The year 2007 witnessed rising numbers of non-Catholic immigrant children being unable to secure school places in oversubscribed Catholic schools in Ireland. The statutory obligation to provide education for all children resulted in the establishment of two emergency Educate Together schools in Dublin 15 in September 2007. This chapter draws extensively on the findings of the two most substantial empirical studies to date of the experiences of Irish schools — Intercultural Education: Primary Challenges in Dublin 15 and Adapting to Diversity: Irish Schools and Newcomer Students. The findings allowed some comparison between the respective perceptions of teachers and parents of how immigrant children were faring in deprived localities. Both studies examined the nature and extent of segregation, the perceived effects of language difficulties, perceptions of the motivation and educational attainment of newcomers compared to Irish children. The studies addressed English-language acquisition and academic standards, cultural capital, racism, and social class.

This chapter provides the context for migration. On the one hand, it introduces the respondents in the Lot, highlighting their common origins as members of the British middle class and the various contexts that brought about their migration. On the other hand, it sets the scene for the remainder of the book, explaining migration, both as presented by the migrants and in the terms of the ethnographic analyst. It traces how the migrants recounted the decision to migrate, highlighting the potential for self-realization. It also critically assesses the explanations presented in the now seminal texts on British migration to rural France and builds upon them to draw attention to the cultural determinants that drive this form of migration.

This chapter investigates the autobiography of N. O. Body published in 1907. It illustrates how the relationship with the self became prioritized above one's position vis-à-vis others, as the individual quest for an inner truth of sex started to replace the desperate search for a morally acceptable position in society. In case histories of hermaphrodites, physicians hardly initiated ways of investigating the sex of self on their own account. N. O. Body's autobiographical text clearly differs from that of Herculine Barbin, who never made the most of the characteristics of her childhood to prove her innate masculine disposition. The homosexual story of the ‘female soul trapped in a male body’ is very similar to Body's story. The difference between the plot and morality of Barbin and Body's texts perfectly exemplifies Charles Taylor's assertion that the self had become an inner space and had turned into a constitutive good.

This chapter explores narrative as a formation emerging out of the contemporary interchange between information technology, culture, and society. If narrative is socially symbolic then the materials of which it is made, the conditions within which it is read, as well as the forms in which it is written or practised, and the tales that it gathers up within itself, matter. They are a part of what gets symbolized, and how. To explore changing narrative formations developing in relation to new media might thus offer insights into the cultural significance of contemporary processes of automation transforming the temporal and spatial dimensions of everyday life.

This chapter explores how the connections between technology and culture have been drawn — and may be drawn — in relation to new media technologies. One key issue here is how and why newly introduced information technologies are so often perceived to be powerful or transformative, able to create new cultural forms and practices, remediate others, and render others still entirely irrelevant — and why they so often disappoint. The first sections of the chapter consider this issue, exploring the interplay between innovation and determination, and showing how the circuit as a whole has a certain ideological force. It concludes by suggesting that these circuits of reception and acculturation temper the critical and popular reception new media technologies receive. The middle sections of the chapter go on to suggest that this dynamic also conditions ways in which developments in the history of information technology are understood within cultural theory. The final sections of the chapter bring the arguments about the relationship between technology and culture up to the present. It explores the contemporary techno-cultural climate, considering various ways in which information technology is understood within the contemporary constellation.

This introductory chapter sets out the purpose of the book, which is to come to the defence of narrative, arguing that it is a vital element of contemporary culture, lying at the heart of the processes through which humans make sense of their experiences in everyday lives that are, by virtue of their mediation through and across information, increasingly multi-layered and complex both temporally and spatially. It argues that narrative is an intrinsic part of a new informational economy which becomes its material and which it holds and articulates. Narrative lives because it is contingent and mutable, because it is changing and transforming rather than fading in response to alterations in the material conditions under which we live, which are themselves articulations of a social totality. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter considers the role digital technologies might play in the constitution of contemporary identity, when this is understood in narrative terms as a life story and its narration. The life stories at the centre of this inquiry are those of a group of inmates of Ashworth Hospital, a secure institution for the criminally insane. This group participated in the making of Rehearsal of Memory, a piece of speculative software produced in collaboration with the artist Harwood with input from the art collective Mongrel, and others. Rehearsal takes the form of a navigable composite body made up of skin scans taken from the inmates, from Harwood, and from Ashworth staff. This body holds fragments of memory, experiences of life at Ashworth and other places, held as images, texts, and audio spots. Users of the artwork are invited to explore the body and its associated objects, but are only able to do so in ways allowed by the project architecture. This functions to organize the interactions between the body and its users in ways that tend to undermine the conventional relationships operating between the inmates of such institutions and the general public.

The chapter explores a virtual community as a history of a particular kind of space, one that is made of words and to a far lesser extent images, but that is more fundamentally to be understood as carved out of code. The opening section draws on Lefebvre to explore virtual space as a social production. It then turns to the Internet itself, reading its history, and within that the history of virtual community, as the history of space. It is argued that virtual community is synecdochal for the early Internet and its values, and that these values continue to attach to virtual communities even while discrete productions of community increasingly fail to instantiate them. The third section focuses on the spatial production of GeoCities, which is also understood in narrative terms. It draws out what the sense of virtual community operational in GeoCities takes from earlier models and how the phrase itself might operate as an ideologeme. This may demonstrate the degree to which processes of contradictory integration mean that ‘virtual community’ has been at once valorized and remade. If the new commercial model of GeoCities is operationalized partly through its appeal to ‘virtual community’, read as a guarantor of the persistence of human communion within an increasingly automated world, this also tends to mask the underlying logic of the Cities, which concerns the production of narrative space as a commodity.

This chapter turns to Elephant, Gus Van Sant's film about the Columbine killings, which may be regarded as interactive and which provokes consideration of non-linearity as a new form of composition, rather than as a form of decomposition or simple disruption. This opens the way to a broader consideration of the cultural forms and practices of everyday life within informational culture. The logic of narrative as an ongoing response to information may be generalized: there is an elephant called narrative in the room.