Rionach Casey

Homeless women in public spaces : strategies of resistance

This paper explores homeless womens use of public spaces and buildings in England. In doing so it problematises the spatial boundaries typically presented in the literature and research which suggest homeless women are largely confined to institutional or private spaces of homelessness. The paper argues that homeless women also use highly visible public spaces and semi-private spaces, and that these practices can be conceptualised in terms of resistance. Homeless women challenge the rules associated with occupying public spaces that either directly or tacitly exclude them, and they engage in identity work to resist being labelled as homeless.

Social Housing Managers and the Performance Ethos Towards a ‘Professional Project of the Self’

In sociology, ‘the professional project’ is understood as a collective endeavour of occupational groups that only succeeds if those groups possess, and control access to, a unique stock of knowledge. Urban sociologists have been critical of public housing managers’ collective endeavours to present themselves as a profession because they use generic knowledge and common sense in their work. They also argue that ‘the professional project’ of housing management is being further under-mined by the ‘performance ethos’, since this now allows service managers to exert even more control over what public housing managers do and thus de-skills them even more. Our argument is that this analysis of the impact of the performance ethos is based on a conceptually limiting view of power as a repressive force that enforces ‘blanket restrictions’ on group activity, i.e. what professional groups are free to do. Conversely, we adopt a Foucauldian view of power because it better explains our research findings. Foucault suggests that power does not simply repress group activity. Power is also appropriated by individuals who use it to redefine themselves, e.g. who and what they are. We draw on our empirical data to show how individual housing managers were appropriating the performance culture in productive ways to achieve their own individual ends (i.e. to ‘work on’ their professional selves so as to re-define themselves and thus their individual claim to professional status). We use this analysis to argue that an individualized (as opposed to collective) ‘professional project of the self’ is emerging in housing management that has not yet been adequately captured in the sociological literature.

The sensuous secrets of shelter: How recollections of food stimulate Irish men’s reconstructions of their early formative residential experiences in Leicester, Sheffield and Manchester

This paper examines the intersection between food, recollection and Irish migrants’ reconstructions of their housing pathways in the three English cities of Leicester (East Midlands), Sheffield (South Yorkshire) and Manchester (North). Previous studies have acknowledged more implicitly the role of memory in representing the Irish migrant experience in England. Here, we adopt a different stance. We explore the mnemonic power of food to encode, decode and recode Irish men’s reconstructions of their housing pathways in England when constructing and negotiating otherness. In doing so, we apply a ‘Proustian anthropological’ approach in framing the men’s representations of their formative residential experiences in the boarding houses of the three English cities during the 1950s and 1960s are examined. The extent to which food provided in the boarding houses was used as an instrument of discipline and control is examined. The relevance of food related acts of resistance, food insecurity and acts of hedonic meat-centric eating in constructing the men’s sociocultural identity are also explored.

Community, difference and identity: The case of the Irish in Sheffield

There is a growing body of research in racial and ethnic studies on the processes of identity construction within minority ethnic populations. This article seeks to build on this work by analysing emerging collective identity formations in an ‘invisible’ minority ethnic group. Based upon focus groups and in-depth interviews with Irish people in Sheffield, the article aims to advance three key arguments. First, the concept of community is central to an Irish collective identity, but is negotiated in a multiplicity of ways. Second, Irish collective identity has been shaped not only by demographic differences but by shared experiences of non-recognition and stereotyping. Third, there is a simultaneous assertion of an Irish identity running parallel with a perception that the ‘traditional’ Irish community may have to re-invent itself in response to changing demographics at the local level. The paper concludes by considering the implications of these arguments for an understanding of Irish ethnicity in multicultural Britain.

Relational and gendered selves: older Irish migrants’ housing and employment histories in the north and East Midlands of England

Abstract Most accounts of migration stress the economic necessity, but generally blur the role of migrants themselves in the process. It is also rare to consider male and female migrants together, or to explore the relational aspects of masculinity and femininity in migration histories. This paper explores the relational aspects of Irish (‘Irish’ is used throughout this article to refer to our participants who self-identified as ‘Irish’. It is further noted that all of the participants were from the Republic of Ireland and hence does not include Northern Irish migrants. Where ‘Ireland’ is used it refers to the Republic of Ireland) migrants’ residential and work histories using narrative enquiry. First, we explore the complex relationship between housing and employment in Irish women and men’s stories focusing particularly on the early phase of migration. Second, we argue that these narratives, especially the ‘intertwining personal, sub-cultural and cultural stories’ are essential in understanding Irish migrants’ experiences. Third, we posit that gender emerges as a significant factor with qualitative differences in Irish women’s and men’s trajectories. Our analysis focuses on the self-in-relation, housing pathways and gendered housing and employment strategies.