The chapter concentrates on Nuala O’Faolain’s journalism, several media appearances (including her final interview on Irish radio just weeks before her death in 2008), and the astonishing international success of her confessional memoir, Are you somebody? In particular, the chapter considers her enduring fascination and involvement with Ireland and Irish culture, despite her extensive and sometimes despairing attention to the effects of misogyny, sectarianism and economic inequality in the country. It documents her treatments of sexuality and intimate relationships in the context of her experience of Ireland and of feminism. The chapter also details her account of the Irish family, of her own education and formation, and of her place in Irish literary, intellectual and political traditions.

The chapter concerns an attempt to bring an ethnographic sensibility to the data generated by contemporary software developers. It focuses on numbers as processes and counting as a form, and explores how re-counting might be useful in attempts to reconstruct platforms and their associative realities. Since launching in late 2007, the code repository Github (Github.com) has become tremendously popular amongst programmers. Github’s growth attests to some substantial transformations in the way coders, coding and code associate with each other. On Github, coding practices have been re-formatted in ways that emulate the traits and tendencies of contemporary social media platforms. ‘Sharing’, ‘liking’, ‘watching’ and recirculation abound. Not only does Github host a wide variety of commercial, industry, government, scientific, educational and civil society software (and non-software) projects, but highly dispersed and diverse human and non-human actors congregate there. Github in early 2016 claimed to host 29 million code repositories and 6 million coders. The chapter describes some ways in which such large numbers might be re-counted. It explores how coders render accounts of what happens on Github through analysis of big data generated by other coders. It outlines some preliminary attempts to map the ripples of associative imitation that animate the platform’s growth and capitalisation. The growth of Github as intersectional assemblage, the reshaping of coding practices in imitation of social media and the susceptibility of large-scale public data about coding to analysis by coders alter the scope and focus of ethnographic study.

This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts discussed in the preceding chapters of this book. All writing, including the writing of history, is a form of poeisis. It is the making of something, at the same time as it continues the world of philosophers, turf-cutters, poets, and historians. In 'What W. H. Auden Can Do for You', Alexander McCall Smith discusses Auden as a poet in the tradition of Horace, teaching us to give thanks for the quotidian and to be concerned with the personal moral life. Ben Lerner's 'The Hatred of Poetry' provides a refashioning of what has already been made and, ultimately, about the making of poetry into prose. He says that many poets dislike poetry too; he quotes Marianne Moore's 'Poetry' for she was another who hated it well.

The afterword outlines some communalities between the subjects of this book and compares their treatments of certain recurrent preoccupations such as religion and the idea of home or homeland. Despite the fact that all these women are seen as heralds of the modern, the afterword comments on their rejection of aspects of the new Ireland, especially consumerism. While there have been major advances in gender equality in Ireland, many of the political aspirations of feminists such as these remain to be fulfilled.

This chapter discusses the social constructionist view of human being and social world offered by the phenomenologist Alfred Schutz. His view erects nonbiological foundations for human existence and, thereby, challenges the Burtonian biological account. It provides the readers also with conceptual tools which can be employed to give the problem-solving workshop a phenomenological interpretation. The chapter then discusses the cultural dimensions of the social world on the basis of Schutz's views. It is important to see how phenomenology differs from positivist social science and especially from political behaviouralism. It is also vital to understand the points of departure between such phenomenologists as Edmund Husserl and Schutz whose philosophy is inclined towards phenomenological sociology. In order to understand the origins of Schutz's phenomenology and a seminal difference between Schutz and Husserl, one needs to return to the notions of the natural attitude and intersubjectivity.

This chapter retrospectively explores Rabih Alameddine’s fiction dealing with the Lebanese diaspora in the USA: The Hakawati, I, the Divine, and KOOLAIDS: The Art of War. The chapter initially considers The Hakawati’s reinscription of homosexuality in Islamic (hi)stories and its problematic censorship in contemporary Lebanese communities. Such a disorientation of heteropatriarchal mores is rendered possible through Alameddine’s ‘druzification’ of history – a pun on Rushdie’s ‘chutnification of history’ – from his diasporic perspective, by adapting and interweaving stories, histories, and religious texts in a manner that syncretises them. It then examines the queering of gender performance in I, the Divine, a novel that critiques both Druze patriarchy and homonormativity in the West. It concludes by analysing the queering of time and place, via Judith/Jack Halberstam, in KOOLAIDS, a novel that, it is argued, assembles the Lebanese Civil War, the American AIDS crisis, as well as America and Lebanon, through a queer Muslim pseudo-prophetic narrator living with AIDS. It is proposed that Mohammad irreverently dismantles heteronormative scriptural exegesis and amalgamates sacred texts in order to defy literalist religious orthodoxies. It is also suggested that KOOLAIDS posits a form of queer family at a remove from the prescriptions of bloodlines.

The early medieval riddles reveal points of contact with the world in which they were created and with which they still interact today. These interactions occur on many levels: between texts within one manuscript, between collections within an overall tradition, between genres and disciplines within an intellectual tradition, between material cultures separated by time and distance, and between poets during the translation process. The chapters in this section seek to explore a small fraction of the interactions between the riddles of early medieval England and the wider world. Each of these chapters is unique and particular to itself, and cannot be reduced to a single, homogeneous approach, but it is perhaps useful to consider them all as aspects of ‘translation’ in its most basic meaning of ‘carrying across’. Fittingly, the collection ends with a chapter that offers new, creative translations of several Exeter Book riddles and reflects upon translation as a practice.

This chapter looks at how practices of scientific analysis are being put under strain by the appearance and necessity of working with new kinds of data. Whilst most commentary about new forms of data have focused on the value and ethics of analysing and using transactional consumer data, this chapter is concerned with the analytical challenge of another field of ‘big’ data – that of environmental modelling.The chapter provides an ethnographic account of the challenges faced by a particular group of climate modellers based at a UK university as they attempt to work with emerging forms of data that promise to bridge a divide between natural processes (sensory data on weather and climate) and social relations (statistical data on poverty, tourism, economy). A central concern of these climate modellers (and shared with analysts of ‘big’ data) is the problem of how to conduct analysis without a controllable baseline for comparison. The chapter compares statistical analysis that informs climate modelling with the epistemology of ethnography, a method which has long operated with an alternative analytical foundation that does not start with the necessity of a generalisable baseline. Reflexively engaging the analytical commitments of the ethnographic method, the chapter considers whether an alternative approach to numerical data might be developed out of ethnographic analysis and what kind of knowledge this approach to data would produce.

One of the Oldham group’s ‘middle ways’ had a clearly secular source: the sociology of Karl Mannheim. The (personally agnostic) Hungarian sociologist believed that Christianity could strengthen liberal democracy in its confrontation with totalitarianism and also humanise the inevitable shift towards more ‘planned’ societies. All group members broadly criticised what they saw as the waste, inequality, greed and chaos of laissez-faire capitalism, and some saw value in Marxism, even if its atheism and the oppression of Soviet Communism were rejected. Mannheim’s concept of ‘planning for freedom’ offered a middle way that would encourage Christian-inspired norms but still leave room for individual liberty and local initiative. But the concept also provoked internal dissent in the group from both the right and the left. These discussions were also reflected in mixed feelings about post-war reconstruction: while the group welcomed moves towards ‘social justice’, some members’ critiques of the emerging welfare state show the contested margins of its consensus.

This chapter explores Richard Rorty’s pragmatist model of ‘conversational philosophy’. By experimenting with new descriptions and novel vocabularies, he aimed to break through old impasses where the conversation has lagged or stalled or been abandoned. For Rorty, experiments in ‘re-description’ potentially reignite the conversation, allowing us to undertake acts that we have never undertaken before. In this view, the point of philosophy is not to mirror the world but to enlarge our cultural repertoire, allowing us to realise new achievements. The chapter applies this approach to the work of the maverick American human geographer, William Bunge (1928¬–2013). Bunge understood maps to be geography’s language, and he believed that by changing the vocabulary of cartography he could break through the crust of previously held conventions, creating something new, potentially changing society and social relations for the better. The chapter looks at three different phases of Bunge’s experiments in cartographic re-description: his early work within spatial science on formal map transformations; his later work in black inner-city Detroit; and his last substantive work on the Nuclear war atlasto warn against atomic Armageddon.

This chapter explores the securitisation of UK development aid from the pre-2010 Labour Government to the post-2010 Conservative-led Government. It does so by examining official policy discourse in Department for International Development (DFID) aid programming in five sub-Saharan African countries: Cameroon, Central African Republic, Ethiopia, Kenya and Uganda. It finds that, in line with the development discourse, aid securitisation as conceptualised here progressed in the five case-study countries gradually between 2002 and 2015. The most notable change from Labour to the Coalition Government in this regard was the higher preference to channel ‘securitised’ aid to countries of more strategic importance to the UK. A closer look at three examples of ‘securitised’ aid projects implemented by Conservative-led DFID unfortunately demonstrates that such projects are not likely to contribute to one of the key aims of securitised aid provision: the sustainable reduction of conflict and instability in the recipient countries.

The conclusion summarises the book’s findings about queer interethnic desire, Islamic femininities and masculinities, and the queer self in time and place. It suggests that none of the artists referenced in the book have the same relationship with Islam, and that their Muslim identity is a matter concerning their own relationship with God. It is suggested there is no queer Muslim diasporic community of writers and artists as such, but a variety of communities locally created. It is argued the work of the chosen artists is often not part of the cultural mainstream, so their visibility is still an ongoing issue. Finally, ways forward in the study of global Islam are sketched, particularly the recent flourishing of decolonial studies, with its specific focus on the role of Islam in the global South, as well as the possibility of non-literalist and mystical dimensions of Islam, such as Sufism, to offer the metaphysical conditions for decolonisation. It is finally proposed that for decolonial Islam to emerge fruitfully, it needs to remain intersectional and also transversal, uniting with heterodox Muslims and non-Muslims alike in the fight against Euro-American and Islamic hegemonies.