It might seem at first glance as though this is to be the story of what might have been. In fact, however, it is to be more an account of what might yet be, barring accidents and…
Abstract
It might seem at first glance as though this is to be the story of what might have been. In fact, however, it is to be more an account of what might yet be, barring accidents and crises of the economy yet more serious than those we are encountering. For staff development — one of the newer fashions in progressive education — can be a costly business:
In all courses in further and higher education some attention is paid at the outset to the most basic theory. A course in Philosophy considers the problem of defining philosophy…
Abstract
In all courses in further and higher education some attention is paid at the outset to the most basic theory. A course in Philosophy considers the problem of defining philosophy itself, and discusses fundamental principles before looking at specific philosophies. So with Business Studies, or Science. So even with Education — or so it was. And if these fundamental, introductory programmes are compared with one another, they are found to have certain common ingredients. One in particular stands out; the need to define and have a common understanding of terminology, so that possible future misunderstandings can be avoided, so that there is common ground on which students and teachers can stand with a sure footing, and so that there are established bases for hypothesis and conjecture as the course unfolds. In other words, attention is paid to the need for an efficient medium of communication in the classroom. Once that medium is created, transfer can take place to the library or the study. The student takes it with him wherever he goes, and uses it whenever he works within his subject. How sad it is that he has no way of making use of it — or of the principles involved in developing it — in any other context.
Sociologists of crime and deviance have devoted considerable time and effort, in recent years, to the study of deviants' accounts of their activities. There are good reasons why…
Abstract
Sociologists of crime and deviance have devoted considerable time and effort, in recent years, to the study of deviants' accounts of their activities. There are good reasons why students of deviance in particular should be interested in what can be learned from their subjects' explanations of their social practices. Actors are normally called to account for or to explain their activities precisely when these actions are seen by significant others to be in some sense “unreasonable”. Moreover, accounts are central to the processes of law. The purpose of legal judgements is to attribute or withold responsibility. In order to assess an individual's guilt, where criminal activities are concerned, lawyers, judges, and juries pose such questions as: “Did the defendant perform an illegal act?”; “if so, can he or she explain his or her actions in reasonable terms?”; “Was the act in question pre‐meditated?” (that is, “motivated”); and, perhaps most important of all “What is the relationship between the accused's account of his or her involvement in an act, and their real involvement?”
Azrini Wahidin and Jason Powell
The purpose of this paper is to critically explore the importance of the experiences of female former combatants during the Irish Conflict, colloquially known as “The Troubles”…
Abstract
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to critically explore the importance of the experiences of female former combatants during the Irish Conflict, colloquially known as “The Troubles” and outline key moments of resistance for female political prisoners during their time at Armagh jail. The paper will situate the analysis within a Foucauldian framework drawing on theoretical tools for understanding power, resistance and subjectivity to contextualise and capture rich narratives and experiences. What makes a Foucauldian analysis of former female combatants of the Conflict so inspiring is how the animation and location of problems of knowledge as “pieces” of the larger contest between The State, institutions of power and its penal subjects (ex-female combatants as prisoners). The paper has demonstrated that the body exists through and in culture, the product of signs and meanings, of discourse and practices.
Design/methodology/approach
This is primarily qualitative methodology underpinned by Foucauldian theory. There were 28 women and 20 men interviewed in the course of this research came from across Ireland, some came from cities and others came from rural areas. Some had spent time in prisons in the UK and others served time in the Republic of Ireland or in the North of Ireland. Many prisoners experienced being on the run and all experienced levels of brutality at the hands of the State. Ethical approval was granted from the Queens University Research Committee.
Findings
This paper only examines the experiences of female ex-combatants and their narratives of imprisonment. What this paper clearly shows through the narratives of the women is the gendered nature of imprisonment and the role of power, resilience and resistance whilst in prison in Northern Ireland. The voices in this paper disturb and interrupt the silence surrounding the experiences of women political prisoners, who are a hidden population, whilst in prison.
Research limitations/implications
In terms of research impact, this qualitative research is on the first of its kind to explore both the experiential and discursive narratives of female ex-combatants of the Irish Conflict. The impact and reach of the research illustrates how confinement revealed rich theoretical insights, drawing from Foucauldian theory, to examine the dialectical interplay between power and the subjective mobilisation of resistance practices of ex-combatants in prison in Northern Ireland. The wider point of prison policy and practice not meeting basic human rights or enhancing the quality of life of such prisoners reveals some of the dystopian features of current prison policy and lack of gender sensitivity to female combatants.
Practical implications
It is by prioritising the voices of the women combatants in this paper that it not only enables their re-positioning at the centre of the struggle, but also moves away methodologically from the more typical sole emphasis on structural conditions and political processes. Instead, prioritising the voices of the women combatants places the production of subjectivities and agencies at the centre, and explores their dialectical relationship to objective conditions and practical constraints.
Social implications
It is clear from the voices of the female combatants and in their social engagement in the research that the prison experience was marked specifically by assaults on their femininity, to which they were the more vulnerable due to the emphasis on sexual modesty within their socialisation and within the ethno-nationalist iconography of femininity. The aggression directed against them seems, in part, to have been a form of gender-based sexual violence in direct retaliation for the threat posed to gender norms by their assumption of the (ostensibly more powerful) role as combatants. They countered this by methods which foregrounded their collective identity as soldiers and their identification with their male comrades in “the same struggle”.
Originality/value
This paper is one of the first to explore the importance of the experiences of female former combatants during the Northern Irish Conflict with specific reference to their experience of imprisonment. The aim of this significant paper is to situate the critical analysis grounded in Foucauldian theory drawing on theoretical tools of power, resistance and subjectivity in order to make sense of women’s experiences of conflict and imprisonment in Ireland. It is suggested that power and resistance need to be re-appropriated in order to examine such unique gendered experiences that have been hidden in mainstream criminological accounts of the Irish Conflict.
Details
Keywords
FOR the student who has to choose a field of study in which to learn and exercise his bibliographic skills Sociology affords an interesting and attractive challenge. Indeed, to…
Abstract
FOR the student who has to choose a field of study in which to learn and exercise his bibliographic skills Sociology affords an interesting and attractive challenge. Indeed, to understand his chosen profession it must necessarily be placed within its social context. Most students at some stage of their development reflect on the social problems that beset the human situation, and some, as the mass media would have us believe, are anxious to remould the “sorry scheme of things” as represented by the existing social structure.