Mary Gilmartin

Gender, Traditional Authority, and the Politics of Rural Reform in South Africa

The new South African Constitution, together with later policies and legislation, affirm a commitment to gender rights that is incompatible with the formal recognition afforded to unelected traditional authorities. This contradiction is particularly evident in the case of land reform in many rural areas, where women’s right of access to land is denied through the practice of customary law. This article illustrates the ways in which these constitutional contradictions play out with particular intensity in the ‘former homelands’ through the example of a conflict over land use in Buffelspruit, Mpumalanga province. There, a number of women who had been granted informal access to communal land for the purposes of subsistence cultivation had their rights revoked by the traditional authority. Despite desperate protests, they continue to be marginalized in terms of access to land, while their male counterparts appropriate communal land for commercial farming and cattle grazing. Drawing on this protest, we argue that current South African practice in relation to the pressing issue of gender equity in land reform represents a politics of accommodation and evasion that tends to reinforce gender biases in rural development, and in so doing, undermines the prospects for genuinely radical transformation of the instituted geographies and institutionalized practices bequeathed by the apartheid regime.

Teaching for better learning: a blended learning pilot project with first year geography undergraduates

Internationally, recognition is growing that the transition between post-primary and higher education is raising a number of challenges for both students and educators. Simultaneously with growing class sizes, resources have become more constrained and there is a new set of expectations from the “net generation” (Mohanna, 2007, p. 211) The use of e-learning in medical education, Postgraduate Medical Journal, 83, p. 211). Within this transforming context, modes of instruction that cater for different paces of learning and learning styles by combining traditional and electronic media have become increasingly important. This paper discusses the transformation of an introductory human geography module at University College Dublin using a blended learning approach that extends beyond the media used to incorporate all aspects of, and inputs into, the learning process. Our experience highlights how blended learning can aid the achievement of a range of objectives in relation to student engagement and the promotion of deeper learning. However, blended learning is not a quick-fix solution to all issues relating to new university students and our analysis draws out a more complex relationship than anticipated between blended learning and student retention that will require further examination.

Interrogating Medical Tourism: Ireland, Abortion, and Mobility Rights

Medical tourism in Ireland, like in many Western states, is built around assumptions about individual agency, choice, possibility, and mobility. One specific form of medical tourism—the flow of women from Ireland traveling in order to secure an abortion—disrupts and contradicts these assumptions. One legacy of the bitter, contentious political and legal battles surrounding abortion in Ireland in the 1980s and 1990s has been securing the right of mobility for all pregnant Irish citizens to cross international borders to secure an abortion. However, these mobility rights are contingent upon nationality, social class, and race, and they have enabled successive Irish governments to avoid any responsibility for providing safe, legal, and affordable abortion services in Ireland. Nearly twenty years after the X case discussed here, the pregnant female body moving over international borders—entering and leaving the state—is still interpreted as problematic and threatening to the Irish state.

European migrants in Ireland:Pathways to integration

Within the EU, efforts in relation to integration are generally directed towards migrants from outside the EU. However, there is evidence that intra-EU migrants face similar obstacles to integration to those of non-EU citizens. Since Ireland has a large EU migrant population, this paper critically explores EU migrants’ integration in Ireland. Drawing on awider longitudinal study, the paper focuses on the lived experiences of 39 migrants from EU Member States living in Ireland. Focusing on domains of integration, we explore the different pathways by which EU migrants move to Ireland and become part of Irish society. Cultural and social pathways – including language, study, adventure and social relationships – are important as the original motivation for migration. Contrary to popular perception, economic factors such as employment were mostly seen as enabling social and cultural interests. However, economic but also social pathways came to the fore during the recession, when securing one’s livelihood and networks took on a new importance. We show that migrants developed various tactics to intensify their contact with Irish society and to develop feelings of being ‘at home’, despite a deteriorating economic situation. Despite these individual efforts, EU migrants continue to face obstacles to integration in Ireland: obstacles that need to be acknowledged at addressed within Ireland and across the EU more broadly.

Revisiting contemporary Irish migration: new geographies of mobility and belonging

Though immigration has become one of the key issues facing Irish society, geographers in Ireland have been slow to respond. This is despite a long tradition of studying migration, particularly emigration, within Irish geography. This is even more surprising given recent developments within the discipline, as geography moves to assert its centrality to the study of international migration. This paper outlines the ways in which geographers in Ireland could contribute to broader debates about migration, both empirically and theoretically. It also introduces the five papers in this special issue of the journal, which provide a comprehensive overview of research on Irish migration, as well as detailed discussions of Irish migration to the UK, return migration and migration to Ireland from Poland, China and Nigeria.

Changing Ireland, 2000–2012: immigration, emigration and inequality

At the start of the twenty-first century, there have been significant changes in patterns of migration to and from Ireland. This paper provides a comprehensive account of available statistics on these migration patterns, and assesses the quality of this information, highlighting issues with the measurement of migrant flow in particular. The paper also provides information on migrant stock in Ireland, drawing on detailed information from the 2002, 2006 and 2011 Censuses, and shows how available data sources might illuminate the relationship between migration and inequality.

Geography and representation: introduction

When I teach introductory undergraduate geography classes, I often assign as additional reading I, Rigoberta Menchu´ (Menchu´ , 1984). The life story of the Nobel Peace Prize winner, as recounted to and by anthropologist Elisabeth Burgos-Debray, is a moving account of Rigoberta Menchu´ ’s childhood, of the difficulties she and her community had to face, and of their political efforts to bring about change for the indigenous population of Guatemala. In class evaluations, students have responded with enthusiasm to this text—they empathize with the young Rigoberta and her family, and they are helped in this by a narrative that is immediate and emotive. Recent work, though, has questioned the validity of this text. In particular, anthropologist David Stoll claims that important segments of the text are fabricated—he highlights Menchu´ ’s flawed accounts of the deaths of family members, and her refusal to acknowledge the extent of her formal education.

Home stories: immigrant narratives of place and identity in contemporary Ireland

This paper discusses immigrant identity and place in contemporary Ireland. It draws from a longitudinal research project that involved recent immigrants to Ireland. Participants in the project came from 18 different countries, and ranged in age from 22 to 68. Their reasons for moving to Ireland were varied, and included work, adventure, and personal relationships. Combining insights from sociolinguistics and human geography, the paper first considers the different ways in which immigrants to Ireland narrate place and identity, paying particular attention to content and linguistic strategies. It then provides a more detailed discussion of the relationship between immigrant identity and place through a focus on the concept of “home,” highlighting the linguistic strategies and means that immigrants used to discursively construct notions of home and identity in their interviews. The paper concludes by arguing that detailed discourse level analysis of peoples narratives of place offers new insights into the relationship between immigrant identity and place.

Geography as a Cultural Field

Geography’s relationship with cultural issues has been restricted in the past to the systematic field called cultural geography, a field to set alongside the other systematic divisions, such as political, urban, or economic geography. But in the last two decades new interpretations of the importance of culture in the differentiation of societies and space, as well as appreciation of the limitations of the realist assumptions that underlay traditional human geographical approaches, have transformed our understanding of the relevance of cultural issues to geography. The result can be seen in the very different content, methods and philosophy of textbooks that exemplify the old (Jordan and Rowntree, 1979, 1997) and new (Mitchell, 2000) approaches. An important part of these new ideas is the critique of the realist assumption behind most geographical work that there is some objective reality waiting to be written down. It is increasingly recognised that our knowledge has been ‘constructed’ through the culture of the peoples seeking to understand and communicate about the world. Certainly this does not mean that generations of empirical work are wasted. This has provided us with a great deal of understanding about the world. Rather, these new interpretations and understandings based on culture focus attention upon fundamental epistemological issues about the nature of our geographical knowledge, and how it has been created. Hence, it can be argued that the study of cultural issues have moved from being a restricted and even marginal part of research in human geography, to one that underpins the whole nature of the contemporary field. The rest of this chapter seeks to justify this position by showing the relationships between culture and geography in five contexts to justify the title that geography is a cultural field. It will begin by briefly summarising the alternative uses of the term ‘culture’ and its relationship with ‘society’. This is followed by a review of the traditional approaches to the field known as cultural geography, which provides the springboard for a brief summary of the profound changes represented by contemporary cultural geography. The next two sections discuss the position that the field of geography is not only culturally dependent but can be viewed as a cultural product, in the sense that the ‘type’ of knowledge produced is influenced by the particular values and needs of the society in which it is created.

Geography in Ireland in transition‐some comments : Introduction

The publication of Rob Kitchins commentary on the state of Geography in Ireland in the sixtieth anniversary issue of Irish Geography has opened the possibility for a broader, public dialogue about our discipline. This forum represents a continuation of this conversation, with its focus on a variety of theoretical, institutional and personal concerns about Irish Geography.