This chapter tries to align Bob Dylan with Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, and to determine which of the two serves as Dylan's mentor, noting that Kerouac and Ginsberg had been closely identified with each other and with the Beat movement of the 1950s. The two discovered their irreconcilable differences during the 1960s; Kerouac became disenchanted with the mass counterculture inspired by the Beats' minority subculture, while Ginsberg became a countercultural figurehead. The chapter reveals the tension that informs Dylan's remarkable achievement and places him firmly within the Beat legacy.

Ireland was just a bubble economy in a world of financial bubbles. After it was named the 'Celtic Tiger' in 1994, the southern Irish economy became the global archetype of success in terms of economic growth. The Celtic Tiger was doomed from the start because of its extreme dependence on a limited group of foreign corporate investors and its membership of a regional EU federation that removed many of the state's most important economic instruments. The discussion in Ireland always focused on government debt and on the advice of economists that government must reduce its debt as it opened up its economy to foreign direct investments. The plunge in Irish economic fortunes had shown how vulnerable a neoliberal economy is to changes of global investment flows. The plunge had also shown that unregulated business behaviour can be a great source of economic instability when a government clings to fiscal conservatism.

The origins and impact of chivalry became a matter of controversy when handled by historians and social commentators trying to identify progress from post-classical barbarism to modern enlightenment. Crusade heroes featured prominently in nostalgic accounts which lauded chivalry's supposed virtues of modesty, loyalty, generosity, humility and faith. While accepting the general theme of crusading fanaticism, Voltaire weaves into his disapproval in a discussion of liberty as well as reason. Edward Gibbon's sonorous judgements on the crusades have become something of a historical and literary cliché. Fashionable and influential eighteenth-century intellectuals tended to use the crusade not as a historical study in its own right, but as a tool in conceptual arguments about religion and the progress of civilisation or manners. Maurist monks, who regarded historical scholarship as integral to their religious vocation, gathered an extraordinarily rich library and essayed a series of the grandest scholarly projects.

Given that thus far higher education (HE) has contributed to the generation of knowledge and actions that have led to the crisis situation we are currently experiencing, we must start to reconceptualise our understanding of higher education institutions (HEIs) in a way that will bring about sustainable development in society. In short, to stop being part of the problem, and become part of the solution. The need to give sustainable development meaning in a specific context involving multiple stakeholders makes these concepts attractive from an educational perspective as they require joint meaning-making, co-creation of new knowledge, collaborative learning and, indeed, critiquing. The aim of this chapter is to explore the challenges posed by (un)sustainability to HEIs, and to discuss the barriers that prevent them from finding a response, and to suggest ways to overcoming these difficulties.

This chapter focuses on Irish difference in terms of sexuality and the harsh regimes of bodily discipline and control instituted over centuries. It also focuses on the different technologies and strategies that were developed to create disciplined, docile, and compliant bodies. A focus on the body helps us to think imaginatively when it comes to the understanding of Irish difference. The chapter analyses how the penitential approach to the body became infiltrated with the neo-Jansenistic teachings of the Catholic Church that became dominant in the nineteenth century. This analysis helps to shine a light on the Irish attitudes and practices in relation to desire, pleasure and sexuality. Michel Foucault emphasised how the creation and maintenance of social order was dependent on building a scientific knowledge of what bodies did and how they could be regulated.

This chapter outlines some of the complex debates and transformations that have since 1980s taken place in the field of Irish studies. It explores some of the ways in which the Irish and Irishness have been framed. The chapter addresses the marginal role of sociology and social science in the field of Irish studies. It argues against the perpetuation of a conceptually narrow, limited and exclusive interpretation of the categories, the Irish, Irishness and Ireland, which are in reality contested terms. The chapter proposes inclusive ways of conceptualising that are more sensitive to research emerging from the social sciences and sociology, specifically. For some scholars, the notion of Irish exceptionalism is the overarching framework used to best understand and define Ireland. Irish studies are preoccupied with history and literary criticism, and postcolonialism and feminist criticism, and it continues to evade social science and other critical perspectives in the field.

Printing and new generations of antiquarian scholars revolutionised the availability of crusade texts and hence the range and depth of historical understanding. English writers on the crusades provide a revealing parallel to their French contemporaries in refashioning the medieval conflicts. Late fifteenth- and sixteenth-century England shared the continental tradition of interest in the crusading past. By portraying crusading as a matter of national pride, Jacques Bongars was aping his master's policy of attempting to escape the politically destructive vice of theological debate. Given the equivocal role he judged was played by religion, Etienne Pasquier took a consistently secular view of the impact of the crusades in trying to identify winners and losers. In certain pre-Reformation reformist Catholic circles, the idea that wars could be lawful if possessed of religious motives such as conversion was challenged.

Higher education has provided little leadership and few conceptual tools to assist us to better understand our place, among others, in leading the world towards a more sustainable future. We continue to educate society in ways oblivious to the mounting crisis of unsustainability (Orr 1992). Instead, our universities reinforce human exceptionalism in environmental matters with a diet of managerialism, funding demands, competitive ratings predicated on institutional instrumentalism, and path-dependent curricula based on a ‘knowing about’ pedagogy rather than one that enhances capability in ‘being-for’. This approach has proven spectacularly disastrous in dealing with critical concerns of the planet. This chapter suggests an alternative curriculum to transform our institutions of higher education

Same-sex marriage disrupts the gendering of marriage and so threatens the familiar social and economic order. However, the twenty-first century has witnessed a major increase in public support for marriage rights for same-sex couples. This chapter traces how an apparently isolated court case grew into a new social movement. It focuses on the 2004 High Court case taken by Katherine Zappone and Ann Louise Gilligan (the KAL case) for legal recognition of their marriage as a same-sex couple, which had taken place a year previously in Canada. The chapter explains the origins of the campaign for full marriage rights for same-sex couples by MarriagEquality, the advocacy organisation that emerged from the KAL case. It presents an alternative route towards the same goal that was adopted by the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network (GLEN). The KAL case provides a platform to explore the hegemonic status of (heterosexual) marriage in Irish society.