Irish Journal of Sociology

In this article, we examine the experiences of migrant women attempting to settle into Ireland as a host society, while navigating various forms of gender-based violence (GBV). It is based on the Irish study of an international research project to analyse, from an intersectional perspective, the causes of and effective policy responses to GBV against women migrants and refugees. Specifically, this project aimed to understand what factors increase migrant women's exposure to GBV and what resources are available to them in Ireland to access the supports they need to survive and recover on their own terms. Our analysis is informed by critical readings and deployments of intersectionality, notably the concepts of ‘situated intersectionality' (Yuval-Davis) and ‘decolonial feminism' (Lugones). We affirm the value of intersectionality as a critical analytical approach to reveal and challenge inequalities at the intersections of identity categories. We also recognise that contrary to the hoped for transformative impact of the concept of intersectionality, in its mainstream applications, it tends to reconstitute the ‘otherness' of ‘women of colour' in particular (Puar), who are rendered into ‘fragmented beings' without agency (Lugones) or a sense of belonging to any category. Taking account of these and other critiques, we adapt a situated intersectionality approach, along lines elaborated by Nira Yuval-Davis as ‘the development of feminist standpoint theory', which centres migrant women’s perspectives and experiences.

The growth in international students in the context of the global ‘internationalisation’ agenda within academia offers significant opportunities for broadening and deepening multicultural exchange, understanding and learning within universities. However, to do so effectively means acknowledging the reality that many universities around the world remain colonial strongholds of white, male, middle-class privilege. Drawing from our respective experiences as a female scholar of colour (SoC) and a female white senior lecturer within an Irish university, in this article, we argue that in order to realise their dreams of internationalisation, universities need to engage with the complex legacies of colonisation, racism, and existent inequalities in a way which makes substantive improvements to students experiences. This means moving beyond individualised neoliberal engagements with specific scholars to one which engages students’ diversity, difference and rich, situated experiences in ways which challenge and unpack the ongoing structures of power which reproduce social divisions in their everyday lives. While a solid body of literature already exists on both the need to decolonise curricula, and on the experiences of academics of colour, far less has been written about the experiences of SoCs and ethnic migrant students within ‘internationalised’ universities. Our article aims to make a contribution in this regard.

In the wake of Brexit, the border on the island of Ireland has received unprecedented scholarly and journalistic attention. A quick search using Google Scholar indicates that since 2020 over 15,000 scholarly works have been published on ‘Brexit’ and ‘Northern Ireland’. Despite the exceptional space, time and conversation made for discussions of the border in academia, the media and political and policy circles, gender as an analytical frame has been conspicuously absent from the discussions and analysis. Indeed, there has been very little engagement with the border by feminist scholarship, either in the wake of Brexit, since the signing of the Good Friday Agreement, or indeed throughout the duration of the Troubles. This blind spot, we suggest, has helped perpetuate a dangerous narrative of the border as ‘open’, ‘invisible’, ‘soft’ or ‘seamless’. This paper offers a critical reflection on the scholarship regarding the UK/Irish border and argues for the urgent need to study the border from a feminist sociological perspective. After outlining the landscape of research on the border and identifying its gender insensitivity, we look to the field of feminist border studies to problematise these absences and flag questions that remain unanswered about the gendered dimensions of the border and its effects on women who live in borderlands on the island of Ireland, including women from racialised, ethnic minority and migrant backgrounds. Our hope is to instigate a feminist sociology of the border with the expectation that by centring the experiences of women, including racialised/and migrant women, we gain a perspective of the border and border life that has yet to be meaningfully considered in UK/Irish border studies, and one that disrupts what we consider to be an androcentric and ethnocentric view of the border.

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 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.

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 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.