates this regime within Irish nationalist inheritance and argues that far-right actors since 2019 mobilise the 2004 amendment's citizen/non-citizen distinction to structure debates on welfare and housing, securing political traction through reiteration of constitutional exclusion.
Based on fieldwork undertaken with Muslim communities in Dublin, Ireland, this article adds new insights on media reportage as received by Muslim audiences. Utilising agenda setting theory, we evidence how dominant representations of otherness are constructed and received. Participants reveal their perspectives on the perceived dominant discourses of racialised media representations of Muslimness and Islam, and their impacts on both Muslim and non-Muslim communities. While focussing on the ‘media' writ large, this article concludes with original insights on online hate and harassment and how Muslim audiences in Ireland, like elsewhere, receive and are subjected to online anti-Muslim hostility that is replete with, and legitimised, by dominant racialised representations of ‘Muslim as Other', underscoring the relationship between ‘old' and ‘new’ media.
This article re-theorises the 2004 Citizenship Referendum, in first theorising ‘Ireland’ as a 32-counties occupied territory spread over two racial states, and as Britain's first colony. Second, the article theorises citizenship as a badge of social subjection and a measure of standing exclusively granted by racial states. Unpicking the meaning of citizenship, the article explores the impact of coloniality on the reconstruction of Irish citizenship as white supremacy. Third, the article proposes that the Citizenship Referendum resulted from the postcolonial Irish bourgeoisie wishing to emulate England, rather than continue to rebel against the ongoing British colonisation of Ireland. In conclusion, I follow McVeigh and Rolston in proposing that in view of the rise in ‘whiteness riots’ in Ireland north and south, our anti-racism scholarship and activism must re-focus not only on the abolition of the racist citizenship regime, but also aim to end Ireland's unfinished revolution.
In 2018, the Irish electorate voted to remove the text of Article 40.3.3° that enshrined an equal right to life for foetal life to that of the ‘mother’ from the Constitution. This created an impetus for the Irish government to reassess the existing abortion information legislative framework. Until then, laws regulating information access were embedded in, and reenforcing of, anti-abortion ideologies. Information was treated in law as a strategic tool for reducing the number of people who chose abortion and as a potential threat to vulnerable subjects and the anti-abortion status quo. Much of the prohibitory and paternalistic governance of information was repealed with the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018. However, it is apparent from within the law, and the accounts of those who experienced or provided post-2018 abortion care, that the ideologies behind decades of anti-abortion information controls were not fully dispelled through the legalisation of abortion. There remains care-related issues due to the mandatory waiting period, criminalisation and issues with the boundaries of conscientious objection. To facilitate an abortion service that is truly abortion seeker-centred, the legacy of anti-abortion information controls needs to be acknowledged and worked against in legal and policy spaces.
Abortion care in Ireland is heavily regulated when compared with other forms of healthcare and the decisions that providers make in navigating this environment have an important impact on access to abortion care. This article explores the regulatory framework from a provider perspective, analysing the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 and other regulatory elements including the Medical Council Guide to Professional Conduct and Ethics for Registered Medical Practitioners (9th ed., 2024); the Health Services Executive Model of Care; and clinical guidance. Drawing on a qualitative study relating to early medical abortion in primary care conducted by the authors in summer 2022, the article uses a legal consciousness framework to explore how providers engage with the Health (Regulation of Termination of Pregnancy) Act 2018 in their clinical practice. The findings from this study support the case for legislative reform. However, the article also argues that access can be substantially improved through the development of clear guidance that prioritises a commitment to women's autonomy and health and is informed by the experiences of service users and providers.
This article outlines some of my experiences of growing up in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s. It then goes on to discuss what I see are the main changes that Ireland experienced since then. The article argues that by the 2020s Ireland had become a kayfabe state, accepting of biopolitical commodification and indifferent to predation upon segments its population.
In a chapter titled ‘our pernicious temporality’ from his Beyond the Sovereign Self (2024), Grant Kester explores the transformative potential of socially-engaged art. Kester's argument is that a dialogical understanding of aesthetic experience can help us to rethink the normativity of aesthetic autonomy, along with the subject of that discursive apparatus – the ‘sovereign self’. In this review, sociologist Kevin Ryan and curator Neal Harlow put Kester's thesis to the test of practice through a dialogical encounter with a body of work by artist Orla Whelan, recently exhibited in Ireland under the title Coloured by Weather. Drawing on insights on temporality and aesthesis from the fields of Black feminist theory and decolonial theory, Ryan and Harlow explore the ‘our’ invoked by Kester, which they understand to be the temporality of Western modernity.
