Kerr, Aphra and King O'Riain, Rebecca and Titley, Gavan (2013) Transnational Media Networks and the ‘Migration Nation’. In: Migrations: Ireland in a Global World. Manchester University Press, UK, pp. 98-114. ISBN 97808-7190-8551-2

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Abstract

While migration has become emblematic of an era of accelerated globalization in Ireland, public and political discourse rarely approaches migration and migrant lives with the same attention to connexity and flow evident in discussions of economic transformation, national ‘brand management’, and the banal and aspirational transnationalism of consumerist lifestyles, investment opportunities and privileged mobilities. Concomitantly, while discussions of diaspora in Ireland have shifted from the Robinson-era rehabilitation of transnational affect and historical bonds to considerations of the ‘Global Irish’ as a diasporic network of expertise, investment, and political and cultural capital (Boyle and Kitchin, 2008), the transnational connections inhabited by those moving to and dwelling in Ireland are largely disavowed in policy and official discourse. By way of example, the government strategy document on integration, Migration Nation (2008), invokes a titular concept suggesting transformative change while proceeding to discuss the integration of ‘minority ethnic communities’ without a single reference to the transnational socioscapes within which such communities are embedded, contested, reworked and evaded. Undoubtedly, the varying intensities with which the nationalist horizon of ‘integration’ is pressed, and the insistent sense of migrants as ‘needed but unwanted’ (Appadurai, 1996), serves to frame these connexities as potential barriers to integration. Axiomatically, perspectives committed to the legitimate presence and belonging of migrants in the nation-state may also pay attenuated attention to these dimensions in an era when migrant transnationalisms have become the focus of what William Walters (2004) terms ‘domopolitics’; a politics of protecting the national home from bad, inutile or suspicious mobilities.

Item Type:	Book Section
Keywords:	Transnational; Media Networks; Migration Nation; Migrations; Ireland; Global World;
Academic Unit:	Faculty of Arts,Celtic Studies and Philosophy > School of English, Media & Theatre Studies > Media Studies Faculty of Social Sciences > Sociology
Item ID:	9149
Depositing User:	Prof. Aphra Kerr
Date Deposited:	16 Jan 2018 15:36
Publisher:	Manchester University Press
Refereed:	Yes
URI:	Publisher
Use Licence:	This item is available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial Share Alike Licence (CC BY-NC-SA). Details of this licence are available here

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