While touching on some of the mainstream discourse in HE, the chapter devotes the bulk of attention to alternative initiatives, in the area, from the grassroots and other sectors. These initiatives prefigure the kind of HE which can emerge in future.

In 1984, the Gallaudet Genetic Services Center (GSC)opened its doors, offering ASL-based and Deafculture-specific genetic counselling and evaluation.It was made possible through federal funding toremove barriers to genetic services forethnocultural minorities. The three hearinggeneticists who drove the GSC’s foundation – WalterNance, Joann Boughman, and Kathleen Shaver Arnos –considered genetic research a collaborativeenterprise with Deaf communities, creating, forexample, ASL signs for genetic concepts. Combiningnon-directive with culturally sensitive counselling,they promoted genetics not as a means for preventingdeafness, but as a way to gain self-knowledge.Acknowledging deafness as a normal, even desirabletrait, the GSC helped prepare the notion of geneticawareness as an integral part of one’s identity anda tool of empowerment for Deaf activism.

This first empirical chapter, entitled ‘Fieldwork’, discusses the work of creating samples during fieldwork expeditions in the Scottish Highlands by the members of the ‘Scottish Pine Project’. The main body of this chapter is structured around a typical day of fieldwork. I show that the production of credible samples was simultaneous with the constitution of a cohesive and exclusive community of fieldworkers who maintained their trust relations through participation and examination of each other’s work, year after year, in the rituals of labour and recreation in the field. This conclusion bears some relevance to public debates about openness in climate science. Given the meticulous work and personal investment and sacrifice required to produce samples, and the fact that restricting access to data was the means by which the scientists studied protected junior researchers and incentivised good teamwork, it is not surprising, I conclude, that scientists might actively oppose or find it practically impossible to comply with transparency laws, as secrecy and exclusivity play a normal and functional role in science.

Usher syndrome – congenital deafness and progressivevision loss – is often portrayed as one of the mosttragic disabilities imaginable. This notioncertainly drove psychologist McCayVernon, who in thelate 1960s initiated a campaign to raise awarenesswith the goal of the eventual eugenic eradicationvia early screening, counselling, and, if necessary,‘therapeutic’ abortion. Over the course of the 1970sand 1980s, the definition of Usher syndrome changed,not least because of the input and experiences ofpeople living with it. In the 1960s, professionalsdefined it as a severe psycho-neurological disorderthat caused psychiatric and emotional disturbancesalongside the hearing and vision loss. Encounterswith individuals with Usher syndrome who livedindependently and were successful professionalschallenged this paternalistic definition. Patientadvocates shifted attention from eugenic preventionto improving quality of life, yet also used geneticmotives to argue for their identity and worth. Bythe 1980s, both advocates and professionals focusedon the emotional impact of living withdeaf-blindness for the affected individuals andtheir families.

This chapter examines, from a Nigerian-Irish perspective, difficulties encountered by hyphenated citizens in their efforts to become accepted as belonging to the Irish nation. It examines rules and processes that remind immigrants who have become naturalised Irish citizens that they are still outsiders. The chapter also examines difficulties faced by hyphenated citizens in asserting their own ethnic identities. Hyphenated citizens are positioned in a precarious situation. One longs to be accepted into both one’s ‘home’ and host society, only to be met with questions of identity that conflict the mind. One’s longing to belong can never be satisfied, because for example, one is neither Irish, nor Nigerian, enough. One carefully threads along the blurred concept of ‘home’, unable to determine where ‘home’ is. Not at one’s own will of course, but because one’s self-assertion to a particular identity is met with enquiry from those who deem that identity theirs: ‘are you one of us?’ Drawing on the concept of ‘super-citizens’, the chapter interrogates the ways in which over-assimilation can facilitate both exclusion from one’s ‘home’ society and racism by the majority, undermining the cultural and ontological facilitators of integration.

This chapter concludes the book pulling the different strands together. It summarises the main points of the previous chapters and argues that HE is currently at a crossroads. It develops a vision for a future social justice oriented HE emphasising LLL as a public good.

The introduction outlines the meaning and rise of bioprecarity and the bioprecariat, here understood as those who seek help with bodily interventions and those who provide such interventions. It discusses core concepts of importance for this volume, including shifting understandings and regulations of the body and bodily interventions, questions of bodily ownership and of agency in the age of the commodification of the body and the issue of power and unequal relations in the seeking and providing of help around bodily interventions. It also provides an overarching introduction to the chapters presented in this volume.

This chapter examines the extent to which Roma have their human rights realised in Ireland from an intersectional perspective. It examines how the operations, interactions and patterns of subordination, including racism and discrimination based on gender, ethnicity and migrant status, are embedded in institutions, legislation and policy, resulting in the exclusion and marginalisation of Roma in Ireland. Using data from the national needs assessment of Roma in Ireland, the experiences of discrimination and exclusion that Roma face across services and in public spaces are discussed, with a particular focus on Roma women. The chapter argues that ‘neutral’ policies combined with a legacy of institutional racism across Europe place many Roma in vulnerable situations. A narrow focus on formal equality and a narrative that ‘equal treatment is synonymous with the same treatment’ is used to legitimise policies that operate to exclude many Roma. Roma are pitched as the ‘problem’ and blamed for the exclusion they face, which is used to fuel further negative stereotypes about the community. Finally this chapter looks at the impact and consequences of institutional racism and exclusion, and Roma responses to this exclusion. It argues that it is crucial to acknowledge systematic structural inequalities and to institutionalise substantive equality to progress Roma rights in Ireland.

The first specialized psychiatric and geneticcounselling services for deaf people, offeredpartially in sign language, were established at theNew York State Psychiatric Institute in the late1950s. They were part of a larger mental health careproject for deaf people, led by psychiatricgeneticist Franz Kallmann. The project was acollaboration with local deaf communities that makesvisible a surprising confluence of eugenictraditions and minority movements, science, andactivism. It was a turning point in the treatmentand perception of deafness in the US, redefining itas a ‘stress-inducing’ psychological condition, andthe deaf as a neglected social minority. Tyingtogether the history of psychiatry, psychology, andgenetics, this chapter shows how Kallmann and hisco-workers reframed older eugenic paradigms in thelanguage of 1960s health and civil rights activism,reframing family and genetic counselling as a healthservice to which deaf people were entitled.

This chapter builds on the previous one to discuss the issues involved in extending the discourse to a specific region. It also provides an account of some important contributions from this region to university community engagement and argues that the relationship should be reciprocal as both sides (Mediterranean and rest of EU) have much to offer each other.

This last empirical chapter outlines a scientific controversy in paleoclimatology, in which one of the scientists studied was actively involved. The main body of the chapter details the dendroclimatologists’ response and attempt to foreclose the controversy. I show how the controversy was temporarily and partially resolved by mobilising a small group of trusted dendroclimatologists and a few members of the blogosphere. This conclusion confirms not only the importance of small circles of like-minded friends and colleagues in many forms of creative and scientific work, but also that the boundaries of such ‘collaborative circles’ and ‘core-sets’ in dendroclimatology are more permeable to the scepticism of critical outsiders than some of these outsiders themselves perhaps imagine and criticise. . I show that the scientists studied adopted the outsiders’ scepticism and integrated it as an internal evaluative standard in the community of dendroclimatology in a process that I call ‘inside-out scepticism’. While most scholarship and public debates employ the vernacular label of ‘climate sceptic’ in a realist way, as if it were describing the ‘real’ traits of individuals, I show that the identity of the ‘climate sceptic’ – that is, the attributed characterisation of one’s scepticism as ‘uncivil’ – is relative to one’s provisional trust relations with the members of the ‘core-set’.