Irish Journal of Sociology

This paper focuses on how divergent but interlinked knowledge cultures shape veterinary professionals’ practices. Embodied sensory and emotional knowing, and local and contextual knowledge, often incorporated within cultural scripts and conventions, constitute the paper's focus. Drawing upon biographic narrative interviews, we demonstrate that these different forms of knowing are enmeshed with scientific knowledge and embedded in veterinarian's interactions and work practices, influencing diagnosis, treatment and other interventions. Here, ‘knowing’ is understood as knowledge cultures that influence communication and professional practice, while transgressing boundaries between tacit and explicit, lay and scientific knowledge. We argue that these disparate yet convergent forms of knowing deepen our understanding of the multidimensionality of veterinary practice and are important for the education and training of veterinarians, their knowledge and expertise claims. We hereby expand sociological discussions of the labyrinthine character of veterinarian's knowledge, highlighting the complex, diverse ways that it intersects with science.

This article examines hygiene poverty as an under-recognised dimension of material deprivation in Ireland. Presenting four in-depth biographical case studies, the study explores how limited resources constrain access to essential hygiene goods across diverse household contexts. Situating hygiene within social policy debates on relative deprivation, dignity and decommodification, the article argues that hygiene poverty is not reducible to income poverty alone but operates through embodied mechanisms of stigma, respectability and social participation. The findings reveal gendered patterns of sacrifice; cumulative pressures associated with incomplete healthcare universalism and the market dependence of essential bodily goods. The article concludes by outlining structural policy reforms, including enhanced measurement, income adequacy review and movement toward universal basic provision of hygiene essentials.

The tree of bixad (suffering) in the Kesajaan tea plantation stands as a powerful symbol of both the cultural memory of struggle and resistance. This representation emerges from complex cultural formations and the historical relationship between colonial powers and plantation labourers. The construction of cultural memory illuminates a specific modality of power relations that persists into postcolonial times. This article examines how these cultural memories evolved into forms of resistance politics that challenge the plantation authorities. The tree holds profound cultural significance for the residents of the Kesajaan plantation. According to the residents, during the colonial period, the punishment inflicted on labourers by planters sometimes resulted in death, and the deceased were subsequently to have transformed into ghostly entities. In contemporary times, residents categorise these dead as protective guardians of the plantation. This article further explores how plantation residents maintain cultural memories of colonial and postcolonial violence through ghostly entities. Through this examination, my central argument emphasises the importance of recognising these previously undocumented cultural memories and their role in shaping resistance politics.

The 2004 Citizenship referendum is a telling index of the nation's sentiment about who is entitled to be Irish. Whether newly arrived or born here Black inhabitants are refused the right to call Ireland home. The exclusion of blackness from constructions of Irishness is strikingly reminiscent of the absence or erasure of black people from Irish diasporic history, particularly in the Americas. This article examines Irish involvement in Caribbean slavery and argues that the slow violence of colonial ideologies of race and race-making contributes to epistemologies of ‘race’ and the exclusion of Blackness from Irish diasporic identity and contemporary national belonging. Irish historiography rarely acknowledges the overlapping processes of Irish migration whitening strategies and African slavery. My inquiry focuses on the connected lives of Irish and African descended women in the Spanish colony of Cuba. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship of slavery, race and gender and reading across the myriad relations between people from Europe and Africa in the Caribbean, this article demonstrates the omission of diasporic complicity in slavery from Irish historiography and in doing so challenges the epistemic erasure of Black people in Irish academic knowledge production.