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Publication The importance of being present: Mentors as "presence practitioners"(Routledge, 2022-04-29) Brady, Bernadine; Dolan, PatThe concept of ‘presence’ has been frequently used with reference to the quality of relationships in health and pastoral care. In this chapter, we argue that the concept of presence is also of value in helping us to understand quality youth mentoring relationships. According to Baart’s (2002), conceptualisation, the ‘presence approach’ means that the worker or volunteer is ‘there for others’ without focusing directly on problem solving. Presence practitioners take time to get to know the person and their environment deeply and strive to affirm the fundamental dignity of the person. While not being problem-focused, these approaches may lead to problem solving. The chapter draws on the findings of a qualitative study with young people in care undertaken by the authors and existing literature on youth mentoring to highlight the relevance of Baart’s theory for our understanding of youth mentoring relationships.Publication Challenges, opportunities, and future directions in narrative inquiry(Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2020-10-30) Moran, Lisa; Reilly, Kathy; Brady, BernadineThis volume brings together a diversity of approaches to narrative and narrative inquiry in research with children and young people, exploring and showcasing how these concepts are understood and applied across a range of disciplines and research contexts. In this respect, the volume underlines the fluidity and diversity of narrative inquiry as a trans-disciplinary research field, with the capacity to yield highly nuanced understandings of children and young people’s everyday realities.Publication Introduction: Narrative research with children and young people(Palgrave Macmillan, Cham, 2020-10-30) Moran, Lisa; Reilly, Kathy; Brady, BernadineStorytelling is a universally recognisable genre inherent in all human life. The ability to narrate transcends difference, providing a space from where stories are made and unmade, through the voices (however manifest) of storytellers. The capacity to narrate does not discriminate by gender, age or class, nor is it limited contextually. Instead, stories prioritise the voice(s) and perspective(s) chosen of and by storytellers and by extension, every story is laden with silence(s), elements of life and context that remain untold, suppressed and/or, are absent.Publication A critical analysis of early intervention in the Irish child protection and welfare system(Routledge, 2024-09-30) Devaney, Carmel; Canavan, John; Mc Gregor, CarolineAlthough early intervention is now established as a strategic orientation and operational component of many Child Protection and Welfare (CPW) systems the underpinning research field is as yet diffuse and underdeveloped. In spite of the intuitive value of these approaches, policy makers and managers remain resistant to a fundamental value shift or significant investment towards early intervention. Based on a reflective account of an evaluation of an early intervention practice model in the context of Ireland’s statutory CPW system, this chapter identifies learning on undertaking rigorous evaluation research in this areas and explores the challenge of generating evidence about early intervention to serve as the basis of policy and practice change. The chapter firstly frames early intervention conceptually, inclusive of its value as an organising principle for services, its parameters, and boundaries, as well as the challenges in establishing its evidence base. We also consider its application in CPW systems responses to the needs of children and young people, and the risks they face. Because of its significance for practice, we include attention to the literature on risk and risk assessment here, with an emphasis on the challenges of evidencing risk management practices based on early intervention and prevention of harm. The second part of the chapter offers a case study based on longitudinal mixed method evaluation of ‘Meitheal’, an innovative, early intervention model, operated by Tusla, Ireland’s Child and Family Agency. Here we describe and contextualise the Meitheal, presenting a real-world examination of early intervention in practice drawing on selected findings from the research. In the third part of the chapter, we reflect on the technical issues involved in implementing the evaluation study, before continuing with consideration of the challenges in establishing an evidence base for early intervention, its place in the CPW system and challenges in sustainability.Publication Surviving necropolitical developments amid democratic disinformation: A pandemic perspective from Brazil(Bristol University Press, 2022-10-03) Khoo, Su-Ming; Floss, MayaraThe global COVID-19 pandemic poses evolving dilemmas of disease, death, disability, and economic and socio-political inequalities and injustices, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus continues to spread and evolve variants. This contribution reflects on the development of disinformation within reactionary populist politics in Brazil, with serious implications for the national health system, (SUS), and global public health. Official misinformation and disinformation (e.g. promoting unproven `early treatment¿) impacts public understanding and health behaviours in a pandemic, negatively impacting public health systems, personnel and capacities to prevent and minimise harm, while deepening harmful, unequal and disequalizing effects. We argue that development and global health ethics warrant urgent and direct attention to survival in a context of a burning public sphere. Disinformation and necropolitics must be countered using rights-based health systems universalism, giving equal attention to both the public, democratic and scientific, health bases of public health.Publication (Post) human rights, poverty and inequality: problems of algocracy, pharmocracy and chemocracy(Edward Elgar Publishing, 2021-09) Khoo, Su-MingThis chapter explores new questions for human rights in a context of extreme poverty and inequalities of income, wealth, political power and biological life. Minimalist and contradictory narratives of poverty and inequality fail human rights by failing to offer coherent bases for vindicating basic minimum rights and realizing social justice. Minimalist, over-optimistic framings of poverty predominate, denying substantive rights universalism and masking inequality s power effects. Poverty is important, since gross deprivations devastate the basic floor of rights universalism. Large and widening economic inequalities undermine solidarity and general duties to systematically uphold and substantiate human rights universality. Since post-human threats reflect widening inequality, human rights duties ought to include constraining extreme wealth. Wealth concentration and its main mechanism, financialization, pose major threats to human rights and humanity in general. This chapter discusses three posthuman threats: algocracy, pharmocracy and chemocracy, which are underwritten by interests and instrumentalities of wealth itself, threatening each generation of human rights with disequalizing, exploitative and dehumanizing outcomes. Political agency has been manipulated and distorted, and human bodies and biological life have been exploited, injured, poisoned and killed. Focusing on poverty eradication alone does too little to protect human rights, let alone advance them. To protect both humanity and rights, human rights must resist the appropriation of the logic of rights by nonhuman entities and address the considerable political, human and ecological harms already inflictedPublication Researching One An-Other(Institute of Public Administration, 2000-01-01) Byrne, Anne[No abstract available]Publication Epistolary research relations: Correspondences in anthropological research: Arensberg, Kimball, and the Harvard-Irish Survey, 1930 1936(University of Notre Dame Press, 2017-10) Byrne, AnneIn public and personal archives scattered throughout the United States lie the professional correspondences and personal letters of the Harvard-Irish Survey research team (1930 36) that came to Ireland in the early years of the twentieth century to conduct an archaeological and anthropological study of a modern society (Byrne, Edmondson, and Varley 2001; Byrne and O Mahony 2012 and 2013). The published works of the Survey shaped the evolution of Irish archaeology and social anthropology. The physical anthropology publications receive less attention, but Family and Community in Ireland ([1940] 2001) by Conrad Arensberg and Solon Kimball is a classic a controversial, frequently cited ethnographic study of Irish rural family and community life. Along with Family and Community in Ireland, Arensberg (1910 97) and Kimball (1909 82) published on methodological and theoretical issues introducing comparative, field-based community studies as a substantially new anthropology, making a significant contribution to the interdisciplinary study of modern European and North American societies (Comitas 1999, 811). In Ireland, Arensberg and Kimball devised a new paradigm for studying culture and community, characterized as the intensive observation of the minutiae of social life, and it had far-reaching effects. Focusing on the social anthropology strand of the Harvard-Irish Survey, this chapter examines unpublished professional and private letters of the first visit of an American team of anthropologists and archaeologists to Europe. How letters are deployed in the Survey, who writes to whom, what is relayed, requested, or refused: these themes inform the dynamics of research relations and the deployment of a novel research strategy providing a focus on informants voices, perspectives, and practices in service of the Survey. A narrative approach to the analysis of letters is introduced. Two slim brown-paper folders, frayed with age, lie on my desk. Bundles of correspondence on brittle yellowing sheets of paper of various sizes, neatly labeled and categorized, are inside. Some letters are typewritten on headed note paper, letter characters paler here, darker there, reflecting the uneven spread of ink on typewriter ribbon or the varying force of fingers striking typewriter keys. The day, month, and year are duly noted, the address of the recipient clearly placed on the top left-hand corner of the page, followed by a singular Dear Sir. The content is closely crowded onto the page, utilizing all available space, signed off with the flourish of a handwritten signature, bold in blue ink. Handwritten letters in pencil on pages torn from school copybooks have their places in the archive too, carefully numbered page by page. Some bundles of letters are substantial, indicating regular exchanges of correspondence, perhaps maintaining old or building new relationships. Others are one-off invitations to attend events or a kind acknowledgment of books received from secretaries of learned societies and state bodies. The personality and character of the writer is suggested by the quality and shape of the paper, the color of the ink, the size and form of the handwriting, the forceful expression of ideas, the colloquial use of language, the formality of tone, the regretful refusal, the polite inquiry, the gossip conveyed, the rude interjection, the news of the day. The immediacy of the voices and the urgency of the content are as compelling as the materiality of the physical presence of the letters, working to dissolve the illusion of time between now and then. Preserved for more than eighty years, these aged, fragile letters were intended by Arensberg and Kimball to be kept and read at some future time, perhaps by themselves or by an unknown person. I have acquired Survey letters, diaries, and documents from public and private archives. Transcribing and reading these letters aloud provokes the imagination and pushes the mind into a different space, time, era. What can they, these writers of letters, tell us, the unintended recipients, the not-addressed audience? How can these letters inform us about the experiences of the unseasoned young American anthropologists, Arensberg and Kimball, as they set about their research tasks in the towns and countryside of 1930s Ireland? What else can we learn from letters in the archive?Publication Rural tourism and cultural identity in the west of Ireland(Cork University Press, 1993) Byrne, Anne; Edmondson, Ricca; Fahy, Kathleen[No abstract available]Publication Women in Irish society: Introduction(Beyond the Pale Publications, 1997) Byrne, Anne; Leonard, MadeleineThis text contains 28 chapters on gender-based social science research in Ireland from a feminist perspective. Accompanied by introductions by the authors, sections include Women, Power and Politics; Hidden Lives; Rural Women and Farming; Women and Violence; Women and Reproduction; Women and Mental Health; Women and the Welfare System; Women and Work; Women and Education.Publication Familist ideologies and difficult identities(Macmillan, 1999-12-01) Byrne, Anne[No abstract available]Publication Single women in Ireland: a re-examination of the sociological evidence(Beyond the Pale Publications, 1997) Byrne, Anne; Leonard, Madeleine[No abstract available]Publication Gender and sustainability in rural Ireland(Routledge, 2016-11-15) Byrne, Anne; Shorthall, SallyThis chapter considers if and how gender is relevant for the sustainability of rural Ireland. When we refer to rural sustainability we mean the continuation of the economic, social, institutional and environmental components of rural life. There are many ways in which we could approach a chapter on gender and rural sustainability. Mobility, education, employment, social class, health care and practically every social structure impacts on gender and the sustainability of rural areas. As these topics are covered in other chapters in this book, we have chosen to focus on gender relations and the sustainability of agriculture and rural development programmes. We review the existing body of research on these topics and consider what they tell us about rural sustainability. The literature review demonstrates how initially research reported gender differences but did not analyse them in any depth. The next phase saw scholars starting to examine the role of women on farms and latterly the role of women in rural development programmes. More recently, scholars have turned their attention to the implications for men of changing gender roles in rural areas. It is clear that any renegotiation of women s roles has implications for men s roles, and vice versa. Much of the research we will review focuses on whether a particular construction of a gender role negatively impacts on another. Our rationale is that a good quality of life for men and women seems central to the sustainability of rural living. We conclude by identifying contemporary considerations regarding gender and rural sustainability.Publication The health and economic costs of violence against women and girls on survivors, their families and communities in Ghana(IntechOpen, 2019-10-08) Alvarado Merino, Gina; Scriver, Stacey; Mueller, Jennifer L.; O’Brien-Milne, Lila; Fenny, Ama P.; Duvvury, NataViolence against women and girls (VAWG) is a worldwide phenomenon. Globally, 35% of women have experienced physical or sexual intimate partner violence (IPV) or non-partner sexual violence in their lives. VAWG is estimated to cost the global economy about US$ eight trillion. Most studies on violence in Ghana discuss domestic violence or some forms of sexual violence but lack a comprehensive view of VAWG and its costs and impacts on communities, businesses, and the national economy. Our international consortium undertook a mixed-methods study to estimate the economic and non-economic losses caused by VAWG. We surveyed 2002 women and 805 male and female employees and conducted 24 in-depth interviews (IDIs) and 8 focus group discussions (FGDs). The study finds that costs of VAWG are high and multi-fold. It estimates costs to health, social relationships, and productivity for individuals, their families, and communities. Individual well-being and capabilities are impacted through absenteeism or missed care work and mental health issues. VAWG deepens household poverty by out-of-pocket expenditures that arise to address medical and legal issues that result from violence. Additionally, VAWG affects the vibrancy of communities as women’s participation and leadership decline. These costs accumulate to have profound effects on the Ghanaian economy and society.Publication Finding ‘Room to Manoeuvre’: Gender, agency and the family farm(Rowman and Littlefield, 2014) Byrne, Anne; Duvvury, Nata; Macken-Walsh, Áine; Watson, TanyaWomen on Irish farms have been a subject of feminist analysis over the past two decades. Salient themes in the literature on farm women have been the constraints of patriarchal agriculture (O'Hara 1997; Shortall, 2004), the invisibility of women's farm work (O Hara 1998), gender inequalities in ownership of farm assets (Watson et al. 2009), increasing professionalisation of farmwomen outside of agriculture (Kelly and Shortall 2002; Hanrahan 2007); and the need to investigate and theorise property ownership as an emerging concern. For Shortall (2004) land ownership is the critical factor underpinning male domination of the occupational category farmer , determining the power differentials between men and women in Irish family farming. Within this research nexus, the central concern of our paper is to explore how women s property ownership acts to disrupt gender relations within family farms in Ireland. Recent evidence suggests that gender inequality in property ownership continues to be a reality within Ireland. The 1991 Census of Agriculture indicated that only ten percent of women owned farms, with more than half (56 percent) inheriting farms on the death of their spouses, positioning widows as the most likely group to be property owners (NDP GEU 2003, 22). The 2010 Census indicates that women own just over 12 percent of farms, representing little historical change. Despite this continued restricted access and limited opportunities for women to acquire ownership of farms and farmland, we regard instances where farmwomen do own property in their own right critical for understanding future implications for farm family agriculture. Does women s property ownership disturb gender relations on the farm? If so, what are the pathways of the impact on gender relations? Does it enhance agency for women in decisions made about the family farm? How is the potential discomfort of the woman property owner as an independent agent negotiated? In selected cases of farmwomen s experiences of ownership and management of farm property, we examine women s agency in the context of the complex relational dynamics that take place in family farming. Reflecting on the importance of choice, we use an empirical approach that is centred on biographical narrative analysis to explore how women negotiate farm family dynamics, gendered (and generational) power relations. We understand gender as a sociological and social identity category that can be analysed, disturbed and disrupted and is constituted and reconstituted within power relations (Pini 2008). Taking note of O Hara s (1998, 22) claim that there is always room to manoeuvre within the frame of family farming, and understanding women as active participants in consciously shaping own lives and identities, our analytical concern is primarily with the experiences of farmwomen as they negotiate the management and ownership of family farm property in contemporary Ireland.Publication Ireland's abortion regime on the world stage: Performative acts and the claim to state sovereignty in foreign policy discourse(LIT Verlag, 2017) Reilly, Niamh[No abstract available]Publication Single women in story and society(Manchester University Press, 2014-11) Byrne, Anne[No abstract available]Publication The methodological issues in the assessment of the quality and benefits of formal youth mentoring interventions - the case of the Czech Big Brothers Big Sisters/Pět P(Routledge, 2020-09-07) Brumovská, Tereza; Seidlová Málková, GabrielaMentoring is a social phenomenon naturally occurring in the networks of human relationships. The systematic implementation of mentoring principles into the mentoring directed programmes creates a powerful tool for social systems in modern societies. Research on the quality of mentoring relationships and on the efficacy of mentoring programmes helps to understand principles that mediate children s and youths positive development and well-being. Of course, evaluations of the efficacy of mentoring programmes is needed to secure powerful strategies of using mentoring services in social and educational systems. Until now most of the research on mentoring programmes efficiency was conducted following the principles of quantitative methodological approaches. The results of these studies bring the assurance on the importance and benefits of mentoring programmes for prevention or even for intervention on various kinds of developmental issues of vulnerable children or youths. At the same time, there is a growing interest in research on exploring mechanisms bringing or mediating benefits of mentoring programmes for various kinds of target groups. We argue that the qualitative and interpretative methodological approaches are especially suitable for this kind of research. Besides, to demonstrate the evolution of the methodology preferred in research on mentoring we present the case of the research studies conducted in the Big Brothers Big Sisters/Pet P youth mentoring programme between 2003 2017 in the Czech Republic. As a country, the Czech Republic has a relatively short tradition in mentoring research, thus intensively absorbing experience from international research in the field. We outline the story about the research on assessing the efficacy of mentoring programmes starting from quantitative questionnaire surveys up to the preference of the longitudinal interpretive phenomenological analysis study to determine mentoring relationships and interventions and their quality. We conclude the chapter with recommendations for future research and praxis in the field.Publication Women, gender and international human rights: An overview(Springer, 2019-06-26) Reilly, NiamhThis chapter reviews the many achievements of the last 25 years − expressed in the proliferation of laws, norms, and mechanisms − to advance the human rights of women and LGBTQI people and considers in five subsections what is required to achieve their implementation. First, it appraises the major achievement of ending the invisibility of myriad forms of gender-based violence (GBV) and expanding the contexts in which GBV is understood as a complex violation of human rights and, in some situations, a war crime and crime against humanity. Second, it traces a growing consensus that implementation of the human rights of women is inextricable from putting into practice recognition of the indivisibility of human rights. Third, it considers fresh discussions of the supposed binary of “universal human rights” versus and “culture,” concluding that the construct denies the gender harms perpetuated by patriarchal cultures across “the West” and distracts attention from the imperative that human rights implementation must be context-specific in every part of the world. Fourth, it is argued, any twenty-first-century agenda for the human rights of women must proceed from a critical, intersectional perspective – one that recognizes that different women and LGBTQI people experience gender-based disadvantage or oppression differently. Moreover, the concepts of intersectionality and vulnerability deployed in this endeavor must focus on the state and non-state actions required to create conditions that ameliorate vulnerability, and in which differently situated women can access and enjoy their human rights. Finally, implementation of commitments to the human rights of women must address root causes – that is, seek to transform the institutions and structural conditions that perpetuate the disadvantages and unequal power relations that foster vulnerability to abuses of human rights in the first place.Publication Secularism, feminism and the public sphere(Oxford University Press, 2017-02-23) Reilly, Niamh[No abstract available]