Department of Sociology - News

03 April 2012

Ronit Lentin and Elena Moreo's Book Launch!

09 March 2012

11 January 2012

The Department of Sociology Trinity College Dublin is pleased to announce the publication in paperback of Andrew Finlay's Governing Ethnic Conflict (Routledge 2011). For more information see attached flyer (20% discount) or the following website:http://www.routledge.com/books/details/9780415510110/

To purchase a book with a discount please press here!

07 December 2011

New Lecture Series 2012 - Sociology Responds to Crisis!

24 October 2011

Jewish Identity and Palestinian Rights: Diaspora Jewish Opposition to Israel

Launch of the new book by Dr David Landy!

The launch will take place on Tuesday 1st November at 6.30 pm in The New Theatre (behind Connolly Books), 43 East Essex St, Temple Bar, Dublin 2. The book is being launched in conjunction with the Ireland Palestine Solidarity Campaign and the Department of Sociology in TCD.

All are welcome! For the invite please click here.

6 June

QS University Rankings

Department of Sociology ranked 48th in the world in the QS university rankings! For more information click here.

5 June 2011

Recruiting Visiting Students

The Department warmly invites applications from Visiting and Exchange Students for 2011/12. Come and join Ireland’s premier university to study new and exciting Sociology modules such as ‘European Societies’, ‘Gender, Culture and Society’, ‘Migration’, or ‘Race, Ethnicity and Identity’. Further information and a full outline of our modules is available here.

We currently have over 40 non-EU Visiting Students, and around 50 Erasmus and other exchange students enrolled in Sociology modules. Our faculty members are truly multicultural with extensive international experience in research and teaching which is reflected in our ethos and curriculum design.

15 April 2011

Announcing PhD Studentships!

Join our thriving community of PhD and Master Degree students at Trinity College Dublin, the longest established Sociology Department in Ireland!

Fully-funded studentships are available for study in the PhD programme in Sociology at Trinity College Dublin, paying tuition fees plus a generous stipend. Application for this financial support is automatically considered as part of the normal admission process. The Department of Sociology normally admits four to six students a year and typically provides financial support in the form of tuition grants, stipends and teaching. For further details see here.

Places still available in MSc European Employment Studies and MPhil in Race, Ethnicity, Conflict!

29 April 2011

Globalization and the Nation State (2nd edition)

Robert. J. Holton

Does Globalisation mean the end of nation state? Or are nation states able to respond to processes of global change? This impressively comprehensive book examines the connections and conflicts that exist between global and national processes, institutions and cultures.

Debating and explaning controversial and contested understandings of globalization, the second edition has new content on:

• hot and timely topics, from human rights and migration to new technologies and environmental sustainability
• connections between globalization and global events, including the rise of China, the financial crisis and 9/11
• interdisciplinary insights from sociology, political science and economics

Thought-provoking and easy to follow, this text will give students across the social sciences a thorough understanding of the history, theories and debates of globalization.

15 March 2011

A literature review on Polish migration to Ireland is now available.To see literature review please click here. This review was produced in connection with the ongoing SCIP research project, which studies the early socio-cultural integration of immigrants in four European countries. For further information on this project, please see http://www.tcd.ie/immigration/scip.php

2 November 2010

A first preliminary report of data from the 'Polonia in Dublin' survey is now available. It contains an overview of Polish migration to Ireland, a brief discussion of the sampling strategy and findings regarding the demographic composition of the sample (gender, age, place of residence and accommodation, educational profile, employment and year of arrival). The main aim of the research was to study working conditions, occupational mobility, networks and leisure activities of the Polish community in Dublin. The survey was conducted by Trinity College Dublin with Peter Muhlau from the Department of Sociology as principal investigator. The study was financed by the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences (IRCHSS).This project relates to the larger study, the SCIP project, which studies integration trajectories of new immigrants in four European countries: Germany, the Netherlands, Ireland and Great Britain.

11 September 2010

CO-MEMORY AND MELANCHOLIA:
Israelis Memorialising the Palestinian Nakba

Ronit Lentin

The 1948 war that led to the creation of the State of Israel also resulted in the destruction of Palestinian society when some 80 per cent of the Palestinians who lived in the major part of Palestine upon which Israel was established became refugees. Israelis call the 1948 war their ‘War of Independence’ and the Palestinians their ‘Nakba’, or catastrophe. After many years of Nakba denial, land appropriation, political discrimination against the Palestinians within Israel and the denial of rights to Palestinian refugees, in recent years the Nakba is beginning to penetrate Israeli public discourse.

This book explores the construction of collective memory in Israeli society, where the memory of the trauma of the Holocaust and of Israel’s war dead competes with the memory claims of the dispossessed Palestinians. Taking an auto-ethnographic approach, Ronit Lentin makes a contribution to social memory studies through a critical evaluation of the co-memoration of the Palestinian Nakba by Israeli Jews.

Against a background of the Israeli resistance movement, Lentin’s central argument is that co-memorating the Nakba by Israeli Jews is motivated by an unresolved melancholia about the disappearance of Palestine and the dispossession of the Palestinians, a melancholia that shifts mourning from the lost object to the grieving subject. Lentin theorises Nakba co-memory as a politics of resistance, counterpoising co-memorative practices by internally displaced Israeli Palestinians with Israeli Jewish discourses of the Palestinian right of return, and questions whether return narratives by Israeli Jews, courageous as they may seem, are ultimately about Israeli Jewish self-healing rather than justice for Palestine.

22 July 2010

 

Governing Ethnic Conflict: Consociation, Identity and the Price of Peace

Andrew Finlay

This book offers an intellectual history of an emerging technology of peace and explains how the liberal state has come to endorse illiberal subjects and practices.
The idea that conflicts are problems that have causes and therefore solutions rather than winners and losers is a quintessentially modernist idea that has gained momentum since the end of the Cold War. It has become more common for third party mediators acting in the name of liberal internationalism to promote the resolution of intra-state conflicts. These third-party peace makers appear to share lessons and expertise so that it is possible to speak of an emergent common technology of peace based around a controversial form of power-sharing known as consociation.
In this common technology of peace, the cause of conflict is understood to be competing ethno-national identities and the solution is to recognize these identities, and make them useful to government through power-sharing. Drawing on an analysis of the peace process in Ireland and the Dayton Accords in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the book argues that the problem with consociational arrangements is not simply that they institutionalise ethnic division and privilege particular identities or groups, but that they close down the space for other ways of being. By specifying identity categories, consociational regimes make ethnicity normative and create a residual category, designated 'other'. These 'others' not only offer a challenge to prevailing ideas about identity but also stand in reproach to conventional wisdom regarding the management of conflict.

22 April 2010

Negotiating Political Identities: Multiethnic Schools and Youth in Europe

Daniel Faas

Globalization, European integration, and migration are challenging national identities and changing education across Europe. The nation-state no longer serves as the sole locus of civic participation and identity formation, and no longer has the influence it once had over the implementation of policies. Drawing on rich empirical data from four schools in Germany and Britain, this groundbreaking book examines how schools mediate government policies, creating distinct educational contexts that shape youth identity negotiation and integration processes. The study is the first of its kind to bring together between-country and within-country differences in identity formation among young people. By delving into the discourses of ethnic majority and Turkish minority youth, the book unravels a wide range of factors shaping contemporary identities and offers new insights into the particular role school policy approaches play in this process. The book situates these discussions within broader European and transatlantic theoretical and empirical debates on immigrant incorporation and offers a much-needed synthesis of European and American scholarship.

'Negotiating Political Identities' will appeal to educationists, sociologists and political scientists dealing with issues of migration, identity, citizenship and ethnicity. It will also be an invaluable source of evidence for policymakers and professionals concerned with balancing cultural diversity and social cohesion in such a way as to promote more inclusive citizenship and educational policies in multiethnic schools.

Review(s):

This ground-breaking book combines an unusually sophisticated theoretical approach with a rich and multi-layered empirical study of the development of ethnic and political identities among Turkish and native youth in four schools in Germany and England. The result is a strong argument that school level policy approaches are very important in influencing how young people categorize themselves. This book should be required reading for anyone interested in migrant integration, multiculturalism, education in Europe and beyond. (Mary C. Waters, Harvard University, USA)