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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This thesis investigates a selection of four sited fashion projects completed in rural Italy (2010), a Midwestern US city (2013), Hawai’i (2015) and the Yukon Territory of Canada (2018), as well as two scholarly articles on my practice. These six publications are critically examined against relevant extant literature to shed light on the ethical, theoretical, and symbolic ramifications of centring a socially engaged art practice in fashion and site-specificity. This critical analysis encompasses three discrete chapters underpinned by representational justice and oppositional cultural practice theories to problematize themes within my creative practice: from how the site-specific character of my projects destabilizes the paradigms of fashion and socially engaged art, to how cultural practices are dialogically and relationally moderated and negotiated during their realization and dissemination. I also explore how participation and collaboration overlap and complement in these projects, and how its fashion centeredness makes my creative practice uniquely suited to enable dialogues about uncomfortable social topics. The resulting insights pose important implications for the broader fields of socially engaged art, fashion practice and fashion theory. Key findings include demonstrating the untapped potential of fashion design as an advantageous medium for implementing socially engaged undertakings, and fashion’s capabilities to enable creative and scholarly practices that empower a diversity of communities and lived experiences. The thesis contributes significantly to scholarship surrounding the use of creative approaches, enabling the implementation of decolonizing methodologies and epistemologies within the disciplines of fashion and socially engaged art. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This thesis is situated at the intersection of arts, human rights and migration policies and practices. Contextualising five of my previous publications, the thesis is a critical reflection on my trans-sectoral work as an advocate for the rights, recognition and professional development support of persecuted artists relocated to European Union countries for safety. Focusing on the decade 2009-2019, with a coda regarding significant events in 2023, the thesis exposes observed disconnects between a European cultural policy rhetoric stressing diversity and inclusion and the realities encountered by artists at risk seeking sanctuary. The thesis includes two chapters, an introduction and a conclusion. Referring to three of my published outputs, ‘Bridging Citizenship’ (2022), ‘Citizenship and Culture’ (2012) and ‘Analysing the Art of Resistance’ (2014), chapter one employs a series of case vignettes from the lived experience of anonymised artists with whom I worked to relocate, to amplify questions of citizenship and hospitality and illustrate systemic inequalities. Chapter two focuses on the public sphere and my engagement with Halliday’s structure of global governance (2005), interacting with international, state and civil society platforms by writing, speaking and organising, using existing or creating new networks of arts and human rights professionals to promote awareness, engagement and concrete actions for the displaced artists. The other two published outputs included in this thesis, ‘Seeing the World in a New Light’ (2011) and ‘Artistic Freedom: A Moveable Feast’ (2018) as well as an analysis of the process of providing background research for ‘Artists Displacement and Belonging’ (IFACCA, 2019) illustrate my advocacy with, consecutively, the political sphere, policymaking institutions and arts organisations. The thesis uses the theoretical lens of the ethics of care as a grounding for processes undertaken by the international arts sector in Europe to equitably welcome and support incoming artists impacted by displacement. Networking is presented as a methodology rather than a practice to examine to what extent civil society actors, individually or in epistemic communities and transnational advocacy networks, can influence public policy. Taken together, the thesis provides a recent history of the evolution of a trans-sectoral matrix of arts, human rights and migration that identifies itself as the artistic freedom sector, focusing on one of its constituent elements, that of the protective relocation to Europe of artists-at-risk. In a context of ubiquitous networking and at a moment when concerns for care and well-being in the arts professions are emerging, the thesis explores if and how the arts sector shares collective responsibility for structural injustice and proposes an ethics of care as foundational to the evolution of common practices at a moment of increasing human migration. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract Situated at the intersection of critical pedagogy, radical theatre and political activism, this PhD thesis reflects critically on a series of publications and an interdisciplinary counter-hegemonic socially engaged art practice between 2010-20. Mobilising the auto/biographical as a conceptual framework for critical analysis, the thesis addresses questions of systemic inequalities, cultural democracy and social transformation in the UK arts and cultural sector. By examining my lived experience through the analytical lenses of intersectionality and feminist standpoint theory, the thesis foregrounds how interconnecting oppressions of gender and class have contributed to the formation of my creative practice and its pedagogical interventions, constituting a direct critical response to redressing unequal power relations at a structural, disciplinary, hegemonic and personal level. In chapter one I examine how the process of writing this thesis begins to expose the complex and interconnected ways in which structural oppressions of class and gender continue to be disabling for working-class women. Drawing on a series of written publications, it outlines how my lived experience of engagement with the radical social and political movements of the twentieth century, such as feminism and the anti-war movement, led me to create a singular critical praxis and pedagogy. By positioning socially engaged art practice and critical pedagogy within wider struggles for social justice, chapter two examines the unconference ‘Taking Part’ (2010) within the critical ontology of my practice and the possibilities of working across sectors and disciplines to offer creative resistance to the growing inequalities of political austerity that marked this period. Through locating the immersive Participation on Trial within a series of public manifestations of theatre as protest, chapter three reclaims the role of theatre as a place of resistance, examining the contribution it can make to social change by creating spaces for agonistic discourse and dialogue. Taken together, the three chapters interrogate how the cyclical appropriation, dilution and de-politicisation of the language and ethos of socially engaged art practices by dominant powers within the cultural sector and an absence of self-reflexivity has maintained systemic inequality and undermined the possibility of realising cultural democracy. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This thesis critically locates my five written publications and documentary film productions – completed during the past decade – within the longue durée of Northern Irish historiography (Hennessey, 2015), periodising the political protest, reform and cultural innovations depicted as a manifestation of the 1947 Education Act. The thematically interlinked interdisciplinary works in this thesis comprise three films: The Boys of St. Columb’s (2010), Translations Revisited (2013) and In the Name of Peace: John Hume in America (2017); and two books, The Boys of St. Columb’s (2010) and John Hume in America: From Derry to DC (2017). The first corpus of work, The Boys of St. Columb’s, explores the schooldays and interventions of a group of students educated at St. Columb’s College, Derry, in the post-war period. It situates their education at the juxtaposition of the post-war British Welfare State and the All-Ireland diocesan school culture, depicting it as an awakening subaltern consciousness deriving from mass education. In Translations Revisited (2013), I endeavour to locate the narrative of Northern Ireland’s post-colonial framework with reference to the dramatic text of Brian Friel’s Translations. Through film and book, the final intervention examines John Hume’s attempt to recalibrate relationships between Ireland and Britain, as well as relationships within Northern Ireland, through breaching the historic British veto in political Washington on US involvement in the Anglo-Irish relations and in Northern Ireland. Taken together, my works probe how a coterie of the Northern Irish minority forged a new language to reimagine the Irish cultural and political sphere, and, through their work, invented a new point of origin for Irish discourse. I situate their interventions within the radical enlightenment tradition rather than unionist and nationalist ideologies. Through the lens of my works, the thesis seeks to illustrate how the power structures of Northern Ireland were based on ideological constructs, which ultimately undermined the legitimacy of prevalent cultural norms as well as Northern Ireland’s legal and governmental frameworks. With an assertion that class-based recodification of the discourse underpinned the discomfiting of the prevailing hegemony, these works and the thesis, in dialogue with broader conceptual frameworks and contemporary politico-cultural discourses, present a counterpoint to contemporary readings that the Northern Irish peace process of the 1990s grew solely from that decade’s experiences. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract Taking as its starting gesture the staging of filmed conversations with ‘dissident’ Irish republican paramilitaries in the gallery as art, this thesis highlights the lack of public spaces for genuine political dialogue, while proposing the potential of durational collaborative art practice to contribute to the production of such spaces. Alongside sites of public dissemination, the artworks – When I Leave These Landings (2004–2009), Go Home (2010–2013), Out the Road (2011–2016) and Dissident Me (2015) – reimagine places of production, such as the art studio, as proto-public places of dialogical encounter. Produced over ten years (2006–2016) with prisoners, former prisoners, their families and a community of independent republican activists, the four artworks of the thesis collectively provide intimate, raw and uncompromising narratives. The thesis expands the temporal scope of collaborative art practice through unparalleled duration, with sensitive subjects, across multiple contested sites and networks of people. Formed in discursive exchange, the films resist forensic analyses to prioritise the intersubjective encounter between artist and subject and the implication of the viewer in the form of the work through its installation-based staging. The thesis performs a collaborative enquiry into constituencies that are either invisible, silenced or receded, to deliver unique insight into the lived experience of ‘dissident’ Irish republican activists and their families, as they occupy volatile margins and states of being indicative of a ‘post-conflict’ society. Divided into three Parts, composing a total of seventeen sequences housed within a single chapter, textually the thesis employs a reflexive voice and segmented structure to explicate and theorise the critical field produced by the practice. Through a simple but insistent action of bringing personal conversation into the public domain, the thesis asks how such a gesture might play a role in the shaping of our public institutions and, in so doing, identifies interrelated research questions. One seeks to determine the impact of militant ideological belief on self, family, and community prompting discussions around how ethics can determine aesthetics, and how this practice challenges traditional representations of conflict and terrorism. Another asks what ethical and methodological conditions are necessary to sustain this collaborative and durational engagement and the representation of perpetrators of violence, or members of a violent organisation, on film in public. A further question, addressing theoretical concerns, persistently probes whether collaborative art practice can provide an alternative forum to the consensual political. sphere by producing spaces of agonistic discourse and encounter. Taken together, the artworks question the potential of the gallery-based film installation to generate political spaces capable of producing new subjectivities, while simultaneously challenging cultural institutions to engage with a non-unitary and agonistic public sphere. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This collaborative art practice-based thesis mobilises the concept of power as an analytical lens to examine a decade-long collaboration (2007-16) between its author/artist and a Dublin-based youth organisation, Rialto Youth Project. In opposition to the depoliticisation of inequality and associated insidious ethics of social inclusion, a collaborative methodological framework is foregrounded, producing dialogical encounters in which multiple power relations are visualised, challenged and reconfigured and where freedom is recognised as a lived contingent practice. Working across disciplines and in response to lived experiences of systemic inequalities, a series of transgenerational projects were developed to critically examine and respond to power relations at a personal, community and societal level, contributing new transdisciplinary knowledge across the fields of socially engaged art practice, youth work and education. The thesis comprises an introduction, two chapters and a conclusion. By considering the historical ontology of the practice and the formation of subject positions of those working in collaboration, chapter one outlines the construction and conceptualisation of power over time among a diverse group exercising political imagination. In articulating lived experiences of complex and interconnected systemic power relations, the second chapter examines the complex relationship of voice and listening in the public manifestations of the collaborative practice, in which truth speaks to power and politics is staged publicly through dialogical and transformative actions. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This PhD thesis in the field of fine arts is a critical analysis of three (out of nine) practice-based projects resulting from almost a decade of research, constituting a genuinely new body of work entitled Portrait as Dialogue. Based on the avant-garde search for ‘primitive’ origin and the tradition of comparative anthropology, it builds on the awareness of a contrast between the historical Western conception and representation of the Other as inferior. It further addresses the problem that Western research largely neglected that the Other also have a tradition to make sense of their others – often relying on senses other than vision. My research projects explored sensory modes of relating and addressing and their related form of expressing otherness which I saw as an opportunity to expand the conception of the portrait through applying an innovative methodology based on othering. It allows for a combination of portrait and self-portrait and mutual representation, or ‘portrait as dialogue’. For the three projects central to my thesis, I first directly experienced human modes of perception and representation at the following instantations: footprints (Track Me, 2005); expressions related to sound and rhythm (Seek Me, 2005); and head/body shape (Imagine Me, 2007). Secondly, through the emphasis on the look in my own depictions of participants, I provoked a dialectic between the Western gaze and non-Western methods, creating a tension between their similarities and differences. By asking participants to indirectly represent the Western gaze, I simultaneously drew attention to historical anthropological surveys – a juxtaposition brought forth through my own vulnerable research position. However, in my artworks, curatorial projects and written publications, by combining both perspectives, I shifted emphasis from a co-creative to a more personal and intersubjective approach, creating new meaning through interpretation. In this thesis I set out to explore how and in what ways the experimental, methodological frames adopted in Portrait as Dialogue challenge, reinforce or both, dominant Western regimes of representing the ‘other’. My analysis shows that I was (and continue to be) not only subverting, but also returning the Western gaze which I claim is its strongest element. Having placed myself in the frame (and with it the Western gaze) is the significant component which enables a productive critical discourse around the entanglements of ‘self’ and ‘other’. I maintain this to be an original contribution to the field. I further found my previously expressed idea affirmed that my research highlights a rich potential of representational means which exists in non-Western cultural practices. My approach juxtaposes non-western and indigenous sensorially organised representational systems with a Western vision-based perspective. This confirms the hypothesis from which my art projects began, namely the observation of the extent to which we are embedded in the representations of others, as also argued by Oscar Wilde: ‘Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter. The sitter is merely the accident, the occasion’ (Wilde, 1890: 5). |
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Abstract Situated within the field of medical humanities and drawing on phenomenological philosophy and visual research methods, this thesis sets out to determine whether patients diagnosed with the same illness produce sufficient signs in common to suggest that a shared visual language of disease exists. The act of medical diagnosis begins with the patient’s story. Accounts of our symptoms relayed in words are a vital first step in receiving a correct diagnosis (Ofri, 2017). This verbal narrative is a key component in how we communicate the presenting complaint; however, as yet, there is no longitudinal study to determine if there are similarities in how patients express non-verbal, kinetic elements of their illness narrative. This thesis poses the question whether it is possible to express and capture the pre-reflective, interoceptive felt-sense (Gendlin, 1982) of disease. Within the framework of phenomenology and embodied selfhood (Kontos, 2009, 2017), a cohort of patients diagnosed with the same disease (Fibromyalgia) access, describe and make visible the felt-sense of that disease through movement. Acquired by motion-capture technology, this kinetic data is analysed to determine if patients produce sufficient signs in common to suggest that a shared visual language of disease exists, which, if proven, could provide an additional modality during diagnosis. This thesis foregrounds the potential in combining the qualitative experiential knowledge of patients with the quantitative capabilities of motion capture technologies to make visible signs integral to the embodied ‘story’ we tell our doctor when outlining our presenting complaint. Further, it argues for the validity of public and expert by experience research (PEER) methodologies for use in patient-led studies. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract The research approach of this thesis is one of a filmic enquiry, which involves the convergence of the imagination and production skills of a documentary filmmaker and photographer with an emerging interest in modes of self-reflective enquiry while working with a group of dockworkers and visualising the lived experience of this Dublin Port community. The filmic investigation focuses on how the experiences and memories of a community of workers in Dublin’s sustainable port space shape their urban identity and sense of place, and is undertaken in consideration of the sensuous, haptic qualities of documentary and ethnographic filmmaking. In order to address these themes, the research identifies and explores how observational and participatory methods of documentary filmmaking can contribute to current understandings of film’s potential to convey and mediate senses of place and lived experience – remembered, imagined and understood. Specifically, how might the multi-faceted, changing nature of place and working life for a Dublin Port community be sensed, visualised, and re-created? The research is framed within the context of contrasting constituencies within the port community in an attempt to interrogate the lived experiences and memories of working life and how these are central to the shaping of identity and memory. The thesis attempts to map out the richness of working life on Dublin port by drawing on different viewpoints: film and artistic projects which address topics such as port life, globalisation and trade; existing sociological and geographical knowledge on Dublin Port and its workers; and primarily, the film and photographic material generated. The filmic enquiry draws on Nichol’s (1991; 2017) rigorous taxonomy of documentary filmmaking as well as ethnographic concepts of embodied filmmaking (Rouch 1975; McDougall 2002; 2006 and Grimshaw 2006) and explores how these combine to facilitate the creation of sensuous, haptic and nuanced representations of the nature of lived experience on Dublin Port. Urban identity and place are pertinent subjects in contemporary scholarship and film practice. The research therefore, in the form of a body of distinctive practice-based artefacts – the installations Stevedoring Stories (2012) and Rhythms of a Port (2014) and the film Keepers of the Port (2017) – makes a valuable contribution to a small body of international film and photographic projects, as well as to sociological and geographical scholarly studies, which address maritime space, port life and globalisation. My study concurrently enriches a series of contemporary research projects, which respond to the specificity of Dublin Port and Dublin Bay and which evolved partially in response to or in parallel with my own work. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract Young people from Dublin’s north-inner city have, over generations, experienced significant marginalisation – structurally, socially, economically, and in terms of reputation. The thesis constitutes a critical interrogation of interdisciplinary participatory media practice with young people from this inner-city area – a practice characterised by democratic sensibilities and transformative possibilities. In its adoption of participatory media practice as a principal methodological frame, this thesis specifically sets out to respond to the stigmatisation of young people’s identities, representing a lack of recognition, which alongside their unequal access to spaces for speaking and self-representation, leads to a devaluation of their voices. In what ways can participatory media practice engage marginalised young people, fostering processes of recognition? Between April 2012 and April 2014 I engaged young people attending two youth services in Dublin’s north-inner city in a participatory media practice. Together with my participants, we shaped a mode of creative practice that foregrounded the development of self-representational capacities to facilitate young people in speaking back to stigmatising representations of themselves and their peers, thus laying claim to spaces for speaking, listening and recognition. The project that emerged through our co-creative relationships was titled ‘A Different Light’. It invited participants to self-select themes through which to explore and share aspects of their identities through their choice of creative media, thereby cultivating their own image. The thesis draws from several different disciplinary perspectives on, and approaches to, participatory practice, including participatory media, participatory art, the deployment of participatory methods in social research and youth work, bringing into representation an exploratory, responsive and innovative research practice working alongside young people. Navigating the key challenges and possibilities underlying shared creative processes, the thesis explicates the various ways in which the participatory practice unfolded, was diverted, transformed and enriched by the contingencies encountered in the field. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This thesis, in three parts, documents and conceptualises a range of political and cultural activities that either sustain or challenge existing structures of power. It seeks to answer the question: how can we conjoin a Gramscian theoretical framework and the insights of transculturalism to understand and investigate practices of dominance and resistance operating in close cultural and ideological proximity to those they oppose? Drawing upon an understanding that a successful hegemonic discourse, one that earns consent and minimises conflict, must in some sense contain, and thus control, its own opposite, Part 1 of the thesis – divided into three chapters, constituting an overarching critical discussion – elaborates a theoretical framework that is transcultural, a view of culture deeply embedded in politics and resistant to the limits of national boundaries and essentialisms; that understands hegemony both as an account of bourgeois power and a programme for a praxis of popular resistance; and that seeks to develop a politically useful spatial metaphor, or set of metaphors, for locating a set of events and encounters in the hegemonic borderlands. In Part 2, the thesis examines a series of hegemonic ‘soft power’ institutions and actors that achieve success, it is argued, through their adoption of discourses that speak of social justice and responsibility; in Part 3, it examines a set of resistance practices that work in the popular sphere, close to the institutions that they challenge. The previously published chapters in Parts 2 and 3 each address a distinct topic. In Part 2, where the critique of allegedly neutral and liberal institutions is developed, the subject matter includes the following: foundations offering financial support for journalistic work; Ireland’s main elite newspaper, the Irish Times; the role of media in Ireland’s property and financial crisis; media treatment of anti-war groups; European fisheries policy; racial profiling within the Irish immigration regime; and finally Bono, the celebrity humanitarian. In Part 3, a diverse set of resistance practices from the distant and recent past is documented and analysed: Bruce Springsteen’s work since 2005; an Irish-Chartist newspaper published in Leeds in the 1840s; theatrical and cinematic interpretations of Jim Gralton, an Irish socialist activist of the 1930s; direct action against US military aircraft at Shannon Airport; solidarity actions with the Welsh mother and family of Wikileaks whistleblower Chelsea Manning; a visit to Gaza with a group of Irish activists; and efforts to tell migrant stories in Ireland in the sphere of popular publishing and media. The thesis proposes that the Deleuzian concept of ‘the line of flight’ and transculturalism’s emphasis on contact zones are analytical tools for developing a renewed understanding of Gramscian hegemony. ‘War of position’, it is argued, is not static but is, rather, a contest over the orientation and delineation of variable and transversal boundaries. The thesis thus offers itself as a purposefully diverse, transdisciplinary body of research practice that exemplifies how such borderlands can be critically explored. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This thesis explores emergent formations of Indian cinema in Dublin with a particular focus on globalising Bollywood film culture, offering a timely analysis of how Indian cinema circulates in the Irish capital in terms of consumption, exhibition, production and identity negotiation. The enhanced visibility of South Asian culture in the Irish context is testimony to, on the one hand, the global expansion of Hindi cinema, and on the other, to the demographic expansion of the South Asian community in Ireland during the last decade. Through varying degrees of participant observation in and across sites of film production and consumption, alongside interviews with South Asian and western social actors with an interest in Indian cinema, this thesis critically frames manifestations of Indian film culture in Dublin; crucially, it does so via my dual positionality as a fan of Bollywood cinema and a researcher, embedded in new formations of Indian cinema in the Irish capital. Drawing on existing literature surrounding the globalisation and circulation of Hindi cinema outside the Indian subcontinent (Rajadhyaksha 2003; Desai 2004; Athique 2005, 2008b; Dudrah 2012) and fan studies (Jenkins 1992, 2006b; Monaco 2010; Duffett 2013), this thesis endeavours to explore the circulation and the social dynamics of Indian cinema, with particular attention to its impact on Irish urban spaces and in constituting subjectivities in the context of the social and economic changes occurring in Ireland since the last decade. Conducted through the lens of fandom, this study foregrounds the relevance of fan studies in promoting a richer understanding of a globalised and transnational cultural product such as Indian film in its multiple manifestations across the Irish capital, contextualising the complexity of the cultural practices and social environments involved. Significantly, my passionate interest in Bollywood cinema led me on a journey through various sites where Indian films are produced, consumed and exhibited, foregrounding the sheer diversity of modes of circulation and engagement that characterises the emergence of Indian film culture in Dublin. Immersive participant observation as a Hindi film fan thus represented an innovative approach to the exploration of the presence of Indian film in transnational contexts, which further contributes to Indian film studies and to the growing field of transnational cinema. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This ethnography of media production explores the challenges of literally and figuratively visualising voice. The labour of a shared production and the distribution of the audio-visual documentary essays unfolded within a field of diverse, and at times, conflicting interests. For this reason, judicious attention to what I name ‘encounters' of ‘political listening' (Bickford 1996; Dreher 2009) provides one framework for theorising the challenges of researching with marginalised subjects and stories, and the contradictions of developing shared practices within proprietary contexts. These encounters reveal moments of listening and being heard, struggles over ‘veracity' and ‘evidence,' and the power relations inherent in the production of media about lives that are most often rendered invisible and inaudible. The research aimed to develop an exploratory and critical practice of inquiry that not only responded to the ethical complexities of research with refugees, asylum seekers, and undocumented migrants, but also created opportunities for research subjects to interpret, analyse and document their experiences as newcomers to Ireland. Within this community of practice (Lave & Wenger 1991; Wenger 1999), participants produced their own media to explore and document their lives as workers, parents, ‘cultural citizens' (Coll 2010; El Haj 2009; Rosaldo 1994), and artists simultaneously adapting to and transforming a new environment. By centring participants from diasporic communities as the primary authors and co-producers of their audio-visual narratives, the research sought to extend and deepen the public discourse of migration in Ireland. Through the process, research participants-seven women and six men from African, Asian, Eastern European and Middle Eastern nations-interrogated their daily circumstances negotiating migration policy, and revealed the structural violence of asylum and migrant labour regimes. To develop a ‘shared' anthropological practice (Pink 2011; Rouch 1974; Rouch & Taylor in Feld 2003; Stoller 1992), the research design introduced an inquiry-based and longitudinal approach to the participatory media genre known as ‘digital storytelling' (Lambert 2013). Digital storytelling as a research methodology is a relatively new endeavour (Alexandra 2008; Burgess 2006; Brushwood Rose 2009; Gubrium 2009; Gubrium & Turner 2010; Hartley & McWilliams 2009; Hull & Katz 2006; Lundby 2008; Meadows 2003). Due to the research design's significant adaptations to the standard Center for Digital Storytelling model, ‘co-creative' (Spurgeon, et al. 2009) documentary practice is employed as a term that more accurately describes the labour at hand. The collaboration generated over 250 images and resulted in two series of broadcast-quality, audio-visual stories-Undocumented in Ireland: Our Stories and Living in Direct Provision: 9 Stories. Both series have screened before diverse audiences, at public forums on asylum policy and migrant rights, the Irish Film Institute (IFI), the Guth Gafa International Documentary Film Festival, and at scholarly conferences throughout Europe and the Americas. Eleven of the fourteen digital stories are currently available for viewing on-line. While research findings indicate the method facilitated dynamic opportunities for engaged inquiry into asylum and migrant labour regimes, recognition of storytellers and stories, and sustained encounters of "narrative exchange" (Couldry 2010), the practice raises complex questions about the politics of listening and being heard. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This dissertation examines the formation of the Sikh community in Ireland by providinga brief historical account of the migration of Sikhs to Ireland, as well as by offering a discussion of the key challenges faced in Ireland by Sikh migrants along with their responses to these particular socio-cultural and political contexts in attempting to forge a ‘community' in Ireland. The research draws extensively upon an oral history and photography project entitled ‘A Sikh Face in Ireland' that was commissioned by, and carried out through, the Forum on Migration and Communications (FOMACS) between 2007-2010. The interviews I conducted during this project as research assistant to Dr Glenn Jordan, who created the photographic exhibit, form a substantial methodological component towards the analysis and insights developed throughout this dissertation. In addition to the interviews, the discussions here are grounded in long-term and sustained participant observation in the Dublin gurdwara over the last three years, which constitutes the major field-site for this research. This dissertation offers a particularly located and ground-level perspective on the many issues around migration, multiculturalism, and questions of diversity that have been central to Irish public life over the last two decades, informed by the life experiences of a community that has suffered widespread racial abuse for sporting external signifiers like beards and turbans identified with Muslims in an increasingly Islamophobic Euro-American context. Through this research I hope to present the Sikh communities' experiences and perspectives of migration as insights that might productively influence the depth and range of sensibilities towards migration and migrants in Ireland and outside, both among the general public as well as at policy level. The dissertation consists of four chapters: Chapter One outlines the methodological approach to the research and locates the main theoretical concerns within relevant literature; Chapter Two offers an outline of the history of Sikh migration to Ireland; Chapter Three is a discussion of the key challenges faced by Sikh migrants in Ireland; and Chapter Four is a analysis of the strategies employed by the community in coping with and adapting to life in a foreign land. The dissertation includes several photographs that were taken during the research for ‘A Sikh Face in Ireland' along with archival photographs from family albums shared by the research participants. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This thesis explores the sport practices of migrant youth in Ireland, focusing on the meaning of sport, namely football, for male teenagers of immigrant origin. Football is the most popular game among young people in Ireland, and according to the Schoolboys Association of Ireland over one hundred thousand boys and girls throughout the country play the game. Through the adoption of a textual and filmic approach, Kick the Ball combines the methodological tools of journalistic inquiry with those of practice-based ethnographic research. The study engages with the social worlds of members of two youth football teams based in west Dublin - a residential location with the highest national percentage of immigrant families. Along with the meaning of sport for youth of different ethnic backgrounds, the thesis foregrounds processes of identity construction and reconstruction, racial/cultural belonging and new modes of citizenship. A central concern of this study is how and in what ways participation in sport functions to enhance the social inclusion of migrant youth and their families. Racism in football emerges from this ethnographic inquiry as a critical topic and focus of analytical attention. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract The Philippines' experience in international labour migration is widely considered a success - an observation endorsed by international bodies such as the World Health Organisation. As an active source of professional nurses to the developed world, the country continues to produce more nurses than the local nursing market can employ; a labour strategy that is promoted, facilitated and supported by the Philippine state and nursing educational system. This thesis interrogates Filipino nurse migration through the methodological prism of autoethnography, drawing on first-hand experience and reflexive accounts, interviews, photographs, policy documents and material cultural artefacts, to critically examine and challenge the country's institutionalised migration regime. Divided into five chapters, Licensed to Care explores how the trend of increasing local production has resulted in the proliferation of more private schools offering nursing programmes; the retraining of medical doctors and other professionals to become nurses; and the development of transnational nursing education in the country. This in turn gives birth to a ‘surrogate nursing' paradigm that aims to facilitate the migration not only of professional nurses but also of Filipino nursing students abroad. Rather than as a response to local health needs, this development is provoked by a global demand and by the competitiveness of the international healthcare labour market. While the Philippines' culture of migration has been widely reported, the thesis argues that understanding this complex phenomenon calls for further and deeper excavation of the social, cultural, political and historical processes that continually shape Filipinos' personal motives and desires. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract Within recent years in Ireland, the increasing regulatory power of retailers has developed in tandem with a re-localisation rhetoric within the agri-food sector. In that regard, producers (inclusive of farmers and growers) in Ireland are working within a broad ideological positioning of family farming and within a dominant rhetoric of rural/local. Since the formation of the Irish State, policy and discourse has centred on the family farm as a critical element of the agrarian dream and maintaining economic activity in rural areas. It now seems that the countervailing realities of valorising an agrarian identity, of which the ideal of the family farm stands as a proxy, is juxtaposed with the reality of intensified regimes of production under the EU's Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) agenda. In its current guise, horticulture has emerged as a diversification strategy within mainstream farming, operating without CAP-imposed quota restrictions and without price subsidies. Yet growers are under pressure, at the vanguard of production, because they are producing in a free market situation, largely targeting the domestic market. Change to the structure of the retail market in the late 1990s was coterminous with the emergence of intensification on sites of production and created new opportunities for expansion within horticulture. At the same time, the supply of migrant workers to horticulture following a managed migration policy by the state has been a key facilitator of expansion within the industry in recent years. A dilemma arises though in trying to reconcile an industry under pressure from competitive forces and the drive towards keeping costs low, with labour articulated as one of the key challenges for future survival. In that regard, migrant labour has arguably acted as an industry subsidy in lieu of direct price subsidies. Importantly, horticulture is an industry without a continuous production pattern: it, therefore, provides a challenge in maintaining a consistent short-term labour supply for the growers. At the same time, the impermanent nature of horticultural production has direct implications for the reproduction of transnational family units and their ability to maintain family integrity. The precarity inherent in producing horticultural commodities, in turn, can contribute to a precarious transnational existence for the workforce, though one in which strategies of agency and choice still feature. Using ethnographic methodology, this thesis examines the social relations that exist between and amongst retailers, growers and workers along the horticultural supply chain. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract Located in the fields of cultural studies and media studies, this thesis frames an ethnography of the private collector, Rodney McElrea, (from Omagh, Co. Tyrone) and his music collection, simultaneously presenting an analysis of socio-cultural issues relating to collecting and archival practices. Focusing on the relationship between Rodney and his collected artefacts, this study is guided by several interrelated research questions: how is cultural meaning revealed in the private archive; to what degree are the taxonomic structures imposed on private archives directing interpretations of it; how might the cultural value of this particular private collection be determined in the absence of an institutional system of cultural evaluation. In addition the thesis explores how cultural memory and (Rodney's) private memory are interrelated within the collected object in his archive and furthermore to what degree can the research questions guiding this thesis be explored through Rodney's performance of the archive? The research is, therefore, framed within an overall narrative concerning the uncertain fate of Rodney's collection, beyond the lifespan of its collector and how the collection might be preserved in the future. The thesis comprises an introduction, conclusion and five chapters. An accompanying DVD features some of my documentation of the field site within an eighteen-minute film. This film provides an ethnographic representation of my experience with Rodney and his archive. Chapter one discusses my first encounters with Rodney and attempts to identify the taxonomic systems at play within the collection. Drawing on a number of scholars from cultural studies, whose primary focus is the ontological status of archives, I explore the meaning of Rodney's engagement with his artefacts and his motivations as a private collector. The role of practice is introduced in this chapter, as a means of navigating Rodney's collection, and is supported by critical arguments from within the fields of visual anthropology and media studies. Chapter two focuses on how recorded sound functions within the collection as both an archival tool (of exploration) and an object of analysis, whilst referring to scholars from within auditory studies. Recorded sounds situate Rodney within the archival space, and are offered as one method of retaining the memory of the collector within future representations. Chapter three refers to Rodney's past collecting practices when discussing the cultural significance of his collection through the metrics of various frameworks of value. Chapter four details the methodological approach to representing such an idiosyncratic collection and foregrounds the practice elements and curatorial process of interpreting and mediating Rodney and his archive. Here emphasis is placed on how the photographic image works in conjunction with recorded sound and how the film sequence performs within concepts of being both ‘archival' and ‘ethnographic' in nature. The fifth and final chapter discusses the film in relation to both Rodney's engagement with it and its success in communicating ethnographic experience to the observer. The future survival of the collection is then revisited in view of Rodney's deeply personal investment alongside external interests from individual and institutional sources, with complimentary yet different agendas surrounding the preserving of this private music collection. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract Situated in the context of globalisation in the Republic of Ireland, this ethnographically informed practice-based thesis addresses the critical relationship between visual arts practice, curatorship, the historical representation of labour, industrialised space and contemporary global labour practices. Drawing on audio and visual ethnographic material generated in my fieldsite - the Hewlett-Packard Manufacturing and Research complex in Leixlip, Ireland, together with the resulting installation and publication titled The Breathing Factory, it further investigates the dissemination of such epistemologies, the term ‘re-representation' being deployed as a reflexive gesture in acknowledgement of such critical re-contextualisations. The thesis comprises four chapters together with an introduction and conclusion. Chapter one provides a critical overview of relevant and intersecting literature on theories of globalisation, global labour practices and labour, drawing particular attention to a conceptualisation of globalisation in terms of vulnerability, which ascribes a more unstable definition of labour and its conditions, emphatically shaped via the globalising effects of the migration of global capital. Acknowledging the central mediating role of the photograph as a critical tool of representation in this study, the primary focus of the second chapter is the role and function regarding the representation of contemporary and historical labour practices, with particular reference to documentary photography.Chapter three identifies the rationale for the research fieldsite, foregrounding the methodological framework ‘multivocality/montage', adopted from visual ethnography as a representational strategy. It details the related methods employed, further serving to instrumentalise practice as a necessary reflexive undertaking extending to the postproduction of material collated on site. The fourth and final chapter addresses the relationship between the re-narration and re-versioning of the research material and the role of the methodological framework, as defined in chapter three, in underpinning the construction of the resulting multivocal and montaged installation. Within an historicised framing it draws upon a review of audio and visual research practices and formats of dissemination, further informed by a description of the curatorial relationship with primary funding supports for the production of The Breathing Factory. The chapter concludes with a description of the installation in the form of a narrativised walk-through,unpacking and detailing the rationale for its constitution. The intention is to critically reflect upon the dissemination and circulation of the research as a visual art installation, the role of curatorial practice and the cycles of discourse surrounding such practice-led research interventions. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract The basic premise of this thesis is that the photographic archive needs to be substantially rethought in the age of its assimilation by digital networked computing - and not only in terms of a dematerialisation at the level of its substrate but of transformations in the relationship between words and images. Today, when the condition of photographs within what might still broadly be termed archives has been significantly modified by digitisation and the rapid expansion of the Internet, this issue is more crucial than ever. Access to images remains almost exclusively mediated by words in the networked digital archive, but the relationship between the two is now managed by an assemblage comprising technical platforms and programs, which modify the possibilities of use even as they anticipate and adapt to it. I articulate the key terms of this change as a shift from the dominance of verbal frames more bound to disciplinary apparatuses and institutions to that of the management of these frames by new technical filters operating as and within control structures, to follow Gilles Deleuze's distinction. Tracing these dynamics across a range of sites, from general purpose image search engines to photo-sharing platforms to the commercial construction of proprietary closed vocabularies and the filtering operations affecting corpus formation in the image banks that now control so much of the trade in photographs, I aim to provide a theoretical account of the ‘basic sociotechnological conditions' (Deleuze [1990]1995) governing semantic and practical access to the photographic archive within control societies. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This thesis identifies and explores the ways in which Dublin’s migrant communities are represented by Irish public service broadcasting and community radio, considering both the representation of such communities and production of programming by them. Informed by approaches drawn from media and cultural studies, this research incorporates analyses of programme content, production practice and broadcast policy in relation to the Irish national broadcaster Radio Telefís Éireann (RTÉ) and Dublin community radio. Within an Irish national and cultural context posited as historically homogenous, the study sets out to address questions of how new migrants are represented in Irish radio and how radio in particular facilitates migrant community participation? The thesis is comprised of five chapters together with an introduction and conclusion. Chapter one introduces the theoretical approaches and methodological practices underpinning this study, incorporating radio scholarship and analysis of production practice and drawing from theories of critical multiculturalism, transcultural production and the transnational public sphere. These theoretical frameworks are located alongside analysis of selected programme content and broadcast production practice in the public service broadcasting and community radio sectors. Chapter two foregrounds the ways in which ‘diversity’ continues to be framed in Irish and European public broadcasting policy contexts, providing scrutiny of informing broadcast policies at a moment of considerable change in definitions of both public service media and community radio at European policy levels. Taken together, chapters three, four and five serve as case studies in which unstructured interviews were conducted with radio practitioners working in programmes focused on representing diversity in both the community and public service sectors. These findings are combined with close readings of selected programme content, investigating strategies of delivery and articulation as well as production practices such as topic selection and the use of ‘experts’ on diversity to frame a programme item. Chapter three focuses on selected ‘multicultural’ radio programmes produced by RTÉ, providing a critical reading of the ways in which migrant communities are represented and framed. Chapter four examines how the institutional structures and strategies of selected Dublin community radio stations facilitate migrant-produced programmes, which provide broadcast spaces for migrant self-representation and articulation. Chapter five combines examination of production practice and of the licensing process in community broadcasting through analysis of the application process for a multicultural radio service and of selected output from temporary station Sunrise FM, which marketed itself as ‘Ireland’s first multiethnic station.’ The thesis includes an audio CD, both to support excerpts cited in the study and to document samples of current radio representations of ethnic and migrant communities. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract Beginning in the late 1990s, Ireland witnessed a significant growth in the number of immigrants arriving in the country including people of Nigerian origin. The increased presence of Nigerians in Ireland is part of an ongoing process of international migration from Nigeria that started in the colonial and early postcolonial periods. By demonstrating a strong familial characteristic, this current migration trend in Ireland contrasts with previous patterns of predominantly male or single persons migration from Nigeria. Responding to this development, ‘Framing the Nigerian Transnational Family: New Formations in Ireland’ utilises ethnography, social and cultural theory and art practice to interrogate the subject of Nigerian transnational family life in Ireland, starting from the material terrain of the migrant domestic archive as a repository of cultural and familial memory. This thesis is composed of four chapters in addition to an introduction, conclusion and art installation. Chapter one engages with the relationship between personal memory and family photographs to question how the domestic archive’s intimate connection to memory can enable ethnographic fieldwork and analysis while also articulating the deployment of affect in this study. Chapter two marks an ethnographic departure into the sites of Nigerian transnational communality, foregrounding the work of Nwannedinamba, an Igbo community organization. Chapter three focuses on the lives of four settled Nigerian families situated in the wider context of mainstream Irish society, two of whom arrived in Ireland as asylum seekers and two as health workers on work visas. Chapter four explores familial formations and transformations in the regimented and regulated spaces of Direct Provision. It is in response to the marginal social contexts of this inquiry that the family photographic image, through which much of the narratives in this study are acquired and around which the subsequent analysis revolves, is subjected to an ethnographically strategic, artistically conceptual and consensual reconstruction and defacement. The art installation draws from and is shaped by the lived experiences and material conditions revealed by this study. The textual and visual representations in this inquiry offer a critique on notions of citizenship and belonging, transnationalism and transition, social class, gender, and everyday life in Nigerian migrant family formations in Ireland. These provide a tangible and materialised manifestation of a change in traditional Nigerian family structures, allied to the ongoing consequences of Nigerian modernity and the contingencies of transnational migration. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This thesis is a response to negative media and public portrayals of young white working class men in Ireland. It is prompted by the emergence into the public sphere of the Department of Education and Science’s Exploring Masculinities (EM) programme, a curriculum initiative designed to counter perceived problematic elements of youthful masculinity. This programme initiated a debate in the Irish media on men and boys, and gave a particular Irish dimension to the international focus on issues and questions about masculinity, social class and youth culture. My research seeks to uncover what lies behind increasingly negative and intransigent portrayals of young white working class men in Ireland who are, through their ‘deviant subcultures’, commonly presented as possessing or embodying a threat to established, middle class social norms and values. My focus throughout is on uncovering and generating an understanding of not only the material elements of the lived culture of young working class men; but also the effects this often violent and misogynistic culture may have on them, and on the way in which they are represented. The research, which is based on ethnographic fieldwork, seeks to reinvigorate debate on the effects of social class, traditional gender roles and disadvantage on gender identity and youth culture. Therefore, this is a ‘local’ ethnography, informed primarily by a small scale case-study conducted over two full school years with two groups of twelve young men from a disadvantaged, urban Cork City community. This work has emerged from and is supported by a broad cultural studies perspective with an emphasis on the pedagogical frameworks the boys participate in as well as their popular culture and everyday lives. It is presented with a full awareness and acknowledgement of the powerful influences which structure and shape youthful masculinities and cultural identities, taking full account of the community, home and school environments which the boys encounter and live within on a daily basis. The dissertation comprises five chapters together with an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter one presents the institutional history of EM as a curriculum initiative. For the unfamiliar reader it introduces the full context and background of the programme, its prolonged review process and the media controversy and coverage that surrounded it from the outset. This chapter summarises and explains the problematic ‘masculinity in crisis’ discourse or narrative, the nature and content of the media coverage and the aims, objectives and methodologies of the programme itself. Chapter two brings the reader directly and immediately into the classroom fieldsite through a critical and reflexive re-reading of my research experience in the school. My ethnographic process is detailed, focusing on the classroom and the experiences therein as well as exploring broader, more abstract questions such as the intersections between active ethnographic research and gender, the larger problems of general and specific access to fieldsites and subjects, and the continuous development and evolution of complex negotiations and conflicts in the field with gate keepers, and occasionally reluctant subjects. The third chapter focuses on encountering and engaging directly with the identity of the boys, their perceptions of themselves as masculine, their perception of their role(s) in the broader social world and their complex understandings of the ways they are negatively perceived by the adult, classed other or outsider. This chapter illustrates and explicates the relationship between the hyper-masculine, macho persona preferred by the boys, their social class position and identity and the restrictive, rule-bound environment of the school whereby they are bound to a subservient position that both conflicts with and encourages their constructed identities and classed and gendered senses of self. Chapter four moves out of the classroom setting and brings the reader directly into contact with the material culture of the boys. I explore the ways in which negative aspects of that physical culture attach themselves to these boys and their peers in a way that is not similarly evident in relation to middle-class boys and their consumption of the same cultural artefacts, brands and moments. The fifth and final chapter re-enters the classroom, bringing together the material culture of the boys discussed in chapter four and the negotiations between the programme materials, the teacher and the class seen in chapter three. It explores, through a series of critical vignettes, the problems that arise when the programme materials and youth culture clash. |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This thesis foregrounds the application of anthropological documentary methods and ethnographic investigation in examining the world of child immigrants and the cross-cultural dilemmas they encounter upon entering the formal educational system of the ‘host’ country – in this case a primary school setting in Dublin and Paris. The specificity of the primary school classroom as an ethnographic site facilitates a sustained audio-visual examination of immigrant children as they work to re-build their identities in a new and unfamiliar environment. Such a richly textured space opens up potential avenues of exploration for the researcher: what for example can intercultural pedagogy learn from the child who is dealing with two or more languages and for whom the past and present have been unexpectedly and irreversibly transformed? How are embodied cultural memories from the past carried and expressed in the immediate present? How are the values of the ‘host’ culture transmitted and what pressures, if any, are placed on immigrant children to prematurely verbalise their personal stories? How do immigrant children dramatise between themselves and with their teachers the conflicted dynamics of their cultural transformation? How does the cinematic process generate a milieu for young migrant actors, to be multi-vocal? |
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Title External Examiner |
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Abstract This thesis is a response to the absence of discussion in feminist and cultural studies of Assisted Reproductive Technology's (ART) increasing utilisation of visuality and technology as complementary legitimating discourses. While critiques of the epistemologies and practices undergirding ART point to the fact that imaging technologies are used to reveal knowledge held in bodies, lacking in current theoretical work on ART, however, is an ethnographic engagement with how visual technologies actually produce the internal and externalscapes of these bodies, and knowledges about them. Mapping selective visual knowledges and technologies constitutive of the ART egg donation, the thesis engages with disparate visual artefacts and imaging technologies: snapshots of prospective egg donors, portraits of fertility clinic doctors and staff, commercialised websites, online databases, brochures, operating theatres, ultrasonography, laparoscopy and images of ova. Reading the marketing images, proliferating technologies and attendant media narratives deployed to sell, perform and legitimise egg donation across varied discursive ‘sites’, the thesis addresses the contemporary Anglo-American fertility industry's construction of, and reliance upon, multiple self-legitimating visual knowledges. Produced by new and established imaging technologies alike, it is argued that through these knowledges, which reproduce a visually dominant race and class-based discourse on 'legitimate' motherhood and reproduction, egg donation is both constituted and sustained. The dissertation comprises five chapters together with an introduction and a conclusion. Chapter one constitutes discursively the field of egg donation, synthesising relevant critical literature alongside inscribing textually my own subject position. Culminating in a discussion of method, the chapter argues for the practical and theoretical necessity of moving beyond the medicalised and bio-technologised fertility clinic as the privileged fieldwork site for the ethnographic study of egg donation. Chapter two examines selectively the representational practices of the fertility industry’s commercial culture. Simultaneously tagging an institutional rhetoric assuring intergenerational physical resemblance as testimony to its professional competence, while offering full disclosure of egg donation’s biomedical procedures expressed through a range of image-based discourses, the chapter foregrounds the deployment of visuality surrounding the industry’s claims to effect a perfect match between an egg donor and recipient. The critical point of departure in chapter three is directed at a set of mediated visual artefacts, beginning with websites. A close-reading of an egg donor recruitment poster found on a British clinic's website serves as catalyst for the chapter’s exploration of the formation of racialised micro-economies in ART in which, as evidenced by industry and media discussion of processes of racialisation in the context of ART, in addition to interviews with informants, women's ova may be differentially valued according to racial taxonomies which are visually ascertained and upheld. The fourth chapter problematises the rhetoric of institutional competence identified in the discussion of chapter two. Drawing upon a fictitious account of egg donation and informants' narratives of professionalism, the chapter foregrounds how spoken and written assertions of institutional legitimacy are discursively underpinned by questions of visuality. The fifth and final chapter revisits visual artefacts produced by the industry, with a particular emphasis on egg donor and egg recipient application forms. Building on discussion in chapter three of the development of racialized micro-economies of human ova, the chapter tracks the industry's simultaneous and contradictory practice of race as both an occasionally visible biological 'fact' and an invisible social construction and concludes with a discussion of the primary role class plays in egg donation. |
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