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This dissertation traces how the politics of asylum and of difference-making relate to antinomies of Irish citizenship, pluralism and forms of recognition that emerged in Ireland against the backdrop of the Celtic Tiger economic boom, the rights-oriented aspirations of the Good Friday Agreement (1998), and an ongoing European-wide retreat from forms of social protection. Through a close reading of the convergences between a) processes of difference-making (stigma, sexism, racism, scapegoating, etc.), b) the experiences of stigmatized groups (Irish welfare recipients, Travellers, African asylees, immigrants and the civil service bureaucrats who are scapegoated for implementing stringent policies), and c) reformist modes of governance (‘adhocracy’, ‘audit culture’, ‘architectures of irresponsibilization’, and strategically ephemeral modes of control), the dissertation makes two inter-related arguments. First, I argue for a thicker account of political economy. Specifically, I suggest that accounts of the above developments should not rely solely on biopolitical theorizations of a racist state and/or the abstract ‘othering’ of psycho-social animus. Instead, they should be supplemented by a material consideration of the constitutive role of political economy; in particular, how the social relations of capitalist accumulation can be manipulated by the state to control and organize groups of asylees and citizens in ways which serve the interconnections and needs of Irish capitalism. Concretely, rather than treating the corrosions of stigma, sexism, racism, scapegoating and so forth as effects of neoliberalism, the dissertation illustrates that capitalist relations and neoliberal governance are in fact dependent on the class work achieved through the denigrations and differentiations of stigma. Second, we therefore need to re-politicize and historically deepen our understandings of the work of difference-making by constructing a new epistemology of stigma-power, expanding beyond the individualism of Goffmanian interactionism to its role in apparatuses of governance, and the ways such governmental mediations influence and shape how nations ‘think,’ ‘feel,’ ‘act’ and ‘know’ – in complex, often contradictory ways.

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