International research has highlighted the crucial role of schools in the integration of children. Schools reflect and transmit dominant cultural norms both explicitly through the curriculum and implicitly. In this context immigrant students are found to often occupy an ambiguous position within the Irish educational system, whether as ‘outsiders’ or as the children of comparatively highly educated parents in possession of the kinds of social and cultural capital valued by the school system. The ‘mismatch’, or cultural distance, between home and school cultures may vary across nationalities or linguistic groups as well as by social class. The chapter specifically focuses on factors that determine whether or not immigrants are seen as ‘outsiders’, such as English-language fluency, country of origin, immigrant status, location, and so on. It evidences how some groups of young people are particularly marginalised and experience exclusion in the Irish education system and beyond.

Opinion columns and pseudo-scientific articles exploring immigration and integration are now the primary channels for overt racism in the Irish media, and their proliferation prompts a necessary exploration of their established form and growing influence. A range of columnists regularly vilify Muslims, Roma and Travellers, particularly drawing on ideas of barbarism, cultural genocide and population control, and defiantly testing the legal limits of incitement to hatred. Constructions of Irish culture as monolithic in the face of an immigration regime which imports failed multiculturalism and racism necessarily position migrants as continuing outsiders and the creators of their own exclusion. Clear connections can be made between racist discourses in Irish media and violence against migrants and ethnic minorities. This chapter explores how Irish media outlets are facilitating and promoting the normalisation of racist discourses, and the implications of this for the construction of debates which take seriously the challenges of integration in practice and in the context of growing anti-immigrant racism.

In Chapter 5, I move to consider some of the challenges of waiting lists and associated targets that configure clinical psychology. Taking the position that targets operate as what Nikolas Rose calls a ‘technology of government’, the chapter indicates some of the affective and material consequences of their instantiation. In particular, I show how clinical psychologists rework processes of entry into therapy, and the aims and character of care, in order to meet – and sometimes accommodate – targets. While professional autonomy is often regarded as being constrained through these technologies of government, practitioners nevertheless find ways of performing autonomous action in a matter that can advantage some patients over others. I illuminate how shifts in psychological care in response to targets could recast clinical psychologists’ relationships to their work and with patients, with implications for the subjectivities that are (not) assembled through therapy.

Introductory in nature, the chapter outlines different forms of globalisation and their relevance to higher education. It highlights some of the relevant literature on globalisation and, while discussing the ramifications of this phenomenon for higher education, it cites some of the most relevant literature on this specific relationship: globalisation and HE. It concludes with a summary of what is expected of this book by introducing the themes of the subsequent chapters.

This chapter focuses on immigrants’ experience of racism and racially motivated anti-social behaviour in social housing in the Republic of Ireland. In recent years the Immigrant Council of Ireland (ICI) has identified a notable increase in the number of reports of individuals and families experiencing racial harassment in their homes or in the vicinity compared with previous years. Almost half (48 per cent) of the incidents reported in housing took place in social housing. The findings of the quantitative and qualitative analysis of data gathered from the ICI’s Racist Incidents Support and Referral Service during 2013 and 2014 are presented in order to paint a detailed picture of the victims’ experiences of racism in social housing in Ireland. The second part of the chapter presents the findings of a case study analysing the policy and practice of one local authority where there has been a response to complaints of racism and an absence of data collection. The chapter demonstrates that the exclusion immigrants suffer is twofold: the immediate impact of harassment, and the insufficient institutional responses to it.

Much research on in vitro fertilization (IVF), assisted reproduction and gamete donation has centred on their medical, legal and sociocultural processes and meanings. Here, quite frequently, little attention is paid to the donors themselves other than in the context of their selection. However, donation is a corporeal process in which body parts are produced and given or sold. This chapter analyses the bioprecarities that derive from the process of sperm donation. It draws on empirical online and social media materials, as well as other texts, in which men who donate sperm for the purposes of assisted reproduction articulate their sense of the meaning of this process and considers responses to the revelation of sperm donation from people both known and unknown to the donor. These responses show how sperm donation as a form of intimate labour in which a man also parts with somatic material produced by his body, and involving negotiated journeys, is managed and talked about. In the chapter I argue that responses to sperm donation indicate deeply gendered views of reproductive intimate labour in which a sense of bioprecarity masks strongly gendered views of sexuality, intimacy and reproduction.

Chapter 3 explores and historicises attempts to revise the 1983 Mental Health Act of England and Wales. I focus on the traffic between: first, clinical affirmations about the need to enhance access to treatment – increasingly understood to be psychological therapy – for people diagnosed with a personality disorder; and, second, political aims to detain criminal offenders living under this diagnosis for longer periods. The rewriting of the Act, and the significance of personality disorder among these, represent a key yet underacknowledged moment in the unfolding story of access to psychological care, while also demonstrating how improved access is not an unproblematic social good. The chapter demonstrates how legal and professional discourses contoured each other such that an understanding of personality disorder as treatable through psychological intervention was produced. This improved the accessibility of therapy for some people; however, this was often as a consequence of their involuntary confinement.

In this short Coda, I describe some of the ambivalences that come with an ethic of access. I reflect on the procedural and ethical challenges that can be propelled by ostensibly progressive healthcare initiatives, and consider what could perhaps be done about these. In light of the arguments made throughout the preceding chapters, I decline to advance discrete recommendations in what is already an overdetermined policy space. Rather, I urge an ethos of reconfiguration within mental healthcare that fosters variability and mutability in services through direct and ongoing engagement with communities. In so doing, psychological practitioners might be enabled to better comprehend, articulate, and serve the needs of those with whom they undertake therapeutic work.

This chapter explores the intimate labour performed by surrogate mothers in the globalized fertility market. Using her body and providing her womb and uterus, blood and sweat, the surrogate mother engages in a highly embodied labour (Pande, 2010). At the same time, the non-genetic relation between the foetus and the surrogate is used by clients and clinics to reduce the woman to a ‘gestational carrier’ and a ‘mere vessel’ (Pande, 2010). By drawing on interviews with Thai women enrolled in transnational commercial surrogacy, this chapter highlights the surrogate mothers’ precarious and vulnerable position in a process of cross-cultural biotechnological intervention with inherently differential power relations among the stakeholders.

This chapter examines the paradoxical interplay of humanist and eugenic ideology underlying early Swedish psychiatric and medical studies on transgender persons. The chapter conceptualizes trans patients in psychiatric institutions in the 1960s as persons who exchange their intimate labour in return for receiving medical care and legal recognition from the state. Drawing on unpublished archival material and published references to patient case files, the chapter argues that the interplay between the trans patients’ own agency and the normalizing power of medical research generated the scientific expert knowledge that functioned as the basis for the world’s first legislation on the legal status of ‘transsexuals’ and the first state-enforced sterilization legislation of transgender persons in 1972. Drawing on Foucault, the chapter contends that in this context, normalizing power over the temporality of the subject operates both at the level of the body and the population. Yet, historical trans patients are not merely passive subjects of power/knowledge. Instead, the chapter emphasizes that the complex intimate labour of transgender patients can be regarded as a form of resistance and counter-power to normalizing biopower.

Northern Ireland is shifting from a Province focused on ethnic conflict and community polarisation to an increasingly diverse society. The scope for multiple or intersectional identities, however, is limited in the political sphere. This chapter examines the role that political division and power-sharing have played in the lack of significant progress in mainstreaming responses to new migrants (European migrant workers, refugees and asylum seekers), as well as long-established groups (British Asian and Chinese) within social policy in the region, and the political integration of groups outside of the ‘two communities’ in Northern Ireland. The construction of political parties along sectarian lines in Northern Ireland, and a power-sharing system which sees political advantages given to parties which designate as ‘green’ or ‘orange’, validate the fears held by many migrants that they cannot participate in the political process without choosing sides. This compounds the disengagement of minorities in the region and further reduces the accountability of political leaders to them. The social and institutional reinforcement of the two-community narrative inhibits integration and the mainstreaming of minority identity into public policy, which has a deleterious effect on provision of health and social care services, education, employment and social mobility for these groups.