Authors celebrate the launch of Coercive confinement in post-independence Ireland

During the first fifty years of Irish independence, tens of thousands of men, women and children were incarcerated. Psychiatric hospitals, mother and baby homes, Magdalen homes, reformatory and industrial schools and prisons formed a network of institutions that was integral to the emerging state.

A unique new book by Eoin O’Sullivan (Trinity College Dublin) and Ian O’Donnell (UCD Institute of Criminology) provides a wealth of contemporaneous accounts of what life was like within these austere and forbidding places, as well as offering a compelling explanation for the longevity of the system and the reasons for its ultimate decline.

While many accounts exist of individual institutions and the factors associated with their operation, Coercive Confinement in Ireland: Patients, Prisoners and Penitents, is the first attempt to provide an overview of the interlocking range of institutions that dominated the physical landscape and, in many ways, underpinned the rural economy.

Launching the book in the UCD Global Lounge during the 8^th Irish Criminology Conference, Mr Justice Sean Ryan observed that:

“This book is valuable as a synthesising analysis, a fascinating collection of contemporary material and even more as a road map for future exploration of the territory of official and semi-official modes of detention.”

Address by Mr Justice Sean Ryan

Thanking Mr Justice Ryan, Professor O’Donnell noted that one of the key themes addressed in the book was the extent to which a high level of incarceration went unchallenged despite the many associated harms.

Eoin O’Sullivan (TCD), Mr Justice Sean Ryan and Ian O’Donnell (UCD)

He expressed the hope that the critical mass of informed criminal justice researchers and commentators that is emerging in Ireland would help to ensure that silence, complacency and looking the other way were consigned to the past, especially where vulnerable citizens were concerned.

Eoin O’Sullivan is Head of the School of Social Work and Social Policy at Trinity College Dublin.

Ian O’Donnell is Professor of Criminology at University College Dublin.

Timed out available in Barbados

Timed Out, by Leon Wainwright, is now available in Barbados through Fresh Milk, an artist led initiative.  Fresh Milk offers an informal platform for exchanges among contemporary practitioners/thinkers/writers/makers.

For more details, and to contact the Fresh Milk team directly, visit their Facebook page.

More information about Timed Out can be found here.

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS LAUNCHES MANCHESTER SCHOLARSHIP ONLINE TO MAKE SCHOLARLY MONOGRAPH CONTENT AVAILABLE VIA THE UPSO PLATFORM

Manchester University Press is pleased to announce it has partnered with Oxford University Press to launch Manchester Scholarship Online (MSO) on OUP’s University Press Scholarship Online (UPSO) platform taking advantage of a fully enabled XML environment with the cutting edge search and discovery functionality. Manchester Scholarship Online will provide instant and comprehensive access to the full text of nearly 300 titles of the highest academic quality in 5 subject areas – History; Literature; Political Science; Film; Television and Radio and Society and Culture.

"We are excited to be part of UPSO. Our titles represent the best of new research in the Humanities and Social Sciences and UPSO offers a suitably high-quality platform for our books. We are very pleased that there is such a technologically advanced, well-realised solution to make our content available to scholars all over the world and it's great that our Manchester brand will be so clearly identified with such an excellent platform."

David Rodgers, Chief Executive, Manchester University Press

Responding to increased demand for online scholarly content, UPSO streamlines the research process by making disparately published monographs easily accessible, highly discoverable and fully cross-searchable via one online platform. Research that previously would have required users to jump between a variety of books, and disconnected websites can now be concentrated through a single search engine. 

Manchester Scholarship Online provides an online hub for the best in Manchester University Press monographs while also providing users with the latest set of highly intuitive tools to enable deep search across all the content in the UPSO program. As such, UPSO will be the premier online research tool—for scholars, teachers, graduate and undergraduate students—and an essential resource for all academic libraries.

 Benefits of UPSO for academics, libraries, and partner presses:

·         Provides the highest quality scholarly content across 22 subject areas
·         Includes a vast and growing number of titles 7000+ titles will be available at launch, 652 of which are new titles, with abstracts and keywords at both the book and chapter level for each title
·         All UPSO content is available in XML, which provides deep tagging and better search results. Content can also be saved downloaded to PDF
·         Is fully cross-referenced and cross-searchable, with clickable citations from bibliographies and footnotes, including OpenURL and DOI-linking support
·         Allows users to streamline research through a single online platform
·         Can be easily integrated into library systems and updated frequently with new content
·         Offers full customer support services as well as flexibility and choice in purchasing models
·         Mobile functionality will be available later this year
·         Increase discoverability and usage of university press scholarly materials
·         Offers university presses unique opportunity to create an XML digital workflow and join a highly successful online scholarship platform, reaching the global academic market at low distribution costs

Niko Pfund, President of OUP, Inc., said, “We at OUP are delighted to welcome Manchester University Press to the UPSO fold.  A dynamic publisher across a range of social science and humanities disciplines, Manchester has developed a list of distinction and flair in recent years and we’re pleased to be assisting the press in reaching its many potential readers around the world.”

Manchester University Press

Manchester Scholarship Online
Manchester University Press is one of the largest University Presses in the UK and publishes high quality monographs, textbooks, and journals by leading scholars from around the world for use by academics and students in higher education, as well as the more general audience.

**Ends**

To speak to Manchester University Press contact:

Bethan Hirst | bethan.hirst@manchester.ac.uk | +44 (0)161 275 7746

New Kindle ebooks now available

A new batch of Kindle ebooks is now available to download from the Kindle store. In less than 60 seconds, you could have access to any of the following titles,

• Adapting philosophy: Jean Baudrillard and The Matrix Trilogy
• Beginning Postcolonialism
• Beginning realism
• British Asian fiction: twenty-first-century voices
• Cultures of Violence: Racial violence and the origins of segregation in South Africa and the American South
• Historiography: An introduction
• History and Memory
• The Malleus Maleficarum
• No other way to tell it: Docudrama on Film and Television

New titles will be added to this list over the coming months. Follow us on twitter @ManchesterUP, to receive announcements every time a title is added to the Kindle store.

BATTLE NOW JOINED FOR SCOTLAND’S CONSTITUTIONAL FUTURE

By Alexander Smith (author of Devolution and the Scottish Conservatives)

This week’s launch of the ‘Better Together’ or ‘No’ campaign (as it will be better-known colloquially) for the 2014 Scottish independence referendum means that the battle over Scotland’s constitutional future now begins in earnest.

It comes just weeks after First Minister Alex Salmond launched the ‘Yes’ campaign in an attempt to regain the political momentum after the SNP fell short of its self-declared goals in the local government elections held on the 5^th of May.

Although emerging with more local Councillors and votes than any other political party in Scotland, the Nationalists failed to wrest control of Glasgow City Council after an epic struggle with their ‘auld enemy’, the Scottish Labour Party.

Supporters of Scotland remaining part of the United Kingdom now sense that the tide is turning in their favour.  

It is certainly true that the challenges ahead for the Scottish Nationalists in winning the referendum campaign should not be underestimated.  The latest opinion polling suggests that, after recently peaking at just shy of 40%, support for independence has now dropped to 35% amongst Scottish voters. 

With 55% of the electorate behind them, those opposed to independence remain in the majority.

These figures reinforce a pattern, which has remained consistent since the opening of the Scottish Parliament over a decade ago, that demonstrates no more than about a third of Scots support independence.

To break through this electoral glass ceiling, the SNP needs to maximise the institutional resources at its disposal, in local government, the media, the Scottish Parliament and the wider community. 

That was why their unsuccessful effort to destroy the Labour Party’s powerbase in Glasgow – Scotland’s largest city – mattered so much to the Nationalists.

Convincing sceptical voters to take a leap into the constitutional dark and back independence remains a massive mountain for the SNP to climb between now and the 2014 referendum.

But supporters of the constitutional status quo cannot afford to be complacent.

For now, ‘No’ campaigners may have public opinion on their side.  But a lot could change before the 2014 referendum.

Leading figures from Scotland’s three main Unionist parties will feature prominently in the campaign to keep Scotland part of the United Kingdom. 

Although former UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown will be conspicuous by his absence from the front ranks of the ‘No’ campaign, his former Chancellor of the Exchequer  Alistair Darling will be leading the charge for Labour in Scotland. 

He will be joined by the well-regarded former Liberal Democrat Leader Charles Kennedy as well as the relatively-popular (for a Scottish Tory) Annabel Goldie, who led the Conservatives in the Scottish Parliament until 2011.

 

Whether these three contrasting political personalities can agree to share the media spotlight and successfully work together over the next two years to secure Scotland’s place in the United Kingdom will prove fascinating to watch.  

 

Indeed, it may prove particularly difficult for the ‘No’ campaign to maintain a united front when the SNP at Holyrood rails against austerity and the budget cuts being handed down by the UK Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition Government. 

 

Sharing a platform north of the English border with both the Tories and the now-reviled Liberal Democrats could be especially challenging for Labour politicians sitting on the opposition benches at Westminster.

 

And in Alex Salmond – the undisputed leader of the ‘Yes’ campaign – they will continue to face one of Britain’s most astute, charismatic and emotionally intelligent politicians.  In recent weeks, he has capitalised on confusion amongst the Unionist parties in the run-up to the launch of the ‘No’ campaign and will no doubt mercilessly exploit divisions amongst his opponents over the next two years. 

 

So far, there have been bold claims made on both sides in their efforts to capture newspaper headlines and rally their supporters. 

 

For the ‘Yes’ campaign, Salmond has called for 1 million Scots to sign a pledge in support of independence in the run-up to the referendum.  Meanwhile, the ‘No’ campaign has declared that it will raise a war chest of £1 million to fight the Nationalists in 2014.

 

But big talk calls for a big vision for Scotland’s future, within – or outwith – the United Kingdom.

 

Over the next two years, Salmond will be hoping that the enthusiasm many Scottish voters feel for his government at Holyrood will translate into support for independence.  He also knows that to win this argument, he must articulate a positive vision for the future and tell a story of a Scotland capable of standing – and prospering – on its own two feet.

 

To derail his arguments, Unionist politicians may be tempted to run a negative campaign that seeks to exploit anxieties amongst Scottish voters over the economic uncertainties facing Scotland and the UK as a whole. 

 

They will likely point to the recent experiences of small countries and fragile economies on the periphery of Europe, such as Iceland, Ireland, Greece or Portugal.  And they will ask whether Scotland can really fend for itself financially, especially if as an independent country it can no longer rely on the Barnett formula or lucrative UK defence contracts to subsidise its economy?

 

In addition, the ‘No’ campaign could muddy the waters for the Nationalists further, distracting them with wearying questions of constitutional banality, such as what passports Scots would carry or whether customs would have to be paid at the English border.

 

While it is likely that a focus on the negative consequences and practical uncertainties of independence may help ‘No’ campaigners win the referendum, it is also true that they need to make an equally positive case for Scotland remaining within the United Kingdom. 

 

Without doing so, Unionist politicians may risk sounding overly negative against a confident, clear-eyed and optimistic narrative from Alex Salmond, who will champion the promise of an independent Scotland able to decide and act for itself on the world stage.

 

This could alienate Scottish voters and, in turn, further entrench the SNP as the natural party of government in Scotland – even if it loses the 2014 referendum.

 

Such a result would be disastrous for the Scottish Labour Party, which is hoping to regroup and fight back after seeing off the Nationalists’ formidable challenge to its Glasgow stronghold in May.

The ‘No’ campaign has now been launched and the battle for Scotland’s constitutional future has been joined. 

The stakes remain high for both sides.

The next two years will prove decisive in the history of both Scotland and the United Kingdom – whether or not the former elects to leave the latter in 2014.

Dr Alex Smith is a Senior Leverhulme Research Fellow in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick and the author of ‘Devolution and the Scottish Conservatives: banal activism, electioneering and the politics of irrelevance’ (2011, Manchester University Press).

Dublin launch of 'Eva Gore-Booth'

This week has seen the highly successful launch of our biography of Eva Gore-Booth: An image of such politics by Sonja Tiernan. The event took place at the Mansion House in Dublin and featured a plethora of speakers.

Racism in Football Crowds: An issue of context, not disposition

As England prepare to kick off their Euro 2012 campaign, the tournament is becoming increasingly overshadowed by racist and violent behaviour by a small number of fans. Geoff Pearson, author of An ethnography of English football fans, published by MUP later this summer, considers ‘why does football attract this type of anti-social behaviour?’

  

By Geoff Pearson

In the build up to the 2012 UEFA European Football Championship, the issue of football crowd racism has been high on the media agenda. Images of Polish and Ukrainian fans chanting racial insults, performing Nazi salutes and on one occasion engaging in racist violence were broadcast in a rather sensationalised edition of BBC 1’s Panorama, leading to debates about what action players and referees should take in the event of racist chanting at Euro2012 matches. 

Expressions of racism by spectators at football matches was one area that I looked at during my 15-year ethnographic study of the behaviour of English football fans. From 1995 to 2010 I followed fans of Blackpool, Manchester United and the England national team, spending over 2,000 hours ‘in the field’. As Clifford Geertz warns us, ethnography is invariably microscopic in nature, and ethnographers must therefore be careful about making sweeping generalisations based on their research, which is inevitably only a piece of a much larger jigsaw of cultural behaviour. My research only focussed on a specific sub-culture of fans, supporting three clubs, in one nation, so it cannot claim to be necessarily representative of how all football fans behave. 

However, in terms of attitudes to racism, a common theme was identified across all three clubs for the duration of my research. This was that expressions of racism from football fans were largely determined by context rather than by a disposition of football fans towards that type of behaviour or those type of views. I found nothing to suggest that football fans were inherently more racist in attitude than non-football fans, or that football matches were magnets for racists or extremist political groups. I observed a number of incidents of racist chanting, but these took place only in specific contexts at certain times; for the vast majority of matches, racist chanting or abuse was not apparent.

For example, at Blackpool (between 1995 and 1999) racist chanting occurred that was widespread in terms of participants, but which only took place at a handful of matches a season, was only directed against one specific ethnic minority, and (with one exception) only against two clubs (both local rivals). And yet the fans chanting these songs refrained from engaging in this form of abuse for the rest of the season. With England (1998-2006), racist chants were engaged in by a minority at most match events, but only in specific geographical contexts – mainly pubs and bars and (again with one exception), not in the stadiums themselves. At Manchester United (2001-2010), racist chants were almost unheard of either inside or outside the stadium, and yet some of the fans with whom I carried out this research had racist views and expressed racist sentiments in other contexts.

What seemed to be happening at all three clubs was a form of (usually unspoken) self-policing. Most fans who might express racist views at home, in the workplace or in the pub, simply did not feel comfortable expressing these at football matches, where so much work has been done by groups such as Kick It Out, to make racist chanting seem unacceptable. If the scenes from Poland and Ukraine are typical of domestic football there (and many commentators from those countries suggest otherwise), then what we are seeing is the opposite – that fans with racist standpoints perceive football stadiums to be acceptable socio-geographic contexts in which these views can be expressed without fear of censure from the spectators around them. Of course in the UK, legislative action combined with improved stadium infrastructure and CCTV has also assisted in making football grounds largely free of racist abuse, but this did not stop some of the incidents observed in my research, and my conclusion remains that it is self-policing by the fans that has been most significant in dealing with the phenomenon.  

There is therefore no easy solution for the Polish and Ukrainian authorities in dealing with racism in their domestic football (whether any racism occurs in Euro2012 stadiums is less certain), but the English experience hopefully demonstrates that it is possible to manage racism in football grounds without somehow excluding all those who have racist views or fundamentally changing entrenched social prejudices. Football is not an equality-friendly pursuit; the teams that the fans at Euro2012 will be supporting will consist of players who are all able-bodied, all male, and all of a particular nationality, often as they play out historical political, religious, or economic antagonisms. There is no room for complacency, and in the case of nations like Poland and Ukraine serious improvement is clearly required if racist abuse in their domestic game is to be controlled. However the fact that the vast majority – if not all – of the European Championship games this year will pass off without any serious racist abuse is something that should be celebrated.

Dr Geoff Pearson is a Lecturer at the University of Liverpool’s Management School, and co-chair of the 2012 Ethnography Symposium.

His second book, ‘An Ethnography of English Football Fans: Cans, Cops and Carnivals’ is published by Manchester University Press in July. 

Follow Geoff on Twitter @Geoff_Pearson.
Follow Manchester University Press on Twitter @manchesterUP
Follow the Ethnography Symposium on Twitter ‏ @Ethnography_LK

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The formal presentation of 'Eva Gore-Booth' to the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins

The President endorsed the book, by Sonja Tiernan, as 'a significant publication focussing on a key period in Irish history.'

The book, published by Manchester University Press to coincide with Eva Gore-Booth's birthday, will be officially launched in Ireland next week.

MUP Author to present her book to the President of Ireland

Eva Gore-Booth

MUP author, Sonja Tiernan, will formally present her book Eva Gore-Booth: An Image of Such Politics to the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins at his official residence in Dublin, Áras an Uachtaráin.  

The first dedicated biography of Eva Gore-Booth was released by MUP on 22 May and will be presented to the President on Tuesday 5 June at a special event. This is one the highest honors an Irish author can receive. Photographs of the reception will be posted after the event.

Yilin Press to publish Chinese translation of Marxism and History

The Chinese translation of Marxism and History, Second Edition, by Stephen Rigby, is due to be published next month. 

Foreign translation rights have been bought by Yilin Press, Ltd, a Nanjing based publishing house.  Established in 1989, Yilin Press are one of the most renowned publishers of literature and social sciences in China. They've been praised for their high academic standards by the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, and work closely with UNESCO publishers. They have also recently earned the honour of National Model Publisher.  

We're very pleased that Yilin Press are publishing and distributing Marxism and History in China.