This chapter examines parents' orientations to the Dreamfields' academy, where middle-class and mostly white students were positioned as a buffer zone against urban chaos. The white middle-class parent occupies an invisible, normative space, while working-class and ethnic-minority parents feel the potential weight of discipline's reformative hand. Many middle-class parents readily compared schools to businesses and positioned the market model as obviously and unproblematically applicable to education. The privileged status accorded to middle-class parents shapes their relationship to discipline, with several suggesting that although Dreamfields seems heavily disciplined, this is more an impression created than a daily reality. The complete lack of resistance to marketised education shows how deeply ingrained neoliberal market logic is in the minds of middle-class parents. Dreamfields reinstates middle-class hegemony as white middle-class parents successfully manipulate the education market to create an 'oasis' in Urbanderry.

This chapter discusses the problematic social construction of crime, law enforcement, and jurisprudence and highlights some of the consequences of these media portrayals for the public and students of this topic. It then sets out an ethic of phenomenological reduction of crime and the incumbent legal processes as a solution. The chapter draws upon the work of Jean-Luc Marion, Claude Romano, Werner Marx, James Mensch, and Immanuel Levinas, to describe how reducing the complex experience of crime, law enforcement, and jurisprudence opens new understanding and new potential for exploring the very complex nature of crime and the resulting legal processes. The reduction, in this case, entails an ethical argument to reduce what is given to those experiencing these processes and to us as observers. In the case of the one accused of crime, a reduction of their experience often breaks our understanding free of the “good-guy, bad-guy” portrayals in media. Likewise, a reduction of the experience and activity of law-enforcement and jurisprudence professionals highlights their professional, personal, and interpersonal complexities as they do their jobs. Finally, it proposes that this phenomenological ethic, when taken up by the media, would actually not only increase the portrayals of these processes in a more authentic manner, but increase the potential for sharing the dramatic stories of the criminal, law-enforcement, and legal professionals. This would serve to further their agenda of telling marketable and engaging stories by highlighting the incredible personal and interpersonal complexities of the people caught up in these experiences.

The city of London has a long experience of staging great events, including mega-event genres, though to the contemporary period. This chapter looks briefly at some of the history of London's major events in the modern era. It focuses on the particular case of the London 2012 Olympics and its impacts and legacies. The chapter introduces the general policy and planning context and aims of the Olympic project, particularly in relation to its long-term social and sport policy goals and aspirations. It presents in more detail at the project's directly social aspects and legacies, in terms of such things as the construction of housing and of the Olympic Park. It also looks into the Olympic project's indirectly social character in terms of its economic and employment impacts and legacies, particularly in terms of the cultural and creative industries.

This chapter focuses on one of the most well-known episodes in the history of tobacco control in Ireland: the introduction of an overall workplace smoking ban in 2004. It draws some key ideas and concepts put forward by governmentality studies. The introduction of the smoking ban in Ireland is considered by politicians, public health and anti-smoking advocates and Irish citizens as one of the biggest success stories in the history of public health policy and tobacco control. The chapter discusses some of the social and political implications of conducting a governmental analysis by drawing attention to the fact that the regulation of smoking became interlinked with social and moral processes. It exposes how some of these processes played a symbolic role in promoting boundaries between different social groups.

This chapter examines the implications for Irish Catholicism that the ‘Yes’ vote in the May 2015 referendum on same-sex marriage may have for the social and cultural position of the Catholic church in contemporary Ireland and in the future. His analysis channels the thinking of Ferdinand Tönnies, an early German sociologist and a contemporary of Durkheim and Weber, who used the German words ‘Gemeinschaft’ and ‘Gesellschaft’ to distinguish between two fundamentally different structural paradigms for social relations. O’Brien sees marriage as a core ideological signifier of ideological hegemony, and using the fantasy fiction of Terry Pratchett’s satire on religion entitled Small Gods as a lens, he looks at the referendum as a significant turning point in the definition of marriage, and by extension, in the transformation Irish society from the organic community of the Gemeinschaft, to the more postmodern and pluralist notion of the Gesellschaft.

This chapter briefly summarises the main findings of the book and explains the relationship between the different chapters. It introduces the reader to the structure of the book and identifies the common themes and underlying issues. It argues that from the different chapters three main conclusions can be drawn: namely 1) that Law needs myths for its legitimacy, 2) that Law needs myths for its existence and that 3) there is a growing need to unveil the myth about law making processes and procedures.

This chapter analyses recent Irish interventions into the 'obesity' discourse from the critical stance. It focuses on evidence from the first longitudinal study of children in Ireland, Growing Up in Ireland (GUI), and how its findings have entered the media and policy arenas. The analysis is based on secondary documentation, including published reviews of childhood obesity prevalence and GUI reports. Families and children were to be responsibilised to protect against the risks of overweight and obesity through educational and lifestyle interventions. The chapter considers some examples of how child fatness nevertheless continues to be framed as a pervasive and urgent issue in Irish society. The framing of childhood obesity illustrates how 'governmentality works by positioning or representing a problem in particular ways'. Body Mass Index (BMI) is even less satisfactory as a measure of childhood 'obesity'.

This chapter applies a labour-centred approach to challenge received views about Western navigation and its technologies, and to put forward an alternate analysis centred on people's skills, intentions and techniques. European navigation practices are typically portrayed as highly planned and abstracted in contrast to the responsive and sensitive environmental perception of the Micronesians and others. Thomas Gladwin's ethnography of Micronesian navigation refers to his own sailing experience and is not an ethnography of Western navigation. The chapter also applies 'orientation' to describe the general and comfortable sense of one's position in the world. This is distinct from the challenge of finding 'relative position' to specific affordances or obstacles. While most analyses of navigation assume that its purpose is orientation ('where am I?'), the chapter demonstrates that virtually all navigation devices are used in techniques to solve the problem of relative position ('where is that?').

This chapter focuses on the lived experiences of gypsies (collectively referred to as gypsies rather than Roma or travellers). The author argues that the relationship between the legal system and the specific lifestyle of this group is itself causing many tensions which cannot be separated from the long-held myths about gypsies. Jago shows how the standing of gypsies in the UK legal system has, in turn, become the object of various myths. He demonstrates how judgements by the European Court of Human Rights in favour of gypsy claims created in many an image of the law being always on the side of the gypsy. A perception which Jago demonstrates is far from true. After addressing the nature and role of myths in general the author illustrates the tension between positive, romanticised myths about the freedom of gypsy lifestyle and three derogatory myths, namely gypsies as "child-snatchers", as thieves and as "land grabbers". Jago illustrates that these myths are linked to deep-rooted beliefs around property and its ownership.