Irish Journal of Sociology, Ahead of Print. This article unpacks some complexities of ‘decolonizing’ in Ireland, a complicated semiperipheral ‘mixed colony’, in which rhetorics, logic, and grammar are simultaneously colonial and decolonial, interrupting and complicitly reproducing divisive and dehumanizing colonialities of knowledge and being. The global call to decolonize academia invites Irish social scientists to confront significant social divisions, economic precarities, and epistemic erasures. I present ‘decolonial repair’ as a doubled figure of return and mending, engaging the decolonia ..read more

Irish Journal of Sociology, Ahead of Print. This article gives an account of some of my experiences of working in the field of Medical Sociology in Ireland. It concentrates in particular on the time period of the Great Recession and Ireland's economic crash and what it was like to be a precarious researcher and lecturer around that time ..read more

Irish Journal of Sociology, Ahead of Print. Irish society is situated within a period of epoch-defining social change. We are facing in to a short number of decades, which promise the significant re-shaping of the political and social contours of our nation. Irish sociology's disciplinary mandate is to analyse that change, yet a historical debate has found new expression – heightened by the 30th anniversary of the Irish Journal of Sociology (IJS) and the 50th anniversary of the formation of the Sociological Association of Ireland (SAI) – as to whether the discipline is utilising the appropriat ..read more

Irish Journal of Sociology, Ahead of Print. In December 2019, in Wuhan in China an outbreak of Coronavirus (COVID-19) was reported. In late February 2020, the first cases of the virus were recorded in Ireland. By 11th March, the World Health Organisation had declared the outbreak a pandemic and on 12th March, An Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar announced that all schools would close with effect from 6pm that day. The schools remained closed until September. This paper considers the impact of the closure of primary schools on both principals’ and teachers’ wellbeing. A mixed-methods, longitudinal resear ..read more

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Irish Journal of Sociology, Ahead of Print. This paper uses the thick description of one recent experience – the closure of the Common Room Club at University College Dublin – to highlight the gap that exists between rhetoric and reality at institutions of higher education in Ireland and beyond. I argue that common rooms have always been part and parcel of the ‘invisible university’. They provide the infrastructure to support what has been called the ‘lifeworld’, sustaining both the communicative experiences of their members and providing vital venues for visitors who are through them more rea ..read more

Irish Journal of Sociology, Ahead of Print. The media influences how we perceive and understand the world, groups of people, and events. The media has been criticised for portraying older people and aging predominantly negatively. In 2020, older people became the focal point of governmental responses in the management of the coronavirus pandemic. In this article, we explore how older people were represented in the officially most legitimate part of Irish news media during the first year of coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic. A sample of 137 articles was drawn from Ireland's national broadcastin ..read more

Irish Journal of Sociology, Ahead of Print. This article examines explanatory factors behind well-being among Danish students during the COVID-19 crisis. The empirical analyses are based on a two round panel survey among students at Roskilde University in Denmark. Using fixed effect regression and random effect regression our results show that, amongst the variables included in the analysis, the level of self-assessed structure in everyday life has the strongest positive effect on the self-assessed level of well-being. We briefly discuss this finding which is supported by qualitative data from ..read more

Irish Journal of Sociology, Ahead of Print. This paper examines the advances made by low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) in the inclusion of children with disabilities and youth within mainstream policies on education, employment, health, and social care provisions and the implications on their outcomes. Theoretically, this paper advances critical disability studies and addresses stigma and discrimination as barriers to progressive social policies. It also critically examines the diffusion of the social model of disability, which finds expression in the Convention on the Rights of Persons ..read more