SOC30360 Assignment: Reflections on Race and Theoretical Concepts in Education

Reflection and Theoretical Concepts

Guidelines

Respond: 100-200 words in length, reflecting on the prompt above.

Question 1

Keeping in mind the question “Is race real?”, please respond to the following article:
Racial purity is scientifically meaningless, say 8,000 geneticists.

1. How do the issues raised help you to make sense of the concept of “race”?
2. Is there anything you found surprising with respect to your previous understandings of “race”?
3. Consider the statements “I don’t see race” or “I don’t see colour”. What is your immediate response to these statements? How can we critically analyze these statements based on what we have learned this week?

Question 2

Choose one theoretical concept that you found in the recommended readings to be particularly interesting and explain why.

• Lefebvre’s ‘right to the city’
• de Certeau’s ‘tactics’
• Agamben’s ‘bare life’
• Freud’s concept of ‘disavowal’
• Bourdieu’s notion of capital
• Krumboltz’s ‘happenstance learning theory’

Recommended readings

• O’Riordan, J., & Fitzgibbon, M. (Eds.). (2020). Direct provision: Asylum, the academy, and activism. Peter Lang Ltd. International Academic Publishers. Available at: https://ebookcentral-proquest-com.ucc.idm.oclc.org/lib/uccie-ebooks/detail.action?docID=6271147
• Cannon, B., & Murphy, S. (2024). ‘We’re not right-wing or racist, but…’: Far-right myth and distributive conflict in asylum seeker-related protest in the Republic of Ireland, November 2022–July 2023. Irish Journal of Sociology, 32(1-2), 225-234. https://doi.org/10.1177/07916035241259252
• Daly, F., O’Riordan, J. (2023). Unintended Consequences: Divisions of Care within Ireland’s Response to Ukrainian Refugees and Impacts on Asylum Seekers, Peace Human Rights Governance, 7(1), 23-44. DOI: 10.14658/PUPJ-PHRG-2023-1-2
• Lentin, R. (2015). Asylum seekers, Ireland, and the return of the repressed. Irish Studies Review, 24(1), 21–34. https://doi.org/10.1080/09670882.2015.1113009
• Lentin, R. (2022). Spaces of racialization: Ireland’s direct provision asylum centres as sites of racialized state violence, State Crime Journal, 11(1), 52–69. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48675913
• Murphy, F. (2021). Direct provision, rights and everyday life for asylum seekers in Ireland during COVID-19. Social Sciences, 10(4), 140. https://www.mdpi.com/2076-0760/10/4/140