Conference of Irish Geographers 2013 – Galway

This may well have been the last Conference of Irish Geographers that I attend. That is not because I don’t like spending days talking about geography with lots of interesting people but because academic conferences have two characteristics which make it difficult to sustain involvement. Firstly, they offer rarefied atmospheres within which a vision of what it can be to be a geographer paid from the public purse can be realised. Secondly, they are a luxury when the work you do is not directly connected with a university department or a research unit. I am wading my way through a PhD but as you will know I also work as a full time researcher with the Catholic Bishops’ Conference. My employers are understanding (of this at least) of my need for engagement with academic communities more broadly. I have made it clear to them that this engagement feeds into the labour I produce on their behalf. This weekend’s conference in NUIG’s engineering building offered me a glimpse of the kind of geographer I would like to be. Although conferences are not the sum total of an academic’s life, this conference was excellent. I felt like I owed no one there anything.

I had two scheduled contributions to make to the CIG this year. The first was a paper to be delivered on the dereliction mapping project that Stephen and I have coordinated since January. Over pints and walks this last five months, we have managed to build some momentum around this fruitful project. More of this later. The second contribution I made was to take part on a panel discussion on the final day of the conference about Ireland After NAMA, the public geography project based in NUIM. Philip Lawton, Jane Ruffino, Rob Kitchin were the panel’s other members which was convened by Cian O’Callaghan. It was an attempt to gather some new ideas for the blog within the academic geography community. My contribution was to reflect the social media user’s views and cast a critical eye on the purpose of IAN in light of a series of papers (behind paywalls of course) on public geographies. Had it not been the last day of the conference, the audience might have been bigger but who comes to choir practice, right?

The panel was taken in a different direction from that which I expected but that’s OK  It spoke of the use of public data and of the consequences of putting blog posts online which don’t conform to the kind of rigour that is expected of academic papers. That rigour of course is notional, it cannot be abstracted from the everyday politics of academic publishing, much of which has been written about elsewhere. Blogs do not so much represent a ‘step down’ from academic publishing as another means by which you can engage with self-creating publics at the same time. I argued that the broadcast model of academic publishing is dying slowly with the likes of Springer, Sage and others trying in vain to appear relevant by hosting blogs of their own. I compared them with the early attempts by television stations to engage with the online. I also argued that IAN does not do enough to cross platforms, with no activity on their twitter feed, a form used effectively by other blogs of a similar nature. As far as I know, audiences are built not merely spoken at. The Religious Studies Project is an example of this. I think, and I hope I get to blog about this on IAN, that the blog needs to build something decent around several themes and then share it around, with the Spectacle of Defiance and Hope for example. It needs to be porous.

The earlier paper session that was convened  by Stephen and me on community geographies was stimulating, if only for the fact that it combined papers on fishers in Ireland and France with Maori mapping and the political economy of Dublin’s derelict housing. None of these topics are of concern to my doctoral work but I could see how a geographical perspective can be brought to bear. It reminded me again, and this is a personal reflection, that this is where I would like to be: making the work of geography more politically engaged. It is good to do the Show and Tell geography where we marvel at unusual landscapes and cultural formations and say “Wow Geography!” It is better to bring people to the point of being confronted by a geopolitics (on all scales) that cannot be ignored. I think we achieved that with the two papers on derelict sites and houses in Dublin’s north inner city. Like we said in the podcast for Unfinished Business, these places are the spatialised class relations of the city we live in. To see them as places of memory and story telling is one way to look at it. But I always want to ask the deeper question of ‘why here and not there?’

I want more of this please.

Uploaded papers

I have uploaded the papers from the ISASR and CIG conferences over on academia.edu. Do go and have a look. I’ll be reviewing my participation in the Conference of Irish Geographers tomorrow.

Conference season

Conference season is upon us. The time of the year when academics and aspiring academics must forge hard and probing questions about the nature of our very existence and then leave them dangling there. I could fill up the year and empty out my bank account with call for papers  right now. I am committed to three however: the Nordic Geographers’ Conference, the Conference of Irish Geographers (see below) and then the Irish Society for the Academic Study of Religions (ISASR), this year at UCD. I get the sense that the organizers have latched on to some Gathering-geist for their theme. The good thing about conference themes of course is that they are often ignored. Here’s my paper’s abstract, although, of course, the deadline for sending them has been extended:

This paper is concerned with a project to digitise Catholic parishes, carried out by UCC, NUIM and the Irish Bishops’ Conference since 2008. The project faces significant technical challenges: scanning, geo-referencing and tidying up these representations of a Catholic Ireland in retreat is a time-consuming process. In five years, the project has been working through these challenges. The institutional Catholic Church insists that no square kilometre can exist outside of a parish. This carries with it a number of assumptions about local politics as well as the Church’s mission, but also creates difficulties for representing parishes that are not based on territory, for example the Parish of the Travelling People.

 This paper presents an overview of the digitising project. While it outlines some of the technical challenges, it also reflects on the broader epistemological issues raised by the process. Making these maps is not only a question of drawing lines but about people’s understanding of their locality, often more oral than cartographic. What kinds of religious attachments arise when the parish, central to the Irish Catholic experience, is not territorial?

I’m not going with my thesis material this year because right now that is all inside and on paper. To be quite frank, I’m a little bored with thesis material and expect to be more bored with it as the year goes on. This is part of the objectification that is expected of compiling and submitting a thesis for examination, or so I keep telling myself.

In the same theme, Stephen Rigney and I have put together a sessions call for the Conference of Irish Geographers in Galway this May. Here’s the call:

Session Title: Community Geographies

Session Organisers: Stephen Rigney and Eoin O’Mahony, Geography, NUI Maynooth

Session Abstract
Community geography is a wide ranging and often misunderstood area of geographic research. This session is designed to bring together researchers, teachers and community activists who share an interest in community geographies in an Irish context. Papers covering all aspects of community geography including walking geographies, community mapping, public geographic resources are welcome.

Conferences for 2013

Thanks to the part sponsorship of the Geographical Society of Ireland, I am off to the Nordic Geographers’ Conference in June. The conference is in Reykjavik and so much of the first few days will be an attempt to understand why the sun hardly sets. Like some others I am planning for 2013 (CIG, ISASR), planning for these events means bending current research interests to suit conference themes. I’m speculating that this session is the best suited to where I am right now, about one year to go on my thesis. It is only an abstract and I’m hoping the organisers will accept it as a contribution to the workshop. Geographies or emotion and memory connects with my doctoral work but more particularly I want to ground the directly political nature of spatialised memory, if I can. To my mind, so much of that kind of academic work is currently about hand-waving.

“During 2010 and 2011 I conducted fieldwork in four sites of pilgrimage in Ireland and Spain, gathering data from my doctoral thesis. The fieldwork began as an exercise in non-participant observation; it ended on my knees in the rain on an island in a Donegal lake. I began by thinking about how to elicit pilgrim responses to the settings. I ended by walking a week of the Camino in Spain and three days of penitence in Lough Derg, Ireland.

How is memory spatialised and how memories might be theorized remains a significant challenge for geography. Those who provided accounts of walking on the Camino referred to memories in places. Those I spoke with at Lough Derg repeatedly referred to how difficult it was in the past. How does the embodied experience get translated into something spiritual? These little acts of translation are filled with the spatial. But how do places form memories and how are they translated into ‘the spiritual’? How is memory spatialised and what kinds of methods serve this process? My contribution (based on my fieldwork on pilgrimage) hopes to unpack some of these questions.”

This stage

I met with The Supervisor for about an hour yesterday. It was to go through some notes he had made on two of the empirical chapters that I had written in August. He had some very nice things to say about my grasp of theory and my way of communicating my ideas. That is reassuring at this stage. If there is one thing I have learned by now it is that taking compliments about PhD writing should be taken as what they are; move on with them in hand. The doctoral thesis is a piece of work to be done, plain and simple. If, at three years in, I didn’t know that, I’d still be languishing in the fifth circle of hell thinking about the differences between post-materiality and non-representational thought.

He also made some very good observations on the way that I organise my thoughts on the page. I have a tendency to write too many words: 5 when 3 might do. I also tend to avoid stating my principal arguments at the beginning and developing them with the evidence that I have gathered. I still think that there’s an academic manner in which to write and this is often best served, mistakenly in my view, by name dropping and quote hopping. At all costs, I avoid my own voice in the text and in any other passage of text beyond the mere descriptive. Sure, isn’t that what a blog is for? On the plus side, I write engagingly and thread through the ethnographic material gathered in a manner that tells a good story.

The doctoral thesis is not my life’s work. If there is one thing I would tell myself of late 2009 right now it is this: the thesis will end and your life will go on. It does not define who I am. No amount of theoretical noodling will do that. I think that is a distinct advantage that a 39 year old doctoral student has over a 24 year old one. I see fellow students struggling with defining themselves through their theses as if it is a natural step from Master’s level to doctoral work into an academic job. I thought years ago that this was the route to my own happiness. It is not. Far more can be done with a doctoral thesis than pleasing the academic canon, by citing all the right folk. I’m not alienated from that approach: OH has tread a path successfully. Being a member of a university’s teaching staff may not be for me. Not because those job opportunities no longer exist but because the decent educator role is now so devalued in this devaluing economy that the application of ‘wot I learnt at collidge’ means more than that. A friend and I are planning a route to the local elections in 2014.

In the next 12 month period I want to adapt my writing style, prepare a thesis for examination (after all, it is as much preparing for an examination as anything else) and then move on. OH has a well-earned sabbatical period from February and I hope that I can take some extended leave from my job in the latter end of 2013 to complete this thesis. The Supervisor also confirmed my belief that writing this thesis is also about meeting the expectation of the external examiner. If that’s the case, it makes it much more mundane an exercise than I thought it was three years ago.

Faith, religion and the secular 3

Part 3 of a short series of posts on the meaning of the secular. Let me know what you think in the comments. Thank you.

“Get the Church out of education”
Following the publication of the documents commonly known as the Murphy and Ryan Reports, the above exhortation was frequently heard and read. There are many things to be said about such an opinion. Firstly, it implies that we understand what the Church is: it is a unified mental construct which is personified by the priest standing at the top of the classroom testing children on the penny catechism. Secondly, it implies that an organisation founded on principles other than some instrumentally oriented purpose to education has no right to be involved in the education of children and younger adults. Thirdly, it implies an audience that will hear such an appeal and understand its passion and meaning. Fourthly, and most crucially it makes that appeal to an authority. That authority is the state itself. William Connolly, the US theologian, charts the rise of the idolatrous nature of the nation state and contends that this state becomes an object of devotion in itself. It becomes the source and not just the object of public devotion. One of the significant outcomes of this form of idol worship is the tendency to construe the values of the state as being the values of all those within its territory. To paraphrase MacIntyre, to become modern subjects we must cast off the archaic notion that we might be asked to kill in the name of God and yet we’re quite happy to do so to defend an oil company.

The secular modern subject must be seen to leave aside the things of the past: a belief in something higher than himself, the notion that we are connected by the divine, that there is a soul that lives on after our corporeal death. These are the things that distinguish the modern person from those of more primitive civilisations. Not only must the modern subject leave these behind, but one should declare it so, preferably in public. In Ireland today, there is a form of secularism which characterises the religious as vestigial: something that we should have left behind in the 1980s. This is primarily based on an understanding of the present moment as separate from this past, with a buffer of the liberating and materially enriching Celtic Tiger between the two. I don’t want to mischaracterise this form of secularism because its most significant outcome is the definition of the boundaries of a new public of We All. In Warner’s terms, this is a logic that actively and politically minoritises faith so that it may be safely contained within the confines of the ‘religious’. In effect, this form of secularism brackets the faithful as backward until such time as We All changed into the modern subjects that are known (and loved, voraciously) today. This is a simplification of more complex cultural forms but the point remains valid. To be a modern subject means casting aside all those things that prevent us from moving forward; religious faith is one of these.

The minoritising logic of state adherence valorises an uncontestable freedom. Such a freedom exists in an ideal state but many things stand in the way of our attainment of it. The vision of freedom is one where ‘our’ collective vision is unencumbered by things that ‘keep us’ in the past: religious faith being the primary object. Those that deny ‘us’ that freedom include people who insist on drawing forth their religious authority, an authority that ‘we’ thought had been successfully contained by becoming modern. It is not that religious faith and a spiritual understanding of life is not valid (although that too is present) it just needs to know its place in the public sphere and in society. Religion needs to be minoritized so that ‘we’ can see what true freedom means, unencumbered by myths of arks, floods and pillars of salt. In short, religion needs to know its place, and then assume that place.

But this is a set of understandings not based on the neutrality of freedom at all. Secularisation is an active political process, frequently misunderstood as linear and static. The construction of what is the secular constantly shifts but in our present moment is adhered to a powerful sense of what the state needs to do to actively minoritise specific beliefs in order to valorise others. More dangerously still, if we are to believe some current political movements, the state itself is in thrall to productive forces that see only profit as the motor of human endeavour and not the divine, the graceful, the authentic. In mass media terms, and in the public sphere more broadly, faith is something that ‘the church’ does. It can do that on its own time, goes the narrative, in its own place. If the proper sphere of the Church is the building known as the church and this is breached, there are specific ways in which that can be traced. The authority of faith and the religious has been rigorously codified within the terms of state’s legal juridical frameworks. I contend in this analysis that the Church in Ireland has been secularised. In Ireland, this is made manifest through public deliberations on graveyard regulation, primary school curricula, the meaning of a child’s education, access to marriage rights, child protection, nursing home care, heritage maintenance. The framework tightly regulates the authority of the Catholic Church in Ireland and other religious institutions. Appeals to such a framework are made every week and are the content of politics on both sides of the border in Ireland. I argue here that the state is currently the main authorising agent for such appeals.

Faith, religion and the secular 2

This is part 2 of a three part posting from an unpublished essay from summer 2012. 

Religion and the public sphere

Central to the marginalisation of the religious and the spiritual is their position within the public sphere. This set of concepts, arising principally from the work of German sociologist Jürgen Habermas, posits that the development of places for democratic deliberation has been one of the defining features of modernity. Habermas extended his analysis from the cafes of 19th century middle Europe to the development of German post-war cultural configurations. In short, the public sphere for Habermas was a place where people met, discussed matters of state and society and agreed or disagreed with each other before deliberating through democratic politics. While access to and resources attributed by the public sphere were always differential for Habermas, his central idea lacked a reflection of political developments that took place in Europe after 1968. Later analyses drew attention to an unconsidered role of women, ethnic minorities and the disabled in Habermas’ seminal work. However, for the purposes of this essay, I want to refer to the critique of the public sphere provided by Michael Warner. For a public sphere to exist at all, argues Warner, a public must be created; only some are authorised to create and constitute such a public. To publish newspapers, periodicals and journals (and now online and through television) one must construe oneself to have an audience to whom one appeals. From this arises an authority to address a public, a mass of people to whom one addresses matters of concern. For example, for a journal such as The Furrow to succeed it must assume for itself some measure of an audience ‘out there’ which is constitutive of a public. That this audience declines in number over time is largely incidental to the force that its ideas are given in reconfigurations of power that take place across that same time period.

Extending out from Warner’s critique of Habermas’ understanding of the public sphere, I want to paint a picture of an environment within which we can detect a secular public sphere in Ireland today. In such a picture, consideration must be given to the authority currently constituted by the Catholic Church both in Ireland and across Europe. In Spain for example, the authority of the Church must deal with an anti-clericalism which has its roots in the first half of the 19th century. In England, the authority of the Church is within the context of it being a ‘minority’. In Ireland, where national identity is identified by others and intimately bound with Catholicism, little distinction is made in the public sphere between the general concept of religion and Catholic identities. Critiques of faith, religious belief or the Church itself arise from a general understanding of the right and proper place of religion in society. In Ireland, where the privatisation of religious belief does not hold much currency, being in public encompasses many different types of practice: the blessing of boats before a fishing season, devotion to Our Lady at grottos, the Angelus on the public broadcaster. Each of these, in their own scales, contributes to a sense of who the public is and is not. How and where these practices are authorised, and more crucially by whom, is one of the defining characteristics of religion in the public sphere.

For example, in the consideration of who can get married and where, the authority to be involved in this consideration is dependent upon the construal of a massed public, whether that public be defined as Catholics or otherwise. In this sense there is no gay marriage lobby, nor is there a liberal agenda at play. Instead, the ground upon which the public discussion about gay marriage is held is as important as the central question of the morality of the state’s proposed legislation. Much public discussion (it should be stressed online as well as offline) will therefore focus upon the Catholic Church’s right to be involved in the discussion. Very often this public discussion addresses its audience as sharing this understanding of the right and proper place of religious faith. If this be on the basis of ‘the church should keep its opinions to itself’ then this will find resonances in other parts of a public discussion, whether that has authority or not. In a further example, the Church’s views on a range of matters are often solicited at particular times of the year, e.g. the cost of clothes for the Sacrament of First Holy Communion. The journalist and editor conceive of the Church’s authority to comment on such matters and so it seems entirely appropriate for a comment to appear in the national newspaper. The crucial difference between these two examples however is the bracketing of the latter as a religious issue and the reservation of the former as one related to state power.

The public sphere is made up of many audiences and ideas, some of which are materially reproduced. Secularisation of the public sphere is thus not a process that moves in one direction from more to less religious. The secular is more properly constituted as an on-going deliberation on what limits are placed on certain forms of authority and how that authority is managed. For Asad and for others, one cannot talk about the secular without understanding the role of state formation processes and the legal structures put in place to manage these processes. The secular public sphere therefore is not one that disregards religion and the spiritual entirely. The state too has its rites: national anthems, flags and investiture ceremonies. Instead, the secular public sphere is one in which the nominally-framed ‘religious’ is negotiated into some places and not into others. This pervades the most mundane aspects of people’s lives, e.g. the statement that ‘we have only one life to live’ as well as the most serious, e.g. how children are educated, instrumentally and morally.

Part 3: “Get the Church out of education”