Blog Carnival – Immigration and the Politics of Belonging

Good Morning! Welcome to our first blog carnival, titled ‘Immigration and the Politics of Belonging’.

The blog carnival is roughly divided into two sections. We will begin by posting pieces which examine an important area of Irish immigration and asylum policy which has been of particular relevance in the past year.  As the day wears on, we will begin to post pieces which examine immigration and the governance of minorities both in Ireland and abroad. Posts will appear at the rate of one an hour, beginning at 8 a.m, and we will finish with a ‘wrap up’ post. I confess that the original intention was that I would draw all of the posts together into a seamless whole but I have thought better of that plan, for now. Our carnival has produced a collection of sometimes overlapping and sometimes conflicting fragments, and as such, perhaps, provides a better sense of the chaos that marks Ireland’s attitude to its migrants and minorities.

Our blog events – and there will be more – are part of an effort to build a substantial community of human rights scholars around the HRinI project. We are always open to readers’ proposals for guest posts and blog events. You can send us a direct message via our facebook fan page or on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/humanrightsblog, or you can email any of the regular contributors.

I hope that today’s blog carnival will spark your interest in questions of belonging in Irish immigration and minority policy, and in immigration to Ireland more generally. Some of you may be interested in doing further reading in this area. So I have set up a library on citeulike which contains references to relevant books and articles.

I would like to thank all those who have contributed posts to the blog carnival (especially Liam for his editorial assistance), to wish you all a stimulating read and to invite you to contribute to the discussion in the comments.

Mairead.

The image above is a ‘Wordle‘ of the speech which Brian Lenihan TD made as Minister for Justice, Equality and Law Reform at the launch of the Immigration, Residence and Protection Bill 2008. It will be the logo of this blog carnival. Wordle, you may be interested to know, generates images from source text depending on the prominence of the words in that text.