Abstract
This article unpacks some complexities of ‘decolonising’ in Ireland, a complicated semiperipheral ‘mixed colony’, in which rhetorics, logic, and grammar are simultaneously colonial
Introduction: Decolonising an ambiguous semiperiphery
What does it mean to decolonise social sciences in Ireland, a ‘post-colonial, post-modern, and European peripheral’ location (Munck, 1999: 98)? Ireland is a complicated place to begin ‘decolonising’ anything, given its contested, unfinished self-determination. Political decolonisation was premised upon partition, resulting in ‘a state whose foundation did not give us a moment of celebration or unity’ (Martin, 2022). Ethnic sectarianism, partition, inequality, racism, and sexism intersect in constituting Ireland's colonial wound. This wound could be obscured by maintaining a conservative, exceptionalist, nationalist, and disconnected imagination, neglecting critical analyses of racialised capitalism (Virdee, 2019).
Some avoid the terms ‘colonial’ and ‘post-colonial’ (and, presumably ‘decolonial’) in the Irish context because ‘they reinforce a prejudicial perspective and blur the relevant influence of [Irish] cultural heritage and identity’ (Bendelli, 2018: vii; viii). Ireland enjoys a privileged global position, perhaps even a ‘cultural empire’, given its ‘deep cultural and linguistic influence in the world’, its ‘peculiar universality’ (ibid.).
Ireland is described as an ‘internal colony’ (Hechter, 1999), a ‘mixed colony’ (Crotty, 1986), or a ‘dual colony’ (Clayton, 2005), simultaneously a protagonist of British Empire
Semiperipheries are routinely overlooked structural locations in the modern, capitalist world system, playing a mediating role between cores and peripheries. Semiperipheries are ‘structured in the middle’, mixing core and peripheral activities (O’Hearn in Beatty et al., 2016: 204). They are notable for their ‘two-faced’ quality, behaving like peripheries in relation to core zones and activities while simultaneously being ‘core-like’ towards peripheralised peoples, locations, and activities. Ireland is defined as semiperipheral, based on its extreme dependence on foreign transnational investment. Despite attaining the second-highest GDP per capita in Europe, high profit rates, and ‘high-tech’ development, its ‘developed’ status is regarded as partly illusory (Beatty et al., 2016). O’Hearn contends that Ireland is important as a ‘test run’ and ‘guinea pig’ for imperial policies to ‘create’ the (economically dependent or ‘less developed’) Third World (op cit: 205; 206). This analysis is economy-focussed, developmentalist, and methodologically nationalist, ignoring structural aspects of non-economic oppression which critical-decolonial, anti-racist, and feminist anti-imperialist theorists emphasise. Racialisation and gender hierarchy have been merely touched upon in world-systems analysis (Smith et al., 1988; Wallerstein, 1991). To consider the capitalist modern world system as not only geo-economic but also geo-political and geo-cultural is to integrate the colour and gender ‘lines’ into an intersectional critique of structural inequalities. The ‘zig-zag’ dynamics of competing nationalisms
The erasure of feminist and anti-racist contributions is not incidental. In a rare occasion, shortly before Immanuel Wallerstein's death, Etienne Balibar and Wallerstein were interviewed by Manuela Bojadžijev (Balibar et al., 2018), accompanying public re-readings of ‘
Complexities of ‘decolonisation’
Current global movements to ‘decolonise’ academia were sparked by ‘fallist’ protests in South Africa since 2015 (Booysen, 2016; Jansen, 2019). Every location manifests specific intersections of insurgent politics demanding material, political, cultural, and epistemic reckoning and justice. What academia should do remains an unsettlingly open question. Decolonisation means more than just the formal handover of power, establishing a post-colonial state. Ireland's peculiar demography, partitioned polity, and semiperipheral economy indicate that ‘coloniality’ does not simply disappear. Irish society, history, politics, economy, materiality, and culture continue to be haunted by a complicated ‘colonial present’ (Gregory, 2004). Colonial wounds remain invisibly present in the haunted form of colonial amnesia. Even if political decolonisation is an accepted historical event, it does not offer any clues about what to do with the structural–historical legacies of coloniality or how to undo its material and affective legacies.
Decolonial theorists Mignolo and Hoffman (2017), Maldonado-Torres (2007), and Lugones (2010) insist that decolonisation is, first and foremost, a problem of existential, cognitive, and epistemic reconstitution towards transformation, gesturing towards a not-yet-known future (GTDF, n.d.). Terms like ‘re-emergence’, ‘re-surgence’, and ‘re-existence’ are used speculatively, their meanings varying, depending on the location within the ‘colonial matrix of power’ (Ndlovu-Gatsheni, 2018). The ‘colonial wound’ refers to racism, sexism, and the social classifications constituted by this matrix (Mignolo and Hoffman, 2017). Racism and sexism are categorisations expressing structural power. Those in control get to classify who is a valid and relevant being and what is valid and relevant knowledge. The ‘universal’ standards against which these determinations are made are false and/or ‘over-represented’ (Wynter, 2003). Ontological and epistemic inequalities constitute the ‘colonial wound’: [w]hen you sense you have been classified as less, as lacking something, as not quite there, it hurts. And you may believe it. But one day you realize that the colonial wound has been inflicted by racist people and institutions in the name of humanity and democracy. So you get angry, and you begin to do something to confront that anger, with dignity (Mignolo and Hoffman, 2017).
‘Decolonising’ the epistemic exclusions of colonial modernity involves engaging with how anti-colonial thinkers theorise the social, outside sociology's canons (Go, 2020; Meghji, 2022b). Decolonising in practice depends on context-dependent, lived experience of coloniality, racialisation, gender, and other intersecting social hierarchies. Escape from coloniality may take the forms of ‘border thinking, doing and leaving’, which cannot be done individually but involves a collective action, sharing alternative values, and ideas of success, different from the ‘colonial-modern’ mainstream. Mignolo (2007) suggests ‘delinking’ to make social science
‘Decolonisation’ takes social science into ‘post-normal’ practice (Funtowicz and Ravetz, 1993), including more diverse forms of sociological knowledge, including popular, creative and arts-based interventions, to explore and address the nature of the colonial wound (Mignolo and Hoffman, 2017: 4–5). Epistemic reconstitution involves not only changing structural forms of reasoning but also acknowledging the role of emotions and senses, returning to Fanon's ‘visceral’ diagnosis (Khanna, 2020) to try to understand how racial ideologies sediment internally within colonised subjects as racialised sensibilities.
Jansen (2019) notes the gap between high theory and quotidian practice. If decolonisation is to be more than a mere byword for proxy discontents, it must be oriented towards some practical end. As an educator, Jansen focusses on the implications for the nature, purposes, and politics of curriculum in South Africa (2019: 2). He suggests six possible ways of ‘doing’ decolonisation through the curriculum: (1)
Tuck and Yang's ‘Decolonisation is not a metaphor’ (2012) has become a popular slogan, but their positionality and intent are highly specific, involving the restitution of Canadian Indigenous people's land and life. Tuck and Yang's ‘unsettling’ of academia established on occupied lands is different from Jansen's educational work of critical engagement. Literal repatriation is not within this article's scope, but Stein (2022) offers a thorough discussion of the former. South Africa has to deal with complex legacies, from precolonial social structures, to formal colonialism, segregation and apartheid, to current democratic politics (Jansen, 2019). Ireland must deal with legacies of semiperipherality, cultural imperialism, and whiteness. In South Africa or Ireland, calls to ‘decolonise academia’ emerge through the neoliberal, corporatised university. South African universities align with Europe ‘even if that curriculum [was] firmly rooted in the epistemologies and needs of the Global North’ (Jansen, 2019: 7). Irish institutions maintain Anglophone, Eurocentric superiority, reproducing neoliberal imperialism through hierarchical, extractive global markets, and rankings (Ordorika and Lloyd, 2015; Stack, 2021).
The ‘decolonisation’ movement reconnects academia to a diversely based, globally spreading contemporary student and public protest movement. South African university decolonisation has mobilised legacies of anti-colonial, pan-African, and nationalist liberation, class struggle, and struggles for gender, racial, ethnic, and cultural justice. The decolonisation of academia intersects with #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo resurgences against racial injustice and sexual harassment. Meanwhile, working-class demands for inclusion and social mobility have become less prominent. ‘Decolonisation’ is a palimpsest, overlaying new struggles upon old, revitalising, but also obscuring, earlier intersections and struggles.
Decolonisation as ‘double translation’ concerns the expansion of canons to recover and include ideas originating in anti-colonial resistance. It engages horizontal dialogues between perspectives and practises epistemic humility (Meghji, 2022b), acknowledging that coloniality can be internalised,
‘Decolonisation’ moves curriculum from being static piles of canonical knowledge for instructional reproduction to being pedagogical, interpretive projects of testing and validation, involving widened peer communities in teaching, research and public discussion of a specific subject matter. The canon of sociology may be more stubbornly ‘classical’ than most (Connell, 1997), but Connell's provocation invitates sociologists to remake their subject and curricula. Connell (1997), Bhambra and Holmwood (2021) and Meghji (2021, 2022a, 2022b, 2022c) all note that canonical social theory included and excluded different theorists at different times and locations, yet ‘classical’ social theory remained peculiarly, consistently, ‘classical’ and unself-critical despite its theoretical posture of criticality. Decolonial revisionism opens up modern social theory to a broader challenge of critical dialogue and learning, situated in a broader practical programme for doing academia differently (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2021; Khoo, 2021). Race and the global ‘colour line’ are identified as the main axis for decolonising sociology (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2021; Meghji, 2021; Virdee, 2019); however, an exclusive focus on the colour line neglects how coloniality works through gender (the ‘gender line’) and the appropriation of material resources and ecological flows (the ‘nature’ line) (Khoo, 2021).
Decolonising sociology (Bhambra and Holmwood, 2021; Meghji, 2021) involves specific and also overlapping subject matter shared with other social sciences (see e.g., Khoo, 2022 on political economy; Boatcă, 2023 on history and critical theory). Greater inclusion of Southern and indigenous decolonial thought widens possibilities for alternative ontologies, epistemologies and methodologies based on communitarian or relational ethics (Naudé, 2019; Tuhiwai Smith, 2021; Whyte, 2020), bringing non-exclusive, non-discrete logics and identities, for example, Gloria Anzaldúa's ‘border thinking’ and
The call to ‘decolonise’ is currently being answered by active global dialogue about what it means to do global social science (Boatcă, 2023; Pleyers, 2023) in a time of intense, multiple, global crises. The ‘decolonial turn’ within the Global North invites acknowledgement of Northern academia's complicities in processes of epistemic domination and erasure. It is a request to stop falsely universalising Eurocentric social science and to explicitly recognise that social science has been conducted and circulated by others who we haven’t read. For the social sciences in semiperipheral Ireland, however, these challenges are further complicated because the social sciences have struggled to establish and maintain their existence, as such.
Ireland and social science – out of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries
European social science emerged in nineteenth century with convergent and divergent aspirations – to unify knowledge, to ally knowledge and science with the projects of (colonial and imperial) states, and to administer, regulate and transform territories and populations. Social science is diverse, it ‘… did not spring forth from the head of humanity only, but from the body as well – from law, medicine, politics, administration, as well as from philosophy’’ (Porter and Ross, 2009: 13).
As a relatively recent Northern/Western episteme, social science is awkwardly positioned between ‘harder’, ‘empirical’ natural sciences and ‘softer’, interpretive humanities. This distinction is itself an artefact of colonial science and its imperative to instrumentalise, divide and hierarchise. Institutionalised at the height of Western imperial expansionism and colonisation, its disciplines (especially Sociology) rarely discuss their own origins and exclusions (Khoo, 2021: 706). ‘Decolonisation’ is one way to talk about origins, revise and democratise, critically questioning epistemic dominance and erasures, and connecting knowledge and theorising to wider struggles for emancipation, reconstruction, and equality. Beyond the strict confines of internal disciplinary debates about academic canons, curriculums, and teaching, decolonisation involves wider struggles to do academic work in a less oppressive, more inclusive and more democratic ways, in concert with struggles originating in broader social movements and publics.
Conway's indispensable intellectual history argues that Ireland was very significant to the development of critical European social science between the 1830s and 1930s (Conway, 2006: 8–10, 2010), before ‘classical’ Anglophone social theory ‘became classical’ in its current form (Connell, 1997). Toqueville regarded Ireland as a starting point for critical generalisation: a ‘little country which gives rise to debate on the greatest questions of politics, morals and humanity’.
Conway points to how Harriet Martineau, the ‘first woman sociologist’ (Hill, 2002), is overlooked in the Irish sociology (Conway, 2006). Martineau visited and wrote extensively about Ireland a decade before Marx, and she was arguably more methodologically innovative. Marx's writings on the ‘Irish question’, capital accumulation, and political liberation ensured interest, mainly among historians specialising in Ireland in the nineteenth century (Garvin and Hess, 2006: 3) and a few Irish sociologists (O’Riain, 2021). Martineau used fictional writing to set political economy in a decolonial, policy-oriented frame: as ‘
Sectarian legacies: From Catholic sociology to empiricism
The transition from nineteenth to twentieth-century saw the central development of Catholic social thought. Irish nationalism and the new Irish state evolved in close interdependence with the Catholic Church. The ‘Catholic action matrix’ involved civil society via confessional organisations such as Muintir na Tire, the Christus Rex Society, and Catholic Truth Society (Conway, 2010). A materially, politically, and culturally powerful global force, the Catholic Church was responsible for most health, educational and social policies, and services. These comprised charitable work, while state action remained minimal up until the 1960s (Skehill, 2000: 697). Catholic authorities established the first academic professorship in ‘Catholic Action and Catholic Sociology’ in the 1930s, representing a dogmatic, authoritative, worldview, suspicious of left-wing and gender-equitable thought, and engaged in social amelioration (Conway, 2010). Unlike the rest of Western Europe, Irish religious resurgence was not merely a counterpoint to secularisation. Ireland arguably became Anglophone Catholicism's main metropole in the late nineteenth century, with Irish Catholic vocations playing leading roles in the global expansion of Catholicism. Within Ireland, the ‘Catholic action matrix’ was literally the only game in town’ (Conway, 2010: 4). Global Catholicism expanded after Cardinal Paul Cullen's appointment in 1866, enabling Ireland to become established as a ‘sort of alternative imperial “nodal point”’ (Barr, 2020: 7). Irish Catholic institutions and personnel spread Anglophone hegemony through a global empire of faith, expressed not only through the Church and religion proper, but also via charitable provision of social care and social control. Welfare, health, and education were understood within ‘a Catholic interpretative framework’, while Ireland served as a burgeoning metropole for Catholic cultural imperialism (Conway, 2010: 4), drawing in peripheralised peoples and locations via a large-scale missionary action.
University College Dublin (UCD) established social science proper in 1953, gradually secularising in the 1960s and 1970s. The state officially separated from the Catholic Church on joining the European Economic Community in 1973, turning towards the UN and international organisations. Catholic sociology transformed into policy-focussed, ‘empirical’ social science, while social work began a belated process of secular professional development. ‘Empirical’ social science remained conservatively non-Marxist, if not anti-Marxist (Inglis, 2021: 298), sectarian, and gender-hierarchical, reflecting a residually Catholic ‘moral monopoly’ (Inglis, 1987). Statistics and quantitative studies had developed during the imperial-colonial nineteenth century, informing analyses of social problems such as emigration, economic backwardness and depopulation, and the empirical turn remained compatible with Catholic social teaching. Much ‘empirical’, policy-oriented research was conducted outside academic institutions (Conway, 2006), in the research divisions of state bodies tasked with state economic and social research, agricultural and rural development.
Catholic and ‘empirical’ social science were associated with state administration and UCD (the ‘Catholic’, and largest Irish university), while Trinity (the older, elite ‘Protestant’ university) was the site for theoretical and critical studies, described as ‘exotic’ (O’Riain, 2021). The Economic and Social Research Institute, a state research and policy body, dominated social research and publications, reinforcing conservative preferences for empirical research, with ingrained distastes towards interpretive sociology, feminism, Marxism, or critical theory. Gendered erasures are reflected in Inglis’ passing remarks distinguishing ‘young ladies studying to become social workers’ from ‘the rest of us … oriented towards social research’ (Inglis, 2021: 297), while ‘social research’ meant quantitative surveys. In elite, Protestant Trinity College, social science involved un-Catholic seminars (not didactic lectures) and ‘exotic’ theory. Social science was ‘empirical’ and social theory ‘classical’ in Connell's sense, taking Western society to be definitive and superior; global capitalism was unquestionable, and critique was limited to an analytic operation within a liberal theory.
Attempts to broaden social sciences and to revitalise their public relevance gained impetus belatedly when Celtic Tiger’s economic growth was augmented by a new secular force, global philanthropy. The Irish state formed new partnerships with Atlantic Philanthropies, a limited-life American foundation representing a single donor, Chuck Feeney. Atlantic granted over €1bn to research in Ireland between 1987 and 2016, funding research on ageing, children and youth, and human rights (Atlantic Philanthropies, 2014; Boyle and Shannon, 2018). The co-funded Programme for Research in Third Level Institutions (PRTLI) began in 1999, heralding the major expansion and belated national coordination of the research system. Initially, the state hoped to develop social sciences as part of the broad programme of higher education and research; however state support proved to be episodic and volatile. An unstable system emerged, dominated by resource competition, intensifying managerialism and narrowing research agendas. Resources became increasingly concentrated and channelled towards narrowly selective, ‘applied’ topics, influenced by philanthropy, technology, and business actors.
Precarious legacies – Irish academia's long busts and short booms
Contemporary Irish social science is ‘an uncertain world with relatively few institutional supports for ongoing rich interactions’ (O’Riain, 2021), spanning a historical trajectory of short booms and long busts. Two periods of crisis and austerity: 1980–1990 and 2008–2018 structurally shaped the academic system. Social research became structurally extraverted, conditioned by low and volatile government spending, especially during the long austerities of the 1980s and 2010s (Joint Committee on Education, Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science, 2022).
The long 1980 austerity meant that by the 1990s, ‘many departments had not hired any staff for 10–15 years’ (O’Riain, 2021: 314). For O’Riain (2021), ‘Irish sociology certainly felt like a dependent periphery when … applying for postgraduate studies in 1992’. Postgraduate and postdoctoral research opportunities were vanishingly scarce until the end of the 1990s, forcing researchers to look to the Anglophone metropoles of the UK, US, or the rarefied European University Institute. From the late 1990s to 2006, the so-called ‘Celtic Tiger’ offered some promise. Social science developed anew through new forms of structural dependence and extraversion. Atlantic Philanthropies made major investments in applied social research across all major Irish universities between the late 1990s and the 2010s. Several social science research centres were established, and there were attempts to coordinate research and training via an Irish Social Science Platform. However, consolidation attempts ran aground as discontinuous and competitive funding frustrated ambitions to build up the social sciences as major component of a national research system through the PRTLI programme (1999–2008). In 2016, the Royal Irish Academy Social Science Committee resorted to a residual ‘profile mapping’ of the social sciences amid much discussion of ‘landscape reforms’ in order to try to explain the value of the social sciences to research, government, and the general public (Royal Irish Academy, 2016).
State investment in academic social science developed largely out of Atlantic Philanthropies’ requirement that the state match-fund philanthropic donations (Atlantic Philanthropies, 2014). In O’Riain's view (2021), the Irish state's failure to consolidate the social sciences rests with decisions to prioritise inter-institutional competition. I agree, but would further explain this odd preference as a legacy of structural semiperipherality and extraversion. Legacy precarities deepened when the European Research Area's rationale shifted away from a broad social cohesion agenda, ‘Social Europe’ to the ‘Lisbon Agenda’, narrowing the scope of research and education to market-oriented technoscience, innovation, and competition. New ‘neoliberal’ values of competition, austerity, disruptive innovation, managerialism, and acceleration overtook academia, sharpening the tensions, contradictions, and pressures of academic life.
Irish researchers continued to rely on European funding during the long busts of the 1980s and 2010s. However, the Lisbon Agenda narrowed the scope of support for the arts, humanities, and social sciences. Research became increasingly contingent on collaborative mechanisms largely designed to bring in, and benefit, the private sector. The arts and humanities were driven to justify research and education in terms of economic benefits, for a competitive ‘creative economy’, while social science's remit to inform policy and enhance social cohesion were overshadowed after the collapse of Ireland's corporatist model of social partnership in 2009. The Irish Humanities Alliance became an important voice lobbying for arts and humanities’ funding on the basis of their contribution to the ‘cultural economy’ and social services (Hazelkorn et al., 2013). In comparison, the social sciences became marginalised, tending to become fragmented, reactive, and unsuccessful in pushing back against cuts and marginalisation. Different social science disciplines fared unevenly: positivistic and quantitative fields of economics, business and management studies, behavioural psychology, and anything to do with digital technologies gained ground. The main sponsor of critical, qualitative and humanistic social science, Atlantic Philanthropies, exited Ireland after 2017, leaving a gap before the state funding recovered. It had contributed to the creation of a significant social science infrastructure, but its contribution proved difficult to replace.
Corcoran (2021) recalls three problems identified by the sociologist Liam Ryan during the 1980s: Northern Ireland, academic precarity, and the low profile of the social sciences, and notes their re-emergence in the 2020s. The paucity of research connecting the North and South of Ireland in the 1980s was remedied by the peace process in the late 1990s. However, by the 2020s, the peace process stalled, and the Northern Ireland question returned with a vengeance, following Brexit.
Given the unfavourable conditions that prevailed during and following the two long busts, a general decline in sociology and social science would not be surprising. However, Irish researchers have been somewhat successful in capturing the European research funding and have succeeded in training a considerable number of researchers capable of reproducing social science's main disciplines. However, persisting structural problems of job scarcity and precaritisation have undermined the academic profession and careers, generally (Courtois and O’Keefe, 2015, 2019; Cush, 2016; Kennedy, 2022; O’Keefe and Courtois, 2019). Prospects are not helped by ‘work overload, disciplinary narrowing, and large student numbers, all exacerbating ‘the uncertain place in the public mind’ occupied by social science (O’Riain, 2021: 317). Despite constant reference to ‘society’ in the public sphere and media, social science remains in a weak position, compared to ‘applied’ technological sciences or even the humanities. Few social scientists are optimistic about the state's role (op. cit., 319) despite the elevation of Higher Education to a full ministerial portfolio in 2020 and proposed reforms for academia.
Reclassifying the social sciences
Does it make sense to bother with ‘decolonising’ Irish social science when it is battling so many constraints, when the academic lifeworld is itself ‘colonised’ by neoliberal pressures and vicissitudes? From the ‘Catholic action matrix’ to philanthropy's uncertain successors in Irish academia, ‘social science’ has had diverse predecessors, sponsors, competitors, and detractors. The ‘social sciences’ are themselves contested with different arguments for including or excluding the ‘sciences of man’, ‘moral and political sciences’, ‘behavioural sciences’, and ‘human sciences’ (Porter and Ross, 2009).
Historians of science complain about the social sciences being ‘that most unwieldy group of the sciences’ (Cravens, 2006) but what are they ‘unwieldy’ to, and why does this negative view prevail? Following the establishment of the Department of Further and Higher Education, Innovation and Science in the late 2020, one of the first actions of the new Minister was to launch a ‘policy consultation’ to reclassify research disciplines (Department for Further and Higher Education, Innovation and Science, 2022). The proposed reclassification would dispense with social sciences as a subject group, departing from the ‘Frascati’ classification used by the European Commission and OECD (OECD, 2015). The proposed reclassification assigned some disciplines’ discrete research subject status: economics, psychology, education, and religion/philosophy as a joint subject. The more critical disciplines: anthropology, sociology, and human geography were to be re-assigned to an odd, unprecedented new category, ‘human societies’. Physical geography would be assigned to the environmental sciences, while human geography would be relegated to ‘human societies’. Disciplinary elements within ‘human societies’ would presumably be forced to compete against each other for resources. While the reclassification exercise has not (yet) produced an outcome, the threat of re/declassification demonstrates the critical social sciences’ relative lack of status, lack of visibility and ‘lower tier’ positioning within government, public policy, the media and public sphere, generally (Inglis, 2021).
Nevertheless, reasons for optimism remain. Irish social scientists, social science disciplines, students, and publics have become more international and diverse in recent decades. The second-level school subject of politics and society was introduced in 2016, after fifteen years of prevarication, and it is a growing subject. Social sciences, including sociology, attract a healthy number of undergraduates and postgraduates. After 2018, social science disciplines began to replace the many staff lost over the preceding decade. The Sociological Association recorded its highest membership in 2023, exceeding the 226 members reported in 2004 prior to the latest long bust (Conway, 2006: 20; personal communication with Membership Secretary, Sociological Association of Ireland, 2023).
Addressing race and gender at a precarious intersection of inequalities
Year 2023 marked the 50th anniversary of the Sociological Association of Ireland following the ‘decade of centenaries’, marking Ireland's long, unfinished processes of decolonisation. Humorous complaints about the surfeit of national historical retrospectives likened the ‘1916 fatigue’ to ‘someone constantly waving your old Leaving Cert results in your face and reminding you that you did well in Irish, history, and religion, and better than expected in English and music, but failed geography, economics, German and maths’ (O’Rourke, 2016). The social sciences fare badly, and sociology does not even manage to make it into this historical joke. Precarious and hardly visible, are Ireland's social sciences worth decolonising if they are not worth commemorating?
Despite discursive prominence, criticality has historically been regarded as ‘exotic’ in the Irish academia. Academic freedom is becoming politicised, ironically in the name of even-handedness and depoliticisation. Absences and silences matter; hence the sociologies of under-funding, elision, and avoidance of subject matter, actors, and events remain important, maybe crucial to decolonising social science. The views from women, from ‘outsider’ sociologists, and from qualitative and inclusive methodologies have remained unjustly obscure (Byrne and Lentin, 2000; Lentin, 2021), replaying the fate of Harriet Martineau's achievements a century earlier. Despite their obvious value and relevance, critical, diverse, egalitarian, qualitative, feminist, and ecological approaches and schools of thought have remained marginal, lack prestige, and are under-represented in our teaching and research.
One worrying and urgent trend that highlights the importance of bringing back in class analysis is the precaritisation of academia and how this impacts on inequalities of gender, race, nationality, and disciplinary affiliation. The trend towards precarity was first highlighted in the 1980s’ depression years (Corcoran, 2021). The precarity of the 2020s threatens to undermine the entire sector, especially since the COVID-19 pandemic began to drive home a sense of generalised crisis (Fitzsimons et al., 2021). Intensifying precaritisation is likely to intensify inequalities and suffering, but it further depoliticises and silences critical voices, since the precariously employed now makes up half of the profession (Kennedy, 2022).
Ireland's semiperipherality has been considered within world-systems analysis, but current hot topics in social science, such as migration, identity, the border, welfare, and cultural imperialism all point to the centrality of race. There is now a noticeable hunger and demand for critical race studies within the Irish social science, particularly within sociology. This hunger is, in part, a response to the re-activation and re-circulation of critical black studies and Pan-African studies across the social sciences and the rise of connected sociologies (Bhambra, 2014). Critical black studies have been largely absent from the Irish social science, until very recently. However, this article emphasises the need to approach race as structural (Lentin, 2020; Wolfe, 2006) and therefore, not restricted to people and phenomena racialised as Black but addressing the structure of racial identification and division as a whole. Mills explains that the boundaries of whiteness are not drawn in the same way across different countries (2015: 218). Decolonising Irish social science necessitates critical studies of global and local forms of Irish whiteness, Irish white ignorance and whiteliness (Tate and Page, 2018; Yancy, 2015) while enlarging the scope of critical race studies to include other ethnic and diasporic identities. White ignorance is a structural form of non-knowledge that denies the centrality of racism as an ideology (Mills, 2015: 220). Whiteness refers to the social categorisation of people as white within a racialised (global) social system. Whiteliness is ‘an epistemological frame that enables and reproduces this invisibility [of whiteness]’. Whiteness is structural, while whiteliness maintains and reproduces white ignorance and white privilege through their invisibilisation (Kim and Olson, 2016: 124; Tate and Page, 2018). Whiteliness works with, and through, other identities of privilege, working a bit like middle-classness, yet it is not the same as middle-classness. Performed through judgements of well-intentioned responsibility, whiteliness determines what is seemingly in everybody's best interests while in fact serving white interests by erasing the structural operations of race that maintain racialised configurations of privilege and benefit, disadvantage and harm.
Conclusion: Double translation and doubled repair
This article began with the project of decolonising as a ‘double translation’, involving an opening-up of perspectives, canons, and curriculum, and engaging in critical dialogue. To conclude, I consider a revisionist project of decolonial repair (Khoo, 2019, 2023 forthcoming), taking repair as a doubled figure of mending and return. Two things kept returning to the forefront of my thoughts: bell hooks’ insistence that it is the centre that must move to the margins (1984) and Kader Attia's work, first exhibited at the 2014 Documenta, in Kassel, and subsequently installed in other locations. Born in Algeria and resident in France, Attia explores the theme of colonial repair by relating repair to imperial violence, the colonial wound, and modern-colonial amnesia.
Attia repeatedly references the Japanese art of
Decolonial ‘repair’ (Khoo, 2024 forthcoming) engages the ‘double translation’ of decolonisation in a double journey of centre to margin
For the centrally positioned, moving to the margin with epistemic humility involves a shattering and reconstitution of the centre and a journey of the centre back to itself. This double figure of decolonial repair engages race and gender in considering the complicated semiperipheral dual colony of Ireland. To engage race structurally is to engage Irish whiteness, white ignorance, and whiteliness via a critically self-interrupting and reflexive route. It tries to avoid the ‘cunning of imperialist reason’ that keeps the sociological imagination's commonplaces in place – race as a structure which one argues
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This work was supported by the Irish Research Council (grant number Coalesce 2019/88).
