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As Michael, the farmer who farms the land was busy the day I went to talk to him

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Rural Ireland

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MEITHEAL

Meitheal is the Irish word for a work team, gang, or party and denotes the co-operative labour system in Ireland where groups of neighbours help each other in turn with farming work, such as harvesting crops.  Neighbours who give their work to others are helped in turn with their own heavy seasonal tasks to the heart of the concept is community unity through cooperative work and mutually reciprocal support.  Meitheal is the Irish expression of the ancient and universal appliance of cooperation to social need.

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Sherkin Island - A Local History

Details

Created on Sunday, 01 September 2013 09:03

Written by Gillian Mills

Dolly O'Reilly first wrote a local history of Sherkin Island in 1994 (now out of print) and in this updated edition she fills in the gaps in the historiography of the island.

She describes the physical landscape as being ' approximately 5 x 2.5 km, comprising 409 acres of land, most of which is fertile, except for the highest point, Slievemore which is rough, hilly and uncultivated.'

Sherkin is unique among many Irish islands due to its close proximity to the mainland ― just one mile off the coast of southwest Cork. A short ferry ride of ten minutes, which is rarely cancelled due to bad weather, ensures easy access to the mainland.
Six townlands
The origins of its name are uncertain. An 1821 census refers to it as' Sherkin Island, also called Innisherkin'; a map of Baltimore (1620) gives the name as Inisherkin Island and Petty's Survey Map (1658)' refers to Inisherkin.

The island is divided into six townlands: Slievemore (Big Hill) is named after a physical feature and Nine Gneeves after another ― a measure of land (1/12th of a ploughland or ten acres.

Kilmona denotes a notable building (St Mona's Church); Horseshoe harbour in the southeast and the townlands of Cloddagh and Farrancoush incorporate natural features. Evidence of human existence goes back to the second half of the third millennium BC. Radio carbon dates suggest that most of the wedge tombs were built about this time or earlier, and could mark the first established community on the island.

Family names synonymous with West Cork ― Carbery and O'Driscoll for example ― are recorded in writings in the sixth century. Prior to and following the Anglo Norman invasion of 1169, clans driven from their original locations ' made encroachments ' on the O'Driscoll territory; names such as O'Mahony, Barry and Sullivan started to appear.
Rivalry and piracy
About this time, ports along the east coast had been taken over by the Anglo-Normans. 'Rivalry between the ancient clans of the west and the Anglo-Normans in the east had developed into deadly enmity which saw many acts of piracy and destruction on both sides.'

The friction continued and in 1450 the citizens of Waterford and Wexford were banned from fishing in Baltimore or from having any commercial contact with the O'Driscolls. The climax of this 'blood thirsty period' was in 1537 when on February 20, 'four ships trading from Lisbon and bound for Waterford with cargoes of wine were driven by bad weather into enemy harbours of Cape Clear, Baltimore and Kinsale. '

What occurred, the author writes, deserves to be told verbatim because it was one of the key factors that led to the destruction of the island, the Franciscan Friary and Dún na Long Castle:
'When the Gentry and Peers of those parts had tasted the wines they forgot their safe conduct and invited the merchants to dinner in the castle, seized and clapped them in irons, manner their Irish gallies and took the ship and distributed 72 tons of the wine amongst their neighbours.'
Within two weeks an expedition was launched to salvage what remained of the ship, under the command of Captain Dobbyn. He boarded the Santa Maria de Soci and drove off the O'Driscolls. The Waterford authorities planned a reprisal and on March 27, a 'formidable expedition, consisting of two vessels containing four hundred men...set sail....and came to anchor off Dún na Long Castle and launched an attack on the island.'

Baltimore was also attacked ' and after wreaking havoc on both Sherkin and Baltimore, the Waterford men returned to their home territory. By the end of the century, the final destruction of the O'Driscolls' power, along with their castles in the area, was to come.'

The author notes that around this time as the economy of Cork strengthened and developed, so too did incidents of piracy. Certain goods (tea, spirits and tobacco) were classed as 'luxuries' and with the many safe harbours along west Cork, pirates were welcomed by ale-houses and tavern proprietors. To address the problem, Sherkin inhabitants in 1610 were ordered to move to the mainland; it is not clear however if the evacuation took place but does indicate the measures taken to suppress piracy and illegal trading.
Marine influence
Looking at the material culture of islands generally, the author suggests this is heavily influenced by their marine environment 'either directly or indirectly by the use and manufacturing of boats and fishing equipment and by the harvesting of food from the sea as part of the marine economy, or indirectly by the use of seaweed and sand for fertilising the land.'

Information on a shipbuilding industry was collated by Fr James Coombes who was stationed on the island in the 1950s, and the island's shipwrights are commemorated in poetry and prose. Sherkin-built sloops were involved in coastal trading, transporting potato cargoes 'from obscure inlets and the less that was known about it by the landlord's agents and tithe proctors, the better the traders liked it.'
Famine destruction
While the arrival of the potato blight has a profound effect, trouble had been brewing since the early 1800s over pricing. A newspaper report in January 1847 describes how areas like Myros, Schull and Baltimore had supplied Cork markets with potatoes for years 'but now the hookers which had transported the cargoes, were lying useless.'

In Sherkin, the first signs of blight appeared in 1847 'and its progress was not arrested till every stalk on the island was blighted before the root was event formed'. In 1847, the Soup Kitchens Act saw stations established in twenty-four locales in West Cork, Bantry and Castletownbere but not in Sherkin and Cape Clear.

'It is with regret I found that owing to the want of boilers the soup kitchens proposed for the islands...had not come into operation. I urged upon the Soup Committee to send on immediate supply of biscuit, rice and peas from Baltimore to these islands, the issue to be supported from the soup funds, until the arrival of boilers,' the author quotes.

Many have asked why people starved when living so close to the sea. The Rev Thomas Fenton in an eye-witness accounts notes that 'everything on the island that a single halfpenny could be raised on has been pawned.'

Another chilling account speaks of starvation resulting 'partly from a prejudice against the use of fish as a dietary, without potatoes...' all of which is corroborated the the Royal Commission Report of 1870 'which details the multitudes that had to part with their boats and gear for anything they could obtain....Nothing was advanced on boats and materials and a large amount of both rotted on the shores.'

After the famine, the fishing industry in Baltimore area was 'negligible until the revitalisation of the local economy in the last quarter of the nineteenth century'.
Fishing & farming
Until the 1870s, Kinsale was the centre for mackerel trade but when the shoals moved west, Baltimore became the focus of the fishery. During the 1890 season, 180 boats landed 40,567 boxes of fish that fetched an average price of sixteen shillings and eight pence.

During the 1920s-1930s, many boats were left idle due to a fall-off in trade; however fishing improved during WW2 when English fishing vessels were 'pressed into war service' leading to increased demand for fish caught by Irish vessels.

'Boats from ports along the southwest coast were involved in drift-netting for mackerel and herring and long-lining for varieties of fish including cod, hake, turbot, long and dogfish.' Until the 1970s, traditional methods of farming were still practised; cows were milked by hand, the land was worked by horses and donkeys and hens roamed freely.

Today, the island has seven farms, mostly for beef and some dairy. The future role of commercial sea fisheries is uncertain, in terms of its ability to provide sufficient levels of income to island communities.

The author notes problems associated with the industry nationally and internationally which she says have a 'disproportionate negative effect' on island fisheries. 'The decline in fish stocks, industry regulations, fuel prices, the ban on drift-netting for salmon and the ageing fleet are some of the factors,' she writes.

Sherkin Island - a local history is a wonderful account of the island and should tempt anyone who wants to know more, to take the short ferry trip from Baltimore to enjoy wonderful scenery, serenity and hospitality that Sherkin Islands extends.

Copies available directly from the author at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

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Details Created on Sunday, 01 September 2013 09:03 Written by Gillian Mills Dolly O'Reilly first wrote a local history of Sherkin Island in 1994 (now out of print) and in this updated edition she fills in the gaps in the historiography of the island.

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One of the thing that interested me when talking to Richard Collins was the story of the sand boats and sand being used as fertiliser.
Sand was collected from the beaches of Sherkin Island and brought to the main land to sell to farmers as fertiliser.

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One of the thing that interested me when talking to Richard Collins was the story of the sand boats and sand being used as fertiliser.
Sand was collected from the beaches of Sherkin Island and brought to the main land to sell to farmers as fertiliser.

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Pic: Áine Tierney

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Pic: Mary Sullivan

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Pic: Mary Sulliva

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Marginal Communities.

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Social exclusion or social marginalisation is the social disadvantage and relegation to the fringe of society. It is a term that has been used widely in Europe and was first used in France in the late 20th century. It is used across disciplines including education, sociology, psychology, politics and economics.

Social exclusion is the process in which individuals are blocked from (or denied full access to) various rights, opportunities and resources that are normally available to members of a different group, and which are fundamental to social integration and observance of human rights within that particular group (e.g. due process).

Alienation or disenfranchisement resulting from social exclusion can be connected to a person's social class, race, skin color, religious affiliation, ethnic origin, caste, educational status, childhood relationships, living standards, and or political opinions, and appearance. Such exclusionary forms of discrimination may also apply to disabled people, minorities, LGBTQ+ people, drug users, institutional care leavers, the elderly and the young. Anyone who appears to deviate in any way from perceived norms of a population may thereby become subject to coarse or subtle forms of social exclusion.

The outcome of social exclusion is that affected individuals or communities are prevented from participating fully in the economic, social, and political life of the society in which they live. This may result in resistance in the form of demonstrations, protests or lobbying from the excluded people.

The concept of social exclusion has led to the researcher's conclusion that in many European countries the impact of social disadvantages, that influence the well-being of all people, including with special needs, has an increasingly negative impact.

Most of the characteristics listed in this article are present together in studies of social exclusion, due to exclusion's multidimensionality.

Another way of articulating the definition of social exclusion is as follows:

Social exclusion is a multidimensional process of progressive social rupture, detaching groups and individuals from social relations and institutions and preventing them from full participation in the normal, normatively prescribed activities of the society in which they live.

In an alternative conceptualization, social exclusion theoretically emerges at the individual or group level on four correlated dimensions: insufficient access to social rights, material deprivation, limited social participation and a lack of normative integration. It is then regarded as the combined result of personal risk factors (age, gender, race); macro-societal changes (demographic, economic and labor market developments, technological innovation, the evolution of social norms); government legislation and social policy; and the actual behavior of businesses, administrative organisations and fellow citizens.

"The marginal man...is one whom fate has condemned to live in two societies and in two, not merely different but antagonistic cultures....his mind is the crucible in which two different and refractory cultures may be said to melt and, either wholly or in part, fuse."

Social exclusion at the individual level results in an individual's exclusion from meaningful participation in society. An example is the exclusion of single mothers from the welfare system prior to welfare reforms of the 1900s. The modern welfare system is based on the concept of entitlement to the basic means of being a productive member of society both as an organic function of society and as compensation for the socially useful labor provided. A single mother's contribution to society is not based on formal employment, but on the notion that provision of welfare for children is a necessary social expense. In some career contexts, caring work is devalued and motherhood is seen as a barrier to employment. Single mothers were previously marginalized in spite of their significant role in the socializing of children due to views that an individual can only contribute meaningfully to society through "gainful" employment as well as a cultural bias against unwed mothers. When the father's sole task was seen as the breadwinner, his marginalization was primarily a function of class condition. Solo fatherhood brings additional trials due to society being less accepting of males 'getting away with' not working and the general invisibility/lack of acknowledgment of single fathers in society. Acknowledgment of the needs participatory fathers may have can be found by examining the changes from the original clinical report on the father's role published by the American Academy of Pediatrics in May 2004. Eight week paternity leave is a good example of one social change. Child health care providers have an opportunity to have a greater influence on the child and family structure by supporting fathers and enhancing a father's involvement.

More broadly, many women face social exclusion. Moosa-Mitha discusses the Western feminist movement as a direct reaction to the marginalization of white women in society. Women were excluded from the labor force and their work in the home was not valued. Feminists argued that men and women should equally participate in the labor force, in the public and private sector, and in the home. They also focused on labor laws to increase access to employment as well as to recognize child-rearing as a valuable form of labor. In some places today, women are still marginalized from executive positions and continue to earn less than men in upper management positions.

Another example of individual marginalization is the exclusion of individuals with disabilities from the labor force. Grandz discusses an employer's viewpoint about hiring individuals living with disabilities as jeopardizing productivity, increasing the rate of absenteeism, and creating more accidents in the workplace. Cantor also discusses employer concern about the excessively high cost of accommodating people with disabilities. The marginalization of individuals with disabilities is prevalent today, despite the legislation intended to prevent it in most western countries, and the academic achievements, skills and training of many disabled people.

There are also exclusions of sexual minorities because of their sexual orientation, gender identity, and/or sexual characteristics. The Yogyakarta Principles require that the states and communities abolish any stereotypes about LGBT people as well as stereotyped gender roles.

"Isolation is common to almost every vocational, religious or cultural group of a large city. Each develops its own sentiments, attitudes, codes, even its own words, which are at best only partially intelligible to others."

Many communities experience social exclusion, such as racial (e.g. black), caste (e.g. untouchables or dalits in some regions in India), and economic (e.g. Romani) communities.

One example is the Aboriginal community in Australia. The marginalization of Aboriginal communities is a product of colonization. As a result of colonialism, Aboriginal communities lost their land, were forced into destitute areas, lost their sources of livelihood, were excluded from the labor market and were subjected to widespread unpunished massacres. Additionally, Aboriginal communities lost their culture and values through forced assimilation and lost their rights in society. Today, various Aboriginal communities continue to be marginalized from society due to the development of practices, policies and programs that, according to J. Yee, "met the needs of white people and not the needs of the marginalized groups themselves". Yee also connects marginalization to minority communities, when describing the concept of whiteness as maintaining and enforcing dominant norms and discourse. Poor people living in run-down council estates and areas with high crime can be locked into social deprivation.

Social exclusion has many contributors. Major contributors include race, income, employment status, social class, geographic location; personal habits, appearance, or interests (i.e., a favorite hobby, sports team, or music genre); education, religion, and political affiliation.

Globalization (global capitalism), immigration, social welfare, and policy are broader social structures that have the potential to contribute negatively to one's access to resources and services, resulting in the social exclusion of individuals and groups. Similarly, increasing use of information technology and the company outsourcing have contributed to job insecurity and a widening gap between the rich and the poor. Alphonse, George & Moffat (2007) discuss how globalization sets forth a decrease in the role of the state with an increase in support from various "corporate sectors resulting in gross inequalities, injustices and marginalization of various vulnerable groups" (p. 1). Companies are outsourcing, jobs are lost, the cost of living continues to rise, and the land is being expropriated by large companies. Material goods are made in large abundances and sold at cheaper costs, while in India for example, the poverty line is lowered in order to mask the number of individuals who are actually living in poverty as a result of globalization. Globalization and structural forces aggravate poverty and continue to push individuals to the margins of society, while governments and large corporations do not address the issues (George, P, SK8101, lecture, October 9, 2007).

Certain language and the meaning attached to language can cause universalizing discourses that are influenced by the Western world, which is what Sewpaul (2006) describes as the "potential to dilute or even annihilate local cultures and traditions and to deny context-specific realities" (p. 421). What Sewpaul (2006) is implying is that the effect of dominant global discourses can cause individual and cultural displacement, as well as sex safety are jeopardized (p. 422). Insecurity and fear of an unknown future and instability can result in displacement, exclusion, and forced assimilation into the dominant group. For many, it further pushes them to the margins of society or enlists new members to the outskirts because of global-capitalism and dominant discourses (Sewpaul, 2006).

With the prevailing notion of globalization, we now see the rise of immigration as the world gets smaller and smaller with millions of individuals relocating each year. This is not without hardship and struggle of what a newcomer thought was going to be a new life with new opportunities. Ferguson, Lavalette, & Whitmore (2005) discuss how immigration has had a strong link to the access of welfare support programs. Newcomers are constantly bombarded with the inability to access a country's resources because they are seen as "undeserving foreigners" (p. 132). With this comes a denial of access to public housing, health care benefits, employment support services, and social security benefits (Ferguson et al., 2005). Newcomers are seen as undeserving, or that they must prove their entitlement in order to gain access to basic support necessities. It is clear that individuals are exploited and marginalized within the country they have emigrated (Ferguson et al., 2005).

Welfare states and social policies can also exclude individuals from basic necessities and support programs. Welfare payments were proposed to assist individuals in accessing a small amount of material wealth (Young, 2000). Young (2000) further discusses how "the provision of the welfare itself produces new injustice by depriving those dependent on it of rights and freedoms that others have...marginalization is unjust because it blocks the opportunity to exercise capacities in socially defined and recognized way" (p. 41). There is the notion that by providing a minimal amount of welfare support, an individual will be free from marginalization. In fact, welfare support programs further lead to injustices by restricting certain behaviour, as well the individual is mandated to other agencies. The individual is forced into a new system of rules while facing social stigma and stereotypes from the dominant group in society, further marginalizing and excluding individuals (Young, 2000). Thus, social policy and welfare provisions reflect the dominant notions in society by constructing and reinforcing categories of people and their needs. It ignores the unique-subjective human essence, further continuing the cycle of dominance (Wilson & Beresford, 2000).

Whilst recognising the multi-dimensionality of exclusion, policy work undertaken in the European Union focused[citation needed ] on unemployment as a key cause of, or at least correlating with, social exclusion. This is because, in modern societies, paid work is not only the principal source of income with which to buy services but is also the fount of individuals' identity and feeling of self-worth. Most people's social networks and a sense of embeddedness in society also revolve around their work. Many of the indicators of extreme social exclusion, such as poverty and homelessness, depend on monetary income which is normally derived from work. Social exclusion can be a possible result of long-term unemployment, especially in countries with weak welfare safety nets. Much policy to reduce exclusion thus focuses on the labour market:

On the one hand, to make individuals at risk of exclusion more attractive to employers, i.e. more "employable".

On the other hand, to encourage (and/or oblige) employers to be more inclusive in their employment policies.

The EU's EQUAL Community Initiative investigated ways to increase the inclusiveness of the labor market. Work on social exclusion more broadly is carried out through the Open Method of Coordination (OMC) among the Member State governments. The United Nations Sustainable Development Goal 10 is also an example of global initiatives aimed at promoting social inclusion for all by 2030.

Some religious traditions recommend excommunication of individuals said to deviate from religious teaching, and in some instances shunning by family members. Some religious organizations permit the censure of critics.

Across societies, individuals and communities can be socially excluded on the basis of their religious beliefs. Social hostility against religious minorities and communal violence occur in areas where governments do not have policies restricting the religious practise of minorities. A study by the Pew Research Center on international religious freedom found that 61% of countries have social hostilities that tend to target religious minorities. The five highest social hostility scores were for Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Iraq, and Bangladesh. In 2015, Pew published that social hostilities declined in 2013, but harassment of Jews increased.

In gay men, results of psycho-emotional damage from marginalization from a heteronormative society include suicide and drug addiction.

Scientists have been studying the impact of racism on health. Amani Nuru-Jeter, a social epidemiologist at the University of California, Berkeley and other doctors have been hypothesizing that exposure to chronic stress may be one way racism contributes to health disparities between racial groups. Arline Geronimus, a research professor at the University of Michigan Institute for Social Research and a professor at the School of Public Health, and her colleagues found that psychosocial stress associated with living in extreme poverty can cause early onset of age-related diseases. The 2015 study titled, "Race-Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors, and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-based Sample" was conducted in order to determine the impact of living conditions on health and was performed by a multi-university team of social scientists, cellular biologists and community partners, including the Healthy Environments Partnership (HEP) to measure the telomere length of poor and moderate-income people of White, African-American and Mexican race.

In 2006, there was research focused on possible connections between exclusion and brain function. Studies published by both the University of Georgia and San Diego State University found that exclusion can lead to diminished brain functioning and poor decision making. Such studies corroborate with earlier beliefs of sociologists. The effect of social exclusion have been hypothesized in various past research studies to correlate with such things as substance abuse and addiction, and crime.

The problem of social exclusion is usually tied to that of equal opportunity, as some people are more subject to such exclusion than others. Marginalisation of certain groups is a problem in many economically more developed countries where the majority of the population enjoys considerable economic and social opportunities.

The marginal, the processes of marginalisation, etc. bring specific interest in postmodern and post-colonial philosophy and social studies. Postmodernism question the "center" about its authenticity and postmodern sociology and cultural studies research marginal cultures, behaviours, societies, the situation of the marginalized individual, etc.

Social inclusion, the converse of social exclusion, is affirmative action to change the circumstances and habits that lead to (or have led to) social exclusion.

As the World Bank states, social inclusion is the process of improving the ability, opportunity, and worthiness of people, disadvantaged on the basis of their identity, to take part in society. The World Bank's 2019 World Development Report on The Changing Nature of Work suggests that enhanced social protection and better investments in human capital improve equality of opportunity and social inclusion.

Social Inclusion ministers have been appointed, and special units established, in a number of jurisdictions around the world. The first Minister for Social Inclusion was Premier of South Australia Mike Rann, who took the portfolio in 2004. Based on the UK's Social Exclusion Unit, established by Prime Minister Tony Blair in 1997, Rann established the Social Inclusion Initiative in 2002. It was headed by Monsignor David Cappo and was serviced by a unit within the department of Premier and Cabinet. Cappo sat on the executive committee of the South Australian Cabinet and was later appointed Social Inclusion Commissioner with wide powers to address social disadvantage. Cappo was allowed to roam across agencies given that most social disadvantage has multiple causes necessitating a "joined up" rather than a single agency response. The Initiative drove a big investment by the South Australian Government in strategies to combat homelessness, including establishing Common Ground, building high quality inner city apartments for "rough sleeping" homeless people, the Street to Home initiative and the ICAN flexible learning program designed to improve school retention rates. It also included major funding to revamp mental health services following Cappo's "Stepping Up" report, which focused on the need for community and intermediate levels of care and an overhaul of disability services. In 2007, Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd appointed Julia Gillard as the nation's first Social Inclusion Minister.

In Japan, the concept and term "social inclusion" went through a number of changes over time and eventually became incorporated in community-based activities under the names hōsetsu (包摂) and hōkatsu (包括), such as in the "Community General Support Centres" ( chiiki hōkatsu shien sentā 地域包括支援センター) and "Community-based Integrated Care System" ( chiiki hōkatsu kea shisutemu 　地域包括ケアシステム).

One may explore its implications for social work practice. Mullaly (2007) describes how "the personal is political" and the need for recognizing that social problems are indeed connected with larger structures in society, causing various forms of oppression amongst individuals resulting in marginalization. It is also important for the social worker to recognize the intersecting nature of oppression. A non-judgmental and unbiased attitude is necessary on the part of the social worker. The worker may begin to understand oppression and marginalization as a systemic problem, not the fault of the individual.

Working under an anti-oppression perspective would then allow the social worker to understand the lived, subjective experiences of the individual, as well as their cultural, historical and social background. The worker should recognize the individual as political in the process of becoming a valuable member of society and the structural factors that contribute to oppression and marginalization (Mullaly, 2007). Social workers must take a firm stance on naming and labeling global forces that impact individuals and communities who are then left with no support, leading to marginalization or further marginalization from the society they once knew (George, P, SK8101, lecture, October 9, 2007).

The social worker should be constantly reflexive, work to raise the consciousness, empower, and understand the lived subjective realities of individuals living in a fast-paced world, where fear and insecurity constantly subjugate the individual from the collective whole, perpetuating the dominant forces, while silencing the oppressed.

Some individuals and groups who are not professional social workers build relationships with marginalized persons by providing relational care and support, for example, through homeless ministry. These relationships validate the individuals who are marginalized and provide them a meaningful contact with the mainstream.

There are countries, Italy for example, that have a legal concept of social exclusion. In Italy, " esclusione sociale" is defined as poverty combined with social alienation, by the statute n. 328 (11-8-2000), that instituted a state investigation commission named " Commissione di indagine sull'Esclusione Sociale" (CIES) to make an annual report to the government on legally expected issues of social exclusion.

The Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action, a document on international human rights instruments affirms that " extreme poverty and social exclusion constitute a violation of human dignity and that urgent steps are necessary to achieve better knowledge of extreme poverty and its causes, including those related to the program of development, in order to promote the human rights of the poorest, and to put an end to extreme poverty and social exclusion and promote the enjoyment of the fruits of social progress. It is essential for States to foster participation by the poorest people in the decision making process by the community in which they live, the promotion of human rights and efforts to combat extreme poverty."

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2. Peace, R., 2001. "Social exclusion: A concept in need of definition?". ^ Social Policy Journal of New Zealand, pp.17-36.

3. ^ Walsh, T (2006). "A right to inclusion? Homelessness, human rights, and social exclusion". Australian Journal of Human Rights. 12 (1): 185-204. doi:10.1080/1323238x.2006.11910818. S2CID 150777458.

4. ^ Marsela, Robo (July 2014). "Social inclusion and inclusive education". Academicus International Scientific Journal. 10: 181-191. doi:10.7336/academicus.2014.10.12 - via ResearchGate.

5. ^ Hilary Silver, Social Exclusion: Comparative Analysis of Europe and Middle East Youth, Middle East Youth Initiative Working Paper (September 2007), p.15

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7. ^ Robert E. Park, Cultural Conflict and the Marginal Man in Everett V Stonequist, The Marginal Man, Introduction, New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1937

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9. ^ Lessa, Iara (February 2006). "Discursive struggles within social welfare: Restaging teen motherhood". The British Journal of Social Work. 36 (2): 283-298. doi:10.1093/bjsw/bch256.

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11. ^ Yogman, Michael; Garfield, Craig F.; Child, the COMMITTEE ON PSYCHOSOCIAL ASPECTS OF; Health, Family (2016-06-13). "Fathers' Roles in the Care and Development of Their Children: The Role of Pediatricians". Pediatrics. 138 (1): e20161128. doi:10.1542/peds.2016-1128. ISSN 0031-4005. PMID 27296867.

12. ^ Leslie, D.R., Leslie K. & Murphy M. (2003). Inclusion by design: The challenge for social work in workplace accommodation for people with disabilities. In W. Shera (Eds.), Emerging perspectives on anti-oppression practice (pp. 157-169). Toronto: Canadian Scholar's Press.

13. ^ Frederic Thrasher, The Gang: A Study of 1,313 Gangs in Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1927

14. Yee, J. (2005). Critical anti-racism praxis: The concept of whiteness implicated. In S. Hick, J. Fook and R. Pozzuto (Eds.), Social work, a critical turn, pp. 87-104. Toronto: Thompson

15. Furlong, Andy. ^ Youth Studies: An Introduction. Routledge, 2013, p. 31.

16. ^ "Global Restrictions on Religion (Executive summary)". The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. December 2009.

17. ^ "Global Restrictions on Religion (Full report)" (PDF). The Pew Forum on Religion & Public Life. December 2009. Archived from the original (PDF) on 3 March 2016.

18. "Latest Trends in Religious Restrictions and Hostilities". Pew Forum. 26 Feb 2015.

19. ^ Crossley, Michelle (2004). ""pp. 225, Crossley, Michelle, 2004. "'Resistance' and health promotion". British Journal of Social Psychology. 43 (Pt 2): 225-244. doi:10.1348/0144666041501679. PMID 15285832.

20. Geronimus, Arline T.; Pearson, Jay A.; Linnenbringer, Erin; Schulz, Amy J.; Reyes, Angela G.; Epel, Elissa S.; Lin, Jue; Blackburn, Elizabeth H. (June 2015). "Race-Ethnicity, Poverty, Urban Stressors, and Telomere Length in a Detroit Community-based Sample". Journal of Health and Social Behavior. 56 (2): 199-224. doi:10.1177/0022146515582100. ISSN 2150-6000. PMC . PMID 25930147.

21. ^ Townsend, Mark (2017-11-12). "Britain's socially excluded '10 times more likely to die early'". the Guardian.

22. Gilbert McInnis, The Struggle of Postmodernism and Postcolonialism, Laval University, Canada

23. ^ World Bank (2013). Inclusion Matters: The Foundation for Shared Prosperity. Washington, DC: World Bank. ISBN 978-1-4648-0010-8.

24. ^ World Bank World Development Report 2019: The Changing Nature of Work.

25. ^ Dahl, Nils (March 2018). "Social inclusion of senior citizens in Japan: an investigation into the 'Community-based Integrated Care System'". Contemporary Japan. 30 (1): 43-59. doi:10.1080/18692729.2018.1424069. S2CID 158466875.

26. ^ Mullaly, Bob (2007). The New Structural Social Work. Oxford University Press. pp. 252-286. ISBN 978-0195419061.

27. ^ Sakamoto, Izumi; Pitner, Ronald O. (June 2005). "Use of Critical Consciousness in Anti-Oppressive Social Work Practice: Disentangling Power Dynamics at Personal and Structural Levels". The British Journal of Social Work. 35 (4): 435-452. doi:10.1093/bjsw/bch190.

28. ^ "Commissione di Indagine sull'Esclusione Sociale, accessed February 07, 2013". lavoro.gov.it. Archived from the original on 17 January 2013.

Alphonse, M., George, P & Moffat, K. (2007). Redefining social work standards in the context of globalization: Lessons from India. International Social Work.

Applebaum, Richard P., Carr, deborah, Duneier, Mitchell, Giddens, Anthony. "Introduction to Sociology Seventh Edition" 2009.

Gilles Deleuze, A Thousand Plateaus, 1980.

Ferguson, I., Lavalette, M., & Whitmore, E. (2005). Globalization, Global Justice and Social Work. London and New York: Routledge Taylor & Francis Group.

Giddens, Anthony, Introduction to Sociology. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2009. Print.

Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844

Frank Moulaert, Erik Swyngedouw and Arantxa Rodriguez. The Globalized City: Economic Restructing and Social Polarization in European Cities. Oxford University Press, 2003, ISBN 978-0-19-926040-9

Mullaly, B. (2007). Oppression: The focus of structural social work. In B. Mullaly, The new structural social work (pp. 252-286). Don Mills: Oxford University Press.

Power, A., Wilson, W.J., 2000, Social Exclusion and the Future of Cities, Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion, London School of Economics, London

Sakamoto, I.; Pitner, R.O (2005). "Use of critical consciousness in anti-oppressive social work practice: disentangling power dynamics at personal and structural levels". British Journal of Social Work. 35 (4): 435-452. doi:10.1093/bjsw/bch190.

Sewpaul, V. (2006). The global-local dialectic: Challenges for Africa scholarship and social work in a post-colonial world, British Journal of Social Work 36, pp. 419-434.

Silver, Hilary (1994). "Social Exclusion and Social Solidarity: Three Paradigms". International Labour Review. 133 (5-6): 531-78.

University of Georgia (2006, November 9). Social Exclusion Changes Brain Function And Can Lead To Poor Decision-making. ScienceDaily. Retrieved February 29, 2008, from http://www.sciencedaily.com /releases/2006/11/061108154256.htm

URSPIC: An EU Research Project to measure impacts of urban development projects on social exclusion

Philippe Van Parijs, Real Freedom for All: What (if anything) can justify capitalism?, 1995. ISBN 978-0-19-829357-6

Wilson, A.; Beresford, P. (2000). "Anti-oppressive practice': Emancipation or appropriation?". British Journal of Social Work. 30 (5): 553-573. doi:10.1093/bjsw/30.5.553.

Yee, J. Y. & Dumbrill, G.C. (2003). Whiteout: Looking for Race in Canadian Social Work Practice. In A. Al-Krenawi & J.R. Graham (Eds.) Multicultural Social Work in Canada: Working with Diverse Ethno-Racial Communities (pp. 98-121). Toronto: Oxford Press.

Yi, Li. The Structure and Evolution of Chinese Social Stratification. University Press of America, 2005, ISBN 0-7618-3331-5

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Social exclusion or social marginalisation is the social disadvantage and relegation to the fringe of society. It is a term that has been used widely in Europe and was first used in France in the late 20th century. It is used across disciplines including education, sociology, psychology, politics and economics.

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Geopolitics definition is - a study of the influence of such factors as geography, economics, and demography on the politics and especially the foreign policy of a state. How to use geopolitics in a sentence.

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Pic: Mary Sullivan

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Pic: Mary Sullivan

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Pic: Mary Sullivan

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Pic: Mary Sullivan

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Pic: Mary Sullivan

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Pic: Mary Sullivan

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While spending time at The Dock Farm and talking to Michael, the owner who farms the land I became aware of the struggle of farming on an island. These struggles that island farmers face are heightened by the REPS scheme, which consists of a huge amount of paper work and red tape.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki

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Things often described as "red tape" include filling out paperwork, obtaining licenses, having multiple people or committees approve a decision and various low-level rules that make conducting one's affairs slower, more difficult, or both. Red tape can also include "filing and certification requirements, reporting, investigation, inspection and enforcement practices, and procedures".

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First Interview conversation with Richard Collins.

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First Interview conversation with Richard Collins.

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Interview with Richard Collins on The Dock Farm - our first meeting with Richard who was reared on the farm .

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Materials - Chain

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In the beginning we all resemble fish...[1]
I

Abtu and Anet, a sacred pair of identical fish swam before the boat of Ra, acting as his navigators on an endless course.[2] During daylight hours they sailed from east to west and by night, they accompanied the Sun god into the Duat - the 'realm of the dead'[3] - swimming across the underworld from west to east. As a common ancestor, the fish is emblematic of both foetus and corpse: a circuit of life and death, as expressed in ancient Egyptian mythology, which places the fish as a device of directionality: as a protection figure and a mechanism to control the light of the earth.

This symbolic narrative is one among several to transgress dominant geopolitical conceptions of the Eastern and the Western Hemispheres as consolidated in European enlightenment principles. Innately linking cardinal extremes to the perpetuating cycle of night and day, we may apply this cosmogenic agency of 'the Great Fish of the Abyss' as a new kind of asymmetrical concept[4] to conceive a radical politics of place. I'd like to, rather naively, consider the so-called Global South as just such a place - where pilot fish composite 'locality' through an encircling motion, whereby any perception of an origin is contingent upon circulatory flows of thought-models, materialities of liberation and civilizational intersections rather than a pact of unilateral sovereignty. Such a reading of affects may allow us to refuse the dominant vector of modernity as Eurocentric pyramidal form - from 'First' to 'Fourth World'.

When the Global South replaced 'Third World' framing with the eventual collapse of the Eastern Bloc, the alliances across decolonized states gave way to a new cartographic affiliation. This categorization bound together the Southern Hemisphere - yet also re-cast it as an ungrounded site 'of unprocessed data'[5]. For, while world-historical processes recalibrated the North-South divide through the drives of neoliberalism, the Post-Soviet era has entailed an ontology of corporatization-putting governments in the service of big business-and therein maintaining a settler-savage dichotomy fortified with the geo-efficiency of an algorithmic globe.[6] Exploitative pursuits ensue in the western imaginary, by way of envisioning the 'rise' of this mass of the world as an exponential market (read: dump) - to rescue the promised glory of consumer capitalism.

In order to re-align with the Global South not simply as an economic and geo-political category but also manifestly as cultural paradigm, we may first be required to dis-figure it through epistemic disobedience.[7] Reflecting instead upon its agential role in migrations of people and forms, cultures of cartography and altering planetary practices.

II

The astronomical and cartographic traditions of the Medieval Islamic world advanced a sensibility to realize the earth as complex machine and wondrous ( Aja'ib) being. The observatory held a vital place within imperial courts since the Abbasid Dynasty (750-1517) as a place of study concerning celestial objects, spaces in-between these objects and the universe as a whole.[8] The governance of land and the onset of the Modern Age were thus, intrinsically linked to knowledge of the celestial skies. The observatory as geo-cosmic apparatus may be said to perform a historical mobilization of the Global South not simply as an axis of statecraft but rather as re-territorialization at a planetary scale.

Located near the River Tigris, the Banu Musa brothers studied Ursa Major (or the Great Bear) from their home turned observatory as early as 863 AD.[9] The Seljuk Sultan, Malik Shah, invited the Persian polymath, poet and mystic, Omar Khayyám to build an observatory in Isfahan and act as his trusted advisor. Khayyám's development of calendric time, solving of cubic equations and proposals toward a non-Euclidean geometry were thus enfolded into a poetics of administration. When writing his quatrains ( Rubaiyat, on facets of human life, the elements ('And that inverted bowl we call the sky') and faith - he sought out a harmonics between the Earth's clay and the sovereign's rule. In 1574, the Ottoman scientist Taqi al-Din Muhammad Ibn Ma'ruf built an observatory in Istanbul on the invitation of Sultan Murad III.[10] Here, relations between the terrestrial and celestial globes were exposed in measuring the longitudes and latitudes of the earth. Taqi al-Din imported European instruments while broadening perceptions on a mechanistic worldview in his treatise, Al-Turuq al-saniyya fi al-alat al-ruhaniyya (The Sublime Methods of Spiritual Machines).[11] The movement of a holistic knowledge thus, consistently transcended hemispheres upon the back of imperial regimes - forwarding a globalism that claimed Eurasia as a 'common' civilizational ground.

Among several instruments conceived to enhance an exterior vision of the planetary horizon, seamless celestial globes were produced in metal workshops at Kashmir, Lahore and some other parts of the Islamic world around the sixteenth century.[12] These cosmic spheres crafted from metal maintained a hollow inside. The earth system was hence, engineered as a singular round upon which cosmological inscriptions were drafted as a skin of multi-lingual commentary. One of the most striking models was devised in the Mughal court of Emperor Shah Jahan (1628-1658). The massive bronze orb - inlaid with silver stars and constellations plotted as human-animal figures - was cast through a cire perdue (lost wax) process by the astronomer, metallurgist and artisan, Muhammad Salih Tahtawi.[13]

When the earlier seamed - halved and re-joined - spheres encountered the bewildering potential of a seamless globe, an exceptional projection came into view. While the seams had discerned hemispheres and celestial quadrants through labours of soldering together pieces of metal, the seamless celestial globe reckons an abstracted mode of being held-apart-together in the computing of interstellar temporality. The re-inscription of space in late capitalism resonates with the seamless celestial globe as a falsely unified sphere.[14] Experimental practices of global production have given way to systemic production of the Globe as a signature of power and swelling data grid.
'The times are always contained in the rhythm.'[15]
III

- Quincy Jones

When the Global South is considered a diasporic body and a rhythm it is gesturally emplaced in the microcosm of lives that remain unbound (even at the cost of life itself), and the macrocosmic shifts of tectonic plates that rhythmically splinter land-ocean territories (such that a portion of Florida once resided in Africa). Migratory populations and terrains continually invert the North-South divide through the cultivation of a porosity that remains incongruous to the unyielding diagrams of a legitimized nation-space.

Between 2005 and 2011, across cities and forest, the contemporary photographer Ketaki Sheth traced the lives of a fragmented community, the Sidi - Indians of African descent who have lived in parts of the subcontinent over several centuries. Through a series of black and white studies, Sheth builds a narrative of travel, friendship, cultural appropriation and diasporic lineage. Two sisters pose amidst a painted wedding tent. A street scene in Jambur - where a goat has climbed upon the boundary wall of a stone house. At Ratanpur - inside the shrine of Sidi saint Bawa Gor, sunlight enters diagonally through a trellised window. Aminaben smiles broadly while smoking her cigarette in Surendranagar.

Seth's photographic 'document' maps a people's history, and processes of place-making crafted over generations. The African diaspora began its journey in the Indian Ocean over a millennium ago, intrinsically tying itself to the Indian subcontinent and extending migratory passage into South East Asia as far as Japan. This movement of African peoples took place far earlier than diasporic spread in the Atlantic World. The long established trade between India and East Africa led to the entry of travellers, slave-soldiers, traders, pearl divers and pilgrims in lateen-rigged ships called dhows, impelled by seasonal winds.[16]

Between the ninth and sixteenth centuries, through Arab-led armies and Portuguese colonialists, African presence in the Indian Ocean grew significantly with several cases of individuals entering the ruling aristocracy through military service and even establishing independent kingdoms across pockets of India.[17]

Today, the Sidi have been enfranchised as a scheduled tribe within the Indian state, with a large number living under conditions of destitution. Anthropologist, Mahmood Mamdani has noted that rather than asserting their relationality to a singular point of origin outside of the community's 'place-making' history, it is through the domain of language that the presence of Kiswahili enters in the shape of words that have brokered a bond with the west Indian language, Gujarati. Further, gestural markers of an 'elsewhere' appear across certain exorcism rituals and the Sidi's Goma music[18] - with its polyrhythmic percussive beats, call-and-response singing and winding dance moves - which remains aligned with the Ngoma style of Bantu-speaking East African peoples.

For the over 50,000 Sidis - locality has acquired a functionality through communal mobility. Belonging is thus not defined as an a priori condition, but rather as an incommensurable mode of being-in-the world.[19] Take for instance, the pre-historic Baobab tree ( Adansonia digitata) - one of the oldest surviving species on the planet, even older than the continental divide.[20] As per Arabian legend, the incommensurability of the Baobab is cited thus, when plucked up by the devil - 'its branches plunged into earth and its roots left in the air'. The eerie upside-down appearance of this botanical, its fleshy water-retaining bark and longevity across trans-continental forays were thus tied to a monstrosity of origins. Human crossings are frequently narrated through incommensurable echoes of alien 'wildness' and home grown 'nativity'. However, far from an epistemic genus, the migratory continuum comprising the Global South is a breathing meshwork [21] - a migrant tree of sorts. Journeying away from wars, ecological destruction, epidemic, unemployment and totalitarian governance are only some of the exigencies that demand human movement. Since, the case for movement also lies in seeking immaterial infrastructures elsewhere: such as love, knowledge, family and the inexplicable resolve to unleash a fresh start over again.

IV

What might it mean to posture narratives of the Global South from the imaginary of a cosmopolitan city? As demands for re-politicization of the city resonate across the Northern and Southern Hemispheres, there is a need to re-locate our discussions on cultures of place and belonging into diversified urban futures. Emblematized in the city as both, social infrastructure and storyteller. This is not to caste the rural as a non-place,[22] but rather to negotiate the neoliberal pressures that gravitate bodies into city limits.

It may be useful to engage here with political geographer, Erik Swyngedouw's consideration of the dead polis becoming an insurgent polis [23] - where a grounding of decoloniality is transacted in contemporary reverberations of dissent. The world-class city has been heralded as the panacea to all forms of underdevelopment in the southern world. However, under global capital, the systemic breakdown of the city as civic space is rampant across border zones. All around us, the swell of daily unrest and violence, the riot and the occupation of public squares mark out an 'insurgent polis' - as a space of political encounter and history-making.

In Bani Abidi's film and photo-based installation, Funland (Karachi Series II), presented at the 8th Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art (2014), we encounter vignettes of the pre-historic port city, Karachi, suspended between contemporary violence, melancholia and cultural memory. The city as cipher, is explored through scenes from an esoteric library with reserves on comparative religion brought under self-censorship; a popular cinema hall from the 1950s set on fire by an enraged mob; an old-fashioned amusement park making way for the construction of a skyscraper; and a man staring out at the sea whilst seated amidst rows of empty chairs (as though waiting for a film to begin). Abidi thus, assembles encounters from urban topography as a map of conjecture - like rumours that never quite settle, but instead float as a collective whisper reimagining a city's multiple pasts. In this artist's work, the Global South is foregrounded as a spatial practice and lived experience. The city of her childhood is observed through an unstable lens where the act of documentation entwines with the tool of fiction to unleash narrative. Funland (Karachi Series II) reveals architectures of erosion where the everyday is an ultimate sublime.

It seems pertinent then to examine the condition of Global South through registers premised upon the city as its unit, instead of the nation-state. For it is via asynchronic histories of a cosmopolis that democracy surfaces as messy and radical non-western encounter, rather than a pristine artefact manufactured from the ruins of Empire.

Before Mercator, the task of apprehending the lineaments of the natural world were undertaken as jagged schemes that enmeshed occidental and oriental trajectories of world making.[24] The clinical divisions of this world - as lines of possession - accompanied Empire and its supremacist notion that the non-western world was possessed by a 'lack of history.' This set up a paradigm of elemental inferiority, which remains beyond measure, yet operative as historical violence. As geographies of the colony grew denser and wider, the creation of indebtedness among the colonized populations gained ground. This false debt is an attestation not just to extractions of material resource but also to the burden of debt that has been carried into the present by adapting the hegemonic historiography of Empire to causes of the nation-state.

In conclusion, I would suggest a mobilization of the Global South as a Quantum concept, read against the grain of determinisms propelled through a Cartesian mechanistic worldview and corpuscularian cosmology that subscribes divisions of mind and body, man and nature, society and space.[25] The ideological burden of hemispheres may then be pictured as unfixed particle-waves - expanded to a politics of circulation, fractured belongings and the perpetuating interconnectedness of sub-human state machinery in the face of human defiance. In these times of anthropogenic dominance over the earth-system, it becomes ever more crucial to re-cognize the Global South as a potentially 'new' mode of non-alignment - as a processual resistance linked to democratization stirred by multi-located beings who forge a planetary collectivity.[26]

[1]A reference to Tiktaalik, the land-walking fish from the late Devonian Period. See: Neil Shubin, Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5-Billion-Year History of the Human Body (New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2008).

[2]Jorge Luis Borges, The Book of Imaginary Beings (New York: Vintage, 2002), p.16.

[3]Eva von Dassow, The Egyptian Book of the Dead: The Book of Going Forth by Day (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle Books, 2008).

[4]Reinhart Kosselleck, Futures Past: On the Semantics of Historical Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004).

[5]Jean Comaroff and John L. Comaroff, Writing Theory from the South: Or, How Euro-America is Evolving Toward Africa (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2011).

[6]Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak evokes the algorithmic globe when calling for a 'displacement of globalization into planetarity', in Death of a Discipline (New York:Columbia University Press, 2003).

[7]Walter D. Mignolo, 'Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and De-Colonial Freedom,' in Theory, Culture & Society 26. 7/8 (2009): pp.159-181.

[8]Wan Kamal Mujani et al., 'Observatories in Islamic History,' in Advances in Natural and Applied Sciences, 6.8 (2012): pp.1370-1373.

[10]Avner Ben-Zaken, 'The Revolving Planets and the Revolving Clocks: Circulating Mechanical Objects in the Mediterranean,' in History of Science 49.2 (2011).

[12]Emilie Savage-Smith and Andrea P.A. Belloli, Islamicate Celestial Globes: Their History, Construction and Use (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985).

[14]Akhil Gupta and James Ferguson, Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).

[15]Quincy Jones quoted in Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press, 1993), p.109.

[16]'The African Diaspora in the Indian Ocean World,' The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture website, 2011 http://exhibitions.nypl.org/africansindianocean/index2.php.

[17]Ketaki Sheth, A Certain Grace, The Sidi: Indians of African Descent (New Delhi: Photoink, 2013).

[19]This position draws upon the work of Elizabeth A. Povinelli, more specifically her address to radical alterity and social commensuration in 'Radical Worlds: The Anthropology of Incommensurability and Inconceivability,' in Annual Review of Antrhopology 30 (2001).

[20]Rupert Watson, The African Baobab (Cape Town: Struik Publishers, 2001).

[21]Tim Ingold develops the notion of 'meshwork' through the space-time relations asserted by Henri Lefebvre. See: Being Alive: Essays on Movement, Knowledge and Description (New York: Routledge, 2011).

[22]Marc Augé and John Howe, Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, (London: Verso, 2009).

[23]Erik Swyngedouw, Civic City Cahier 5: Designing the Post-political City and the Insurgent Polis (London: Bedford Press, 2011).

[24]Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998).

[25]Ayssar Arida, Quantum City, (Routledge, 2002)

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In the beginning we all resemble fish... [1] I Abtu and Anet, a sacred pair of identical fish swam before the boat of Ra, acting as his navigators on an endless course.[2] During daylight hours they sailed from east to west and by night, they accompanied the Sun god into the Duat - the 'realm of the dead'[3] - swimming across the underworld from west to east.

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Mixed Media - Áine Tierney

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Mixed Media - Áine Tierney

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Mixed Media - Áine Tierney

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Debatable Land: stories of life in a grey area

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A blog about life in Berwick-upon-Tweed, which speculates about what may change if the 2014 referendum leads to Scottish independence.

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Island History.

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sherkin island marine station county cork ireland matt murphy islands roaringwater bay sherkin cape clear calves carthys goat little goat long castle horse skeams heir catalogues sandy quarantine jeremy spanish inishleigh mannin mannin beg

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Sherkin Island Marine Station - The Islands

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Sherkin Island Marine Station - The Islands of Roaringwater Bay, Co. Cork, Ireland

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Artist/Educator/Researcher - Deep Mapping

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Introduction
Since 1999, when I began concerning myself with what I would come to know as deep mapping, I have been vexed by the question of what role, if any, the first of Felix Guattari's three ecologies - namely the ecology of the 'self' - should play in such work. That question has been deepened by the work of two recent doctoral projects that I helped to supervise: Dr. Ciara Healy-Musson's Thin Place: An Alternative Approach to Curatorial Practice (2015) and Dr. Davina Kirkpatrick's Grief and Loss; Living with the Presence of Absence. A Practice-based Study of Personal Grief Narratives and Participatory Projects (2016). Both, in my view, point up the inadequacy of current conceptions of the relationship between 'self', society, environment and the past by focusing on different aspects of our relationship to the dead.

In December 2016, I gave a presentation at the Theoretical Archaeology Group (TAG) conference in Southampton entitled: ' Hearing' heritage: The Kirkyard of St Mary's of the Lowes, in which I explored the possible relationship between two traditional 'supernatural' ballads and that abandoned Kirkyard. It is probably fair to say that it got a mixed reception. No doubt my failure to time the presentation accurately did not help but, more critically, one emphatic commentator insisted that it is simply academically inappropriate to 'speculate' where there is no verifiable historical record (e.g. written documentation) to support that speculation. In short, I was told that ballads can only be taken to be suggestive of a mentalité once they have been written down.

Although I don't accept that assumption, believing with Lizanne Henderson and Edward J. Cowan that "ballads can contain factual truths not found in the often scanty records, and can contain certain emotional truths, the attitudes and reactions of the ballad-sing folk to the world around them" ( Scottish Fairy Belief 2001: p. 5), I found this critique of my speculations dispiriting. (It was delivered with all the assurance of one delivering a scientific truth). What follows, however, is a reworking of that original presentation that simply ignores that 'scientistic' assumption. It is also made in the light of my subsequent reading of three texts: James Hillman and Sonu Shamdasani's Lament of the Dead: Psychology after Jung's Red Book (2013), Claude Lecouteux's Witches, Werewolves and Fairies: Shapeshifters and Astral Doubles in the Middle Ages (1992, translated into English 2003) and Richard Firth Green's Elf Queens and Holy Friars: Fairy Beliefs and the Medieval Church (2016) and attempts to address, in a limited way, the issue of the importance for those engaged in deep mapping and related activity of 'listening to the dead'.
The updated presentation
In Archaeological Narratives and Other Ways of Telling, Mark Pluciennik argues that a more democratic approach to narrative might offer fresh opportunities to reflect on the roles and possibilities of both narrative and non‐narrative writings of archaeology. I'd want to extend his argument by linking it to Gemma Corradi Fiumara's call that we return to a listening that attempts to recover the neglected and perhaps deeper roots of thinking. Also to the geographer Karen Till's argument that acknowledging the historic 'wounds' associated with particular sites enables the memory-work needed to create healthy places, citizens and states. This, along with listening to two old Borders ballads, frames my thinking about how the The Kirkyard of St Mary's of the Lowes might be narrated so as to evoke something of its complexities and paradoxes.

Prof. Arthur Watson - an artist, teacher, author, and the twenty-first President of the Royal Scottish Academy of Art & Architecture (RSA) - has participated as a singer in the oral tradition of the Scottish Traveler community since he was fifteen. Within this oral tradition old ballads like Tam Lin have been passed down from singer to singer for many hundreds of years. Professor Watson sees that oral tradition as supported by notions of memory and authority that are the antithesis of academic thinking, in my view entirely correctly. I mention this because much of my work connected to deep or narrative mapping over almost twenty years has happened in the creative space between those two notions of what is to be taken as 'authoritative'.

The Kirkyard of St Mary's of the Lowes overlooks St Mary's loch in the Scottish Borders and is situated just off the A708 between Selkirk and Moffat. It sits in the valley of the Yarrow and Ettrick Waters, a location central to a variety of ballads extending from pre-16 th century ballads like Tam Lin, through to late Seventeenth Century ballads like The Battle of Philiphaugh. In short, the kirkyard in question is situated in both a physical landscape and a highly charged vernacular songscape.

This site is currently the object of two quite distinct public narratives. The first is the on-line archeological account given by the Borders Archeology Company. Although the author is careful to make it clear that his account is provisional, it tacitly evokes the objective authority of 'fact' as underwritten by the academic disciplines of history, archeology and etymology. This narrative begins by citing archival evidence for the existence of the now-vanished chapel in 13th century documents and works its way back in time, citing both archeological and etymological evidence to support its provisional findings. This narrative proposes that the kirk, abandoned in 1640, once stood near an earlier 'kil' or cell occupied by a hermit. The name 'Lowes' derives from the Cumbric term for a lake. Since the site was also originally located in the Cumbric diocese of Glasgow, the implication is that the cell was Cumbric in origin and may have been established as early as the 6 th century. Archeological material in the surrounding landscape also suggests that the site may have had some pre-Christian significance.

A second narrative, provided by the Etterick and Jarrow Community and Development Company, is found at the site itself. Its wording meets the needs of a Borders heritage industry catering to those people, frequently Americans, visiting the Borders in search of their roots. Archaeology doesn't feature here. The information board is one of a set distributed around a circular walk that starts and ends at the statue of James Hogg at the head of the loch. The board presents the site as: "a peaceful and ancient place of worship", encouraging us to "rest awhile and let its magic work on you". It then invokes two major heritage tropes - Scots nationalism and radical Protestant dissent. In the first case by positing a link between the site and William Wallace, in the second by drawing attention to the annual Blanket Preaching in commemoration of the Covenanters held on the site. This second reference also authenticates the site as one of enacted remembrance. A further reference to a tragic romance connected to the Douglas family - still major regional landowners today - adds local colour. I'll come back to this reference later.

What interests me is, however, absent from both these narratives.

As already mentioned, this site is situated within a songscape dominated by what are called the "supernatural" ballads, versions of which first enter the written record in the late 14 th century. These are old, layered and fractured sung narratives that contain both explicitly Christian and non-Christian folk material. I'm particularly interested in the traces of the non-Christian medieval lifeworld, because they resonate with current theorizations of 'a sensible materialism' and of ecological concerns by thinkers such as Isabelle Stengers, Jane Bennett, Donna Haraway, and Bruno Latour. I see these traces as a basis for work with testimonial imagination that might bridge a neglected aspect of the history of the psyche, current high theory, and an emergent attitude present in contemporary popular culture. Something of this emergent attitude is implicit in two verses from the song Resurrection, by the American singer Rita Hosking.
I'll have no rebirth but I will be in the bark of trees and the breath of air I'll not be in a church, but in the cells of leaves and maybe I'll see you there.
Significantly, Hosking relates her work to the tradition of Appalachian 'mountain music' which, among other sources, draws on the old Borders ballads.

The valley in which St. Mary's kirkyard sits is haunted by two ballads in particular - Dowie Dens of Yarrow and Tam Lin. Before Hogg became the public figure commemorated here, he was the shepherd grandchild of Will O'Phaup, reputedly the last man in Scotland to converse with the fairies. Which is only to say that, as a child he internalized a heterodox ontology, radically at odds with the strict monotheism of Calvinism. The land-owning and professional classes memorialised at St. Mary's kirkyard had adopted Calvinism a century before Hogg's birth. But some of the rural laboring class resisted Calvinism, preserving a now banned oral tradition of ballads populated by transgressive women, revenants, prophetic dreamers, and uncanny figures like Thomas the Rhymer, taken by its Queen into fairyland.

I need to clarify something at this point. There is a physical location known as "Tam Lin's Well" in Carterhaugh Wood on the Etterick, down-stream from St Mary's loch. Sir Walter Scott indicated, and numerous people still believe, that this is where Janet, Jennet or Lady Margaret met Tam Lin - the young grandson of the Earl of Roxbrugh who'd been abducted by the Queen of Elfland. I've no interest in such literalism, but neither do I see the content of the old ballads as picturesque nonsense. I hear these songs as echoing a vernacular lifeworld regarded by the Christian authorities as heretical, marginal, foolish, or otherwise unacceptable; a life-world that, in consequence, is largely absent from both the historical and archeological record. Aspects of that lifeworld are now being recovered by scholars like Emma Wilby, who analysis and contextualize material common to both the supernatural ballads and testimony given by individuals accused of witchcraft, and by students of medieval literature like Claude Lecouteux and Richard Firth Green.

The information board at the kirkyard refers to events narrated in a ballad called The Douglas Tragedy. This tells the story of the elopement of Lady Margaret Douglas, during which her lover kills her father and seven brothers, only to be mortally wounded himself. Margaret then dies of grief. The suggestion is that the lovers may have been buried in St. Mary's kirkyard. An older ballad, the Dowie Dens of Yarrow, has a broadly similar plot but differs in being both framed and fractured by the devise of a prophetic dream. In this dream a mother and daughter learn that the daughter's lover - a plowboy - has fought with nine local gentlemen for the right to marry her. The plowboy kills three of these men, three withdraw, and he badly wounds three more. At which point he's stabbed from behind by the girl's brother.

The significant qualities distinguish this ballad from The Douglas Tragedy. Characters accurately foresee a future event, class appears to be substituted for generational conflict over inheritance, and the landscape itself is treaded as a participant in the narrative. To what degree this is the case depends on how carefully the original collectors of this ballad listened to what was being sung. If what was hear was the words ' dowie dens of Yarrow', this is best rendered in English as 'dismal narrow wooded valleys'. However, if what in fact was sung were the words ' downie dens of Yarrow', the reference is to fairy hills (Henderson & Cowan 2001: p. 9), a reading that would be supported by the remains of pre-historical remains in the area. This would suggest that, rather than the plowboy lover who has defeated nine men being treacherously killed because he comes from the wrong class, that the girl's brother stabs him from behind because he suspects that the plowboy's prowess comes from an uncanny source. In short, that he is either a fairy warrior or, like Tam Lin, a mortal associated with the fairies. (Of course, this second possibility does not exclude the issue of class). Both the attributes of 'dowie' and 'downie' to the landscape are consistent with a mentalité vividly represented by the opening lines of the anonymous C8 th Irish ballad, Donal Og. These translate as:
It is late last night the dog was speaking of you The snipe was speaking of you in her deep marsh It is you are the lonely bird throughout the woods And that you may be without a mate until you find me.
However, if we hear 'downie' rather than 'dowie', then the ballad is firmly located in a liminal landscape in which the boundaries between the day and night world of dream, the human and uncanny worlds, are acknowledged to be porous.

I want to suggest that, in addition to offering an alternative context for narrating this site, the supernatural ballads also point up an alternative approach to narrative. I'll now elaborate on this suggestion.

While Dowie (or Downie) Dens of Yarrow and Tam Lin clearly have a beginning, middle and end, they also give a powerful sense of being embedded within an oral tradition in which the strict linear sequence of past, present and future is disrupted by magic or prophesy. From this point of view The Douglas Tragedy and Dowie (or Downie) Dens of Yarrow reflect competing worldviews. Attempts by illustrators to visualize a supernatural ballad like Tam Lin by using a single visual style are always problematic because they are visually 'monovocal' in the sense that illustrators conventionally maintain stylistic consistency to evoke a sense of affective or conceptual unity. But the ballads themselves don't employ a single narrative perspective, voice or affective register.

Instead they deploy a weave of several, sometimes mutually antagonistic, perspectives. In Tam Lin we can hear the Christian orthodoxy of the landowning class rubbing up against the beliefs of a quasi-pagan peasant culture. We hear exchanges between gendered and socially differentiated voices - human and non-human - that warn, defy, expose, mock, promise, and threaten from within a polyverse rather than a universe. This polyvocality unsettles linear narratives that are further unsettled by the fact that a ballad often share lines, or even whole verses, with others, suggesting their embeddedness within a larger mesh of stories. And then, of course, each ballad exists in multiple variations.

All these characteristics allow singers to inflect the meaning of the version they're singing by hinting at variations that resonate in the listener's memory. Consequently, the song's meaning, like that of our own narrative identity, is kept open to question and contestation. Arguably, then, our experience of hearing such a ballad is creatively tensioned between an unstable linear narrative woven from multiple voices and a matrix of other - perhaps antagonistic - variations situated within the space of a larger songscape.

An alternative narrative mapping of the kirkyard of St Mary's of the Lowes might amplify the provisional archeological information. Through listening to and referencing Tam Lin it might evoke the longevity of elements of a quasi-pagan life-world in the region and to its relationship to Cumbic or Welsh Christian theology. The Dowie (or Downie) Dens of Yarrow raises questions about the relationship between class, land ownership, multiple worlds. It might point us both to the suppression of the tripartite nature of the 'self' or 'soul' suppressed by the medieval church, and to a dubious history of Scottish nationalism personified by William Wallace. Wallace's surname derived from the Old English "wullish", meaning "foreigner" or "Welshman". Where his family economic migrants from Wales or members of a Cumbric-speaking ethnic minority in Strathclyde? In either case, what does this say about the construction of a Scottish nationalism that takes him as a central figure? (There is a further possibility attached to this Welsh connection, which persisted through the speaking of Welsh in areas of the lowlands as late as the twelfth century. As Henderson and Cowan point out, this means that it is "just possible" that Southern Scots learned of the Welsh tale of Elixir's journey into fairyland from such people and that it served as one source for Thomas Rhymer's own journey).

The Covenanter history celebrated at the annual Blanket Preaching sits uncomfortably with the consequences of Sir David Lesly's 1645 victory at Philiphaugh, on the bank of Ettrick Water. The Ballad of Philiphaugh which celebrates that victory makes no reference to the murder of fifty Irish Royalists who surrendered on being promised safe quarter. Nor to the killing of three hundred camp followers - mainly women and children - who were then thrown into a mass grave. Given that it was his army's Covenanter ministers who encouraged Sir David Lesly to authorize these sectarian murders, local Covenanter history sits somewhat uneasily with the characterization of St. Mary's kirkyard as a "peaceful and ancient place of worship".
Conclusion
In referencing ballads to suggest possibilities for re-narrating or re-mapping this isolated Borders site, I've evoking multiple voices of the dead so as to thicken and contest any simply 'factual' account - whether archaeological (scientific) or touristic (popular). Roger Strand argues that we need to set aside the increasingly toxic culture authorised by "merely fact-minded sciences"; an authority that, he suggests, privileges the views of "merely fact-minded people" at the expense of values that contribute to "a genuine humanity". Following Mark Pluciennik, I am suggesting that to evoke a genuinely democratic and humanitarian relationship to an archaeological (or indeed any other) site, we need to interweave multiple stories and images that invite individuals to listen out for and relish the evocation of our multiple heritages and conflicting interpretations. That can only happen if we are willing to both hear and ponder the voices and beliefs of the dead, including and perhaps particularly those ancestors who held very different views of what constituted the 'self', society and the environment to those that dominate our current culture.

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Deep Mapping and the importance of 'listening to the dead'

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Introduction Since 1999, when I began concerning myself with what I would come to know as deep mapping, I have been vexed by the question of what role, if any, the first of Felix Guattari's three ecologies - namely the ecology of the 'self' - should play in such work.

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Mixed Media : Áine Tierney

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Mixed Media: Áine Tierney

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Photo: Áine Tierney - The Red Tape and beurocracy of farming.

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Photo: Áine Tierney

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The Dock Farm is situated at the North end of Sherkin Island. Farranacoush is the name of the townland.

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A book of Sherkin Island History by local, Dolly O'Reilly.
https://southern-star-shop.myshopify.com/products/sherkin-island-a-local-history-dolly-oreilly

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https://www.ucc.ie/en/english/deep-maps/

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Learn, Study and Research in UCC, Ireland's first 5 star university. Our tradition of independent thinking will prepare you for the world and the workplace in a vibrant, modern, green campus.

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In the 1960s and '70s, politicization meant taking a position, establishing and following a political program, taking up armed struggle, putting one's skills (including art) at the service of the revolution, fighting in the name of the horizon of state socialism, and acting in solidarity with anti-imperialist and decolonization struggles. Artists and militant networks were drawn together by political affinities, and Palestine, Vietnam, and Chile were symbols of anti-imperialism. This form of politicization translated into an aesthetic practice of international vanguardism, contestation, criticality, counterhegemony, and postcolonial memorialization and assertion, within the framework of a politics of representation. Since that time, however, this kind of politics has come to be perceived as a form of violent nationalism that led to authoritarian states and propagandist aesthetics. Politics has become inseparable from the neoliberalized political economy, as well as from culture.

Within representation's ruin, what used to be "outside" of capitalism-like marginality, queerness, or race-has been symbolically incorporated and deprived of its capacity to disrupt and contest. Figures of otherness have disappeared and been subsumed into "lifestyle" options. The underclass is a blurry horizon disconnected from the flows of global capitalism; far from being a political figure, the underclass is sometimes subject to site-specific intervention, pacification, betterment, development, and community-building projects. Its emancipatory horizon lies in entrepreneurship. Moreover, in the twenty-first century politics is no longer representative, but what some theorists call "post-politics." Following Jodi Dean, this means that politics now aspires to a superficial democracy that neutralizes antagonism and denies democracy's limits and mechanisms of exclusion. "Post-politics" thus implies the disavowal of the fundamental division conditioning politics, as equality has come to mean inclusion, respect, and entitlement. "Post-politics" means consensual politics, the end of ideology, the neoliberal withering away of the state in some areas and its strengthening in other strategic ones, and the financialization of the economy.

Insofar as democracy has become the goal of political action, visibility has become a key feature. This form of politicization presupposes that displacing signs may contribute to destabilizing or mobilizing people, providing tools for articulations that can enable specific political goals. As a consequence, cultural production has become inextricable from political action. We must also consider what was made evident by the 2011-13 worldwide mobilizations: the huge gap that exists between government (political parties, elections, institutions) and the actual forms in which we are being governed, which give shape to our lives and the ways we make a living-according to the interests of international trade organizations and corporations. " Que se vayan todos," or "They all have to go," has been the motto on the streets of Argentina since the early 2000s, even if "they" all eventually end up staying. In Egypt, Tahrir Square took Mubarak's head, and the Tamarod (rebellion) movement took Morsi's. Collective self-determination was reclaimed in the streets, and yet the people's goal was not to get organized and take power because, first, power creates the fiction that gathering and protesting is enough to change things, and second, because politics no longer works as representation.

If traditional forms of power were representative and lodged in institutions and persons, power is now hidden in infrastructure (a highway, a supermarket, software, fiber optics, a data center, corporate providers of energy and water) and materialized as spatial arrangements. Post-representative forms of power manifest themselves as the organization, design, and configuration of the world; these forms of power are architectural and impersonal, as opposed to representative and personal. Moreover, politics is also post-ideological, which means that critical disposition, symbolic gesture, political position, and everyday life are completely dissociated. This dissociation leads to pervasive contradictions: denouncing hunger in Africa, but drinking coffee at Starbucks; expressing solidarity with Palestinians in Gaza, but consuming Israeli goods; protesting against violence, but exploiting one's own employees; opposing slavery, but buying clothing manufactured by enslaved people in Southeast Asia; expressing concern about global warming, but buying food in supermarkets; applying for government and corporate funds to produce projects that critique them. Our post-political and post-ideological era is characterized by a sharp discrepancy between political position, political action, and symbolic gesture.

In what follows I would like to address the transformations in militantism in the context of the shift from representation to post-politics and post-ideology, as manifested in politicized art in recent decades. This shift embodies the passage from the ruin of representation to sensible politics: from internationalism to multiculturalism, antiglobalization, and recent artistic production that, aside from taking up the task of rendering visible the invisible, has proposed forms of salvaging reality, of self-organizing transient communities, bettering the conditions of living and working, and imagining new forms of communal organization, social therapies, and useful art. One of the questions that urgently needs to be asked concerns the role that contemporary art plays in geopolitics, if we consider the art world as an industry, as the harbinger of neoliberalism, and as a tool for pacification, normalization, and gentrification. Relatedly, can the nation-state can still function as a container for globalized struggles? What can the political art and militancy of the 1960s and '70s contribute to these struggles?

The Ruin of Representation

A century ago and up until the 1960s, political action was framed under unions, parties, and associations, and consisted in attending rallies and organizing strikes, meetings, and marches. In this context, militants delivered pamphlets and gave speeches-what is known as "agitation" work. For instance, Lucy Parsons was a member of the Communist Party and an indefatigable agitator who also belonged to the Chicago Working Women's Union and joined the Socialist Worker's Party in 1877. Parsons travelled throughout the United States and became a well-known labor leader and one of the main defenders of anarchism, Black people, and the rights of prostitutes. Another militant, French philosopher Simone Weil, sought to transcend the domain of politicized speech (although she was known to have given speeches at workers' meetings in Le Puy, where she taught philosophy) and engaged in factory and peasant work as well as in armed struggle with the Republican Army in Spain. In the 1960s, a major shift took place in political engagement, especially after May '68. Following in Weil's footsteps-and in opposition to Jean-Paul Sartre, who kept militant action and philosophy as two separate activities-figures such as journalist Ulrike Meinhof, philosopher Régis Debray, and filmmaker Masao Adachi bypassed the party as the container for progressive politics and engaged directly in armed struggle, seeking to join theory and practice. Maoist students also rejected the party and worked alongside laborers and peasants, no longer seeking (as Lenin's had prescribed in his text "What is to be Done?") to militate ahead of them, but to learn from them.

Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault discussed the shifts in militantism and their implications in a public dialogue on March 4, 1972. They posed the question of the role of intellectuals in relation to the struggles of students, workers, and prisoners. In the discussion, Foucault defined two types of politically involved intellectuals: "outcasts," who engage in actions that are regarded as subversive or "immoral" by bourgeois society (i.e., Jean Genet); and "socialists," who use discourse to reveal particular truths (i.e., Rosa Luxemburg). Intellectuals had traditionally taken the latter role, serving as "the consciousness of the people." The events of May '68, however, marked the awareness that the masses no longer needed intellectuals to represent them or to describe their various forms oppression. For Deleuze, the role of the intellectual was no longer to situate himself ahead of workers, but to contest the very forms of power that position intellectuals as producers of knowledge. Thus, what was problematized by May '68 was precisely the notion of the "representative consciousness." Intellectuals had been rendered aware of how they propagate discourses of power disguised as "knowledge," "consciousness," and "truth." For Foucault and Deleuze, there could be no representation, not because there wasn't a signifier ("archaism") that could bring together a given group based on common interests, but because in "speaking for others," there is always an unconscious desire operating: to know, appropriate, and have power over the Other, denying him or her the right to self-consciousness.

Foucault and Deleuze thus gave intellectuals the task of organizing struggles beyond representation and "class consciousness." They posited militantism as a matter of denouncing, speaking out, finding targets, and creating tools to fight different forms of power and oppression. This cleared a path for an array of different struggles beyond class consciousness, rooted in the cultural and social arenas, as well as for a politics of counter-information, which privileged the mass media as a site of militant intervention. New micropolitical struggles targeted the processes of subjectivation ( subjectivation) and subjugation ( assujettisement or sujétion), which assigned roles, functions, and identities to individuals subordinated by a given form of power. These struggles sought to use the logic of subjectivation to organize militant self-consciousness, constructing an active, politically constituted subject or subjectivity that could counter the process of subjugation. In the domain of art, after the shifts prompted by the ruin of aesthetic-political representation (manifested in philosophy as post-structuralist theory), artists developed conceptual art strategies that aimed to dematerialize the art object in order to resist its ever increasing status as a commodity. Through institutional critique they began to question the conditions of art production, and through a pedagogy of viewership, they made art (most notably video art) that sought to counter the spectacle.

From Anti-Imperialism to the Global Celebration of Difference

Parallel to student and worker struggles in Europe, anti-imperialism and decolonization battles were underway in the third world, seeking to establish alternatives to Western capitalism. Cuba, China, Palestine, Chile, and Vietnam were key referents in the 1970s. Communism was a "living hypothesis," a horizon that mobilized the belief, passion, and will of a large part of the revolution and inspired solidarity from the Western world. The political figures brought about by anti-imperialism were the empowered peasant or slum-dweller and the colonized subject fighting for their own emancipation against empire. By the 1980s, however, the revolutionary anti-imperialist subject and project had been disavowed as a sort of aberration of decadent socialism, A new de-ideologized form of third-world emancipation, beyond the international division of labor and the figure of the worker as a politically self-defined subject, was foregrounded. Anti-imperialism had implied universalizing a cause or giving a name to a political wrong; the "wretched of the earth" emerged for a historically specific period of time as a new figuration of "the people" in the political sense. But a new ethical humanism took over, replacing revolutionary and political sympathy with pity and moral indignation, transforming the latter into political emotions within the framework of human rights.

This led to new figures of alterity in the 1980s and '90s: the "suffering other"' who needs to be rescued, and the postcolonial subaltern demanding restitution, presupposing that visibility would follow emancipation. These figures became the postcolonial, ethnically self-defined and self-represented subjects struggling for recognition and for a place from which to speak their own suppressed, unheard, or forgotten narratives: "I speak therefore I am," utters performance artist Guillermo Gómez-Peña in his Declaration of Poetic Disobedience (2006). In order to avoid the representation of identities based on archaisms (or "essentialisms," as Gayatri Spivak put it) that would perpetuate the discourses of Western society's "Other" through nationalisms, myths, and other types of ethnic-specific narratives, in the 1980s postcolonial theorists posited a differential structure of identification, in which identity was conceived as always being in the process of formation, constructed through ambivalence and "splittings." What became crucial politically, according to Homi Bhabha, was the articulation of "interstitial moments," or processes produced in the articulation of differences. For Bhabha, "third spaces" can allow for an elaboration of "communal" representation, generating "new signs" of cultural difference as "sites of collaboration." The concept of "difference," however, came to be trivialized. By the late 1990s it manifested itself in the art world as biennials in marginal corners of the world, somehow fulfilling the multicultural utopia of globalization.

Under the site-specific intervention model of the biennial, space came to be regarded as epistemically rich; delivering experiences or intervening in everyday processes took over from representation. Site-specific art sought to infuse social criticism into the everyday. As a moral statement, however, site-specific intervention became the limit of its own political effect. Confined within the art world, it provided contrasts and pointed at potentials, yet fell short of modifying the background of political turmoil, and even caused epistemic violence to the site in question. Site-specificity had been liberatory insofar as it had enabled the displacing of essentialized nation-state identities and had introduced the possibility of multiple identities, allegiances, and new meanings. This was prompted by what Susan Buck-Morss described as a compensatory fantasy that responded to the intensified fragmentation and alienation of an expanded market economy. Thus, in the "biennialized" art world, multiculturalism, polyphony, and marginality actually came to affirm white hegemony, insofar as they expressed a moral struggle for recognition. Considering that fluid identities are made possible by the privilege of mobilization and thus bear a specific relationship to power, a new class division based on degrees of mobility was established: on one side, a transnational class of cultural workers with smooth access and safe passage, pondering the elsewhere of global processes; on the other, migrant workers and refugees crossing borders as "illegals" to survive.

Globalphobic Aesthetics and Tactical Media

With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1989, the political horizon of communism as a promise, a utopia, an intellectual construct, and a political vision waned. Instead, it became a place and an event in actual history, a disastrous experiment manifested in totalitarian dictatorships. As neoliberal policies were implemented and free trade agreements were signed across the world, the antiglobalization movement arose in the mid-1990s, opposing neoliberal reforms and fighting for fair trade, sustainable development, human rights, and corporate accountability. Following Brian Holmes, this movement was the first attempt at a widespread, meshworked response to the chaos of the post-'89 world system. Within this framework, anticapitalists critiqued the failures of neoliberal governance from an array of different positions: democratic sovereigntists, anti-border libertarians, and the more traditional, union-oriented Keynesians. The antiglobalization movement conceived itself as a social base for criticizing corporate capitalism, globalization, and the growing political power of multinational corporations, exercised through trade agreements and deregulated financial markets.

Antiglobalization protesters converged at gatherings of world leaders, most notably in Genoa 2001, and at their own international conferences, like the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil that same year. The political subjectivity embodied by the movement was theorized by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, who, in line with May '68 post-representational politics, sought to go beyond the worker-based identity of the "proletariat" and the homogeneity inherent in the concept of "the people." They thus they coined the term "the multitude." For Hardt and Negri, the multitude is a social being formed in the no-place of capitalism. It is a decentered network of singular cells within Empire immanently producing the "common," which is also the substance of the multitude and the condition and end of production (the locus of surplus value). The multitude exists within the imperial rule of biopower, a form of social control that regulates and administers life from within, extending through consciousness, bodies, and the entirety of social relations. As opposed to taking over power and the means of production, as Marxism prescribed in the twentieth century, for Hardt and Negri the task of the multitude is to democratize the common(s), exploit networks of social production with the purpose of achieving autonomy, and undermine the sovereignty of biopower. The flesh of the multitude, however, embodies a series of ambivalent conditions that can become dangerous: social production can either lead to liberation, or be caught in a new regime of exploitation and control, feeding biopower.

In parallel with the antiglobalization movement, artistic production veered toward anticapitalist politics, characterized by interdisciplinarity and the adoption of an array of countercultural positions and political affiliations, with the goal of creating autonomous zones, albeit symbolically. Examples include art collectives producing counter-informative, didactic, and symbolic interventions or actions against capitalism in the public sphere: REPOhistory, Group Material, Guerrilla Girls, WochenKlausur, Colectivo Cambalache, Las Agencias (Yomango, Prêt à Revolter, and so forth), Ne Pas Plier, Haha, the Yes Men, Superflex, Mejor Vida Corp., the Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Atlas Group, Raqs Media Collective, and Chto Delat. At the same time, tactical media emerged, with strategies like attacks on servers as digital "sit-ins." But while this form of creative activism lasted only until a globally integrated system of electronic surveillance was implemented after September 11 (as clandestinity became impossible and this form of attack was criminalized), antiglobalization art and activism have been criticized for having no political program, or for having the vague program of using imperialism against itself.

For Hardt and Negri, the multitude has the desire for world equality, freedom, and a global democratic society, and it has the power to achieve them; but it has no discernible goals or agenda beyond opposing capitalism and appropriating production. The limitations of the antiglobalization agenda are illustrated by one of the actions performed within the framework of Yomango, a Spanish artistic project of social disobedience. The Yomango project involved disseminating instructions on how to appropriate goods available in globalized stores, followed by gatherings in which the goods were shared. Designed to facilitate the redistribution of the commons, the action, however, obscured the international and thus imperial division of labor and the conditions of production surrounding the goods that the participants appropriated for themselves.

Following Brian Holmes, the antiglobalization movement ultimately faltered due to the cultural consequences of globalization, that is to say, the global success of American mass culture, which extinguished local cultures only to resurrect them in a Disneyfied form. The antiglobalization movement was also defeated by the very neoliberal program that launched it in the first place, which manifested itself as a military, moral, and religious return to order, a massive expansion of capital, and a worldwide clampdown on civil liberties. In the realm of "high culture," the expansion of American mass culture went hand in hand with the globalization of Western modernism as the lingua franca of contemporary art, derived from an emptying-out of postmodernity as a critical and temporal category, and its replacement by a singular and internally differentiated global modernity.

Relationality and Salvaging Art

In parallel with the antiglobalization agenda, a current in art production sought to experiment with different forms of collectivity and community beyond identity and processes of identification. Relational art of the 1990s was the catalyzer for transient communal gatherings that sought to revive social relations and counter the alienation brought about by the spectacle. This form of art, described by Nicolas Bourriaud, envisioned the audience as a community and unfolds in the realm of human interactions, elaborating meaning collectively. Instead of having a "utopian" agenda, relational artists sought to find provisional solutions in the here and now; this is why relational artworks insisted on being used rather than contemplated. Another current of this participatory aesthetics was described by Claire Bishop, who put antagonism at its core in the creation of situations in which the members of a collectivity are confronted, thus drawing the limits of society's ability to fully constitute itself. There were also "dialogical" practices, exemplified by the work of Suzanne Lacy, which brought together an array of different people (i.e., high school students, the police, the media) and dispositifs, repurposed for the creation of transversal spaces for dialogue. In Lacy's piece The Roof is On Fire (1994), part of her Oakland Projects, 220 public high school students took part in unscripted conversations about family, culture, race, and education while sitting in one hundred cars on a rooftop garage, with Oakland residents listening to them. Lacy's work combines institutional and social apparatuses with educational workshops, mass media, and policy development.

We can regard relational, participatory, and dialogical art practices as experiments with new models of social and political organization. These experiments emerged in the face of the fragmentation, the destruction of social bonds, and the alienation brought about by globalization. These practices also evidenced how art has become a form of experimental activity that overlaps transversally with the world through its flight into other disciplines, dispositifs, and regimes, with the purpose of addressing sociopolitical concerns. Participation, however, has its limits, as it is one of the forms of neoliberal governance and power. Following Eyal Weizman, at the horizon of participation there is collaboration, "the tendency to forcefully, or willingly, align one's actions with the aims of power, be it political, military, economic or a combination thereof." The problem is that the options from which we are allowed to choose cannot themselves be challenged, and thus participation ends up forcing the subject into compliance with power. This form of power has been conceptualized by Wendy Brown as "neoliberal governance," and its focus is creating incentives to negotiate goals in common.

Governance in this regard implies the creation of systems that enable administered or controlled inclusion through the fetishization of democracy. Via integration, individuation, and cooperation, democracy is reduced to "participation," yet divorced from justice. Discontent is placated. Participation thus raises political and ethical dilemmas, demanding that the power relations enabling participation be urgently questioned. Participatory art, however, can be understood as an effort to experiment with ways to restore community links that have been destroyed or threated by neoliberal policies. Similar to Jean-Luc Godard, who has posited the image as a form of "salvaging the real," W. J. T. Mitchell has posited site-specific or relational art as a form of "salvaging," digging out things, recovering ruins, and rescuing neighborhoods by involving art and collaboration between institutions and communities.].]

Art is expected to "save" reality by reviving the singularity of places and persons-here we can recall the use of locality and site- or cultural-specificity in the 1990s. It is not that the world or reality has been lost, but rather that our connection to and belief in them have been destroyed, and thus need to be saved. Art can help. For Mitchell, art's new vocation is to remake the world both literally and symbolically as a way of constructing social solidarity and forms of imagining together (e.g., Pedro Reyes's repurposing of guns as musical instruments, or Theaster Gates's Dorchester Project, which involved the renovation of formerly abandoned buildings in Chicago's South Side). The role of this kind of art has been to experiment with ways to restore vital contact with the real, highlighting the current crisis of presence due to extreme alienation in the West.

Politics of the Art World and Politics of Resistance

Antiglobalization, relational, and interventionist forms of aesthetic practice exemplify the different ways in which art and politics have related to each other within politicized aesthetics. But there are other ways in which politics and aesthetics converge. There is, for instance, a politics of the art world, as exemplified by Hito Steyerl's video Is the Museum a Battlefield? (2013). In this video-performance, which is also a kind of documentary, Steyerl eloquently connects a shell casing found on a battlefield in Turkey to the military-museum-industrial complex, revealing the ties between the weapons industry, transnational corporations, "starchitecture," and global biennials. The genealogy of Steyerl's video can be traced back to the institutional critique of 1970s, '80s, and '90s, which aimed to elucidate the discourses behind exhibition practices and raise concerns about art sponsorship.

Taking institutional critique even further, recently there have been mobilizations that transcend the domain of art production to become direct political action within museums. For instance, last June members and allies of the group Gulf Labor temporarily occupied the Guggenheim in New York to protest the working conditions of laborers building the new Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi. The group Liberate Tate has also engaged in various direct actions to shed light on British Petroleum's sponsorship of the museum. Artists are less and less keen to separate creativity, exhibition venues, and the sponsors that support them. They are reluctant to give credibility to sponsors that fund art in order to whitewash their own crimes. These political acts-which involve taking a position, issuing demands, and boycotting-are different from the politically engaged practices I elucidated above, which have used the art world as a strategic space for political discussion and experimentation.

Through disruptive actions, groups Gulf Labor and Liberate Tate protest against labor exploitation, the capture of public space, climate injustice, and gentrification. They denounce the art world as "a spectacular subsystem of global capitalism revolving around the display, consumption, and financialization of cultural objects for the benefit of a tiny fraction of humanity, the 1%." Artists at the 2015 Istanbul Biennial organized a "productive disruption" to highlight the escalation of violence in Turkey, demanding a return to peace negotiations between the Turkish government and the Kurdish PKK. At the 2015 Venice Biennale, artists issued a "Letter for Palestine" that called attention to the campaign for the academic and cultural boycott of Israel. Also expressing solidarity with Palestine, at the 2014 São Paulo Biennial 176 of 199 participating artists signed an open letter opposing Israeli "cultural sponsorship" of the event. The curators supported the letter, and in response the Fundação Bienal de São Paulo agreed to "clearly dissociate" Israeli funding from the overall sponsorship of the exhibition. Artists are now raising awareness about the epistemic and physical violence committed in sites of art production elsewhere. They are trying to restore contact with the political real by investigating and denouncing labor exploitation and new forms of enslavement: the figure of the worker as a site for politicization is returning to the fore.

Creating assemblages that link actors from the art world to projects oriented toward political action, these actors seek to create subjectivities and terrain for political acts by locating power struggles (instances of subjectivation), and are sometimes linked to social and political movements, autonomous collectives, and alternative media. Following Gregory Sholette, however, these forms of art tend to be characterized by the problematic absence of any ideological counternarrative to capitalism and by the belief (ever diminishing) that "cultural producers can bring something extraordinary to the underprivileged masses via the benefits of serious art." Many of these practices described so far do not constitute political acts in themselves: images and symbolic gestures have served as back-ups to help activists gain political influence and visibility. While art and the art world have indisputably served as a self-reflexive site, and elucidated on global processes of oppression and expropriation, experimental laboratories or platforms for communal organization, collective therapies, speculative politics, yet as vehicles for visibility, politicized aesthetics these formats are not in and of themselves, a means to resist. Moreover, we must consider that critiques of capitalism need a social base, as well as forms of organization to resist against the neoliberal destruction of forms ways of life and common experiences. We must also take into account that nowadays, power is embedded in everyday objects and environments, that power is the order of things itself: it is not only infrastructure, but the way in which it works, is controlled, and built. These forms of power make the nation-state deaf to any demands we might make of it. The nation-state today legitimizes itself not through democratic processes, but by neutralizing citizen demands through governmentality, and by governing its populations differentially, as we will see in the following part of this essay.

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The author would like to thank @Stephanie Bailey @Saúl Hernández @Urok Shirhan @Fawwaz Trablousi @Rolando Vazquez and eveyone at #sharjahmarchmeeting2015.

Irmgard Emmelhainz is an independent translator, writer, researcher, and lecturer based in Mexico City. Her work about film, the Palestine Question, art, cinema, culture, and neoliberalism has been translated to Italian, French, English, Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, and Serbian, and she has presented it at an array of international venues. She is member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal, and has recently finished a book on neoliberalism as a sensibility and common sense embedded in urban planning, work and life, culture, social movements, mourning, and women's struggle.

© 2016 e-flux and the author

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Geopolitics and Contemporary Art, Part I: From Representation's Ruin to Salvaging the Real

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In the 1960s and '70s, politicization meant taking a position, establishing and following a political program, taking up armed struggle, putting one's skills (including art) at the service of the revolution, fighting in the name of the horizon of state socialism, and acting in solidarity with anti-imperialist and decolonization struggles.

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Incentives for farmers to protect the environment.

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http://mariiwahara.com

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GLAS (The Green Low-Carbon Agri-Environment Scheme) is part of the Rural Development Programme 2014-2020. It provides funding to farmers in return for delivering environmental management on their land. Farmers must commit to the scheme for a minimum period of 5 years.
As part of the GLAS scheme farmers are asked to distribute bird houses around their farms and in the barns and sheds to facilitate birdlife. For each bird box the farmer will receive a payment of €6/box/year, subject to a minimum of one boxes per farmer and a maximum of 15. Bird boxes are included in tier three of GLAS which aims to enhance climate change, water quality and biodiversity benefits delivered.