Mark Justin Rainey | University of Galway (original) (raw)

Journal Articles by Mark Justin Rainey

Town and Planning Review, 2023

This article presents the case for a reconceptualised form of engagement around development at a ... more This article presents the case for a reconceptualised form of engagement around development at a local scale within a medium-sized city. Deploying ideas gleaned from literature on emergence, the article explores how a non-teleological form of development might engage with stakeholders in an urban regeneration area. Focusing on three distinct social practices – co-production, activism and policy – the article sets out to unfold the example of Nuns’ Island in Galway, Ireland to chart a participatory form
of development in the absence of previously defined goals. Honing in on ‘storytelling’ as a key cultural strategy in this process, the article concludes with a view from Europe’s West towards locally embedded urban development practices.

Human Geography, 2021

Two sculptures of Friedrich Engels have recently been installed in Greater Manchester, the city w... more Two sculptures of Friedrich Engels have recently been installed in Greater Manchester, the city where the social philosopher spent most of his working life and was the focus of his proto-ethnographic account of the early industrial city. The first sculpture is a fibreglass ‘fabricated ruin’ set within a newly rebuilt section of the University of Salford campus. The second is a former Soviet monument that was transported from eastern Ukraine to Tony Wilson Place, a new arts, business and entertainment space in central Manchester. While the appropriation of the city’s radical figures and movements is very much part of Manchester’s narrative of post-industrial regeneration, the ‘homecoming’ of Engels in the decade following the 2008 financial crash and amid the unfolding Brexit crisis raises certain methodological concerns for us. Engels is a figure who has returned and can be returned to. Here, his 'double return' can be read in very particular ways. In this paper, we bring Engels back to Manchester as a figure who will immediately re-signify against the contemporary political, economic and cultural landscape. In doing so, we advocate a dialectics of geographical traces that can grasp the social contradictions and fractures of the present in a way that works both within and beyond the writing and practice of Engels. As we move on from the 2019 UK General Election in which the Conservative party formed a substantial majority government into the fractured British landscapes of 2021 and beyond, this practice becomes increasingly necessary.

European Planning Studies, 2021

In this paper, we map the evolution of approaches to development in Ireland since the formation o... more In this paper, we map the evolution of approaches to development in Ireland since the formation of the state. With reference to the current national and international context, we make the case for the adoption of a transformational approach to development in one of Europe’s most centralized countries. We highlight the growing literature on socio-ecological approaches to growth and consider the potential for the development of an urban lab to enable a radical shift in approaches to development in Ireland. The paper shines a light on certain initiatives already underway in Galway, Ireland and posits their culmination in the delivery of an urban lab for the city. In particular, we cite the opportunities afforded by urban labs to better define growth (a more socio-ecological definition of innovation) and facilitate the co-authoring of development through place-based experimentalism at the local level.

Borderlands, 2020

Based on ethnographic research undertaken between 2012-2014, this article focuses on the experien... more Based on ethnographic research undertaken between 2012-2014, this article focuses on the experiences and narratives of four refused, male asylum seekers living in a network of emergency night shelters located in churches across Greater Manchester, UK. Without the right to work and under No Recourse to Public Funds, many refused asylum seekers are pushed into dependency on charitable support and live under threat of arrest, detention and deportation. This enforced destitution interlocks with other mechanisms of deterrence within the UK's asylum system to produce a weaponised time in which the state uses time to marginalise, destabilise and exert control over asylum seekers and refused asylum seekers. This paper argues that this weaponised time should be considered as a technology of state power alongside dispersal, detention, destitution and deportation. In making this assertion, it also takes stock of the UK's asylum system and its built-in forms of marginalisation. It also places both the ethnographic content and policy discussion within the controversy surrounding the UK government's 'hostile environment' towards so-called 'illegal immigrants' that was unfolding as the ethnographic research took place. This opens towards wider discussions on the mutually reinforcing relationship between asylum policy and political discourse.

Identity and Cultural Icons in a Multicultural World : Ethnicity, Language, Nation, 2020

This paper draws on ethnographic research carried out in a network of emergency night shelters fo... more This paper draws on ethnographic research carried out in a network of emergency night shelters for refused asylum seekers in Manchester, UK. Located in churches throughout the city, these shelters provide informal accommodation for men who have been made destitute following the refusal of asylum claim. With particular focus on volunteers working in the night shelters, this paper argues that a ‘theo-ethics’ based on notions of Christian love – or agape - often informs individual and organisational practices of care while also recognising the limitations of this work in the face of the wider and systemic injustices of the UK asylum system.

Third Text

Repairs, like many of the people who carry them out, often constitute an invisible background tha... more Repairs, like many of the people who carry them out, often constitute an invisible background that ensures the smooth functioning of everyday life-worlds. This extended introduction instead places them centre stage, situating the theory and practice of repair at the intersection of a number of different fields, from Science and Technology Studies to the Medical Humanities. It explores the role repair plays in the layered history of various objects and social forms, from technological devices and artworks, to post-conflict cultures. Repair, it argues, is a practice that exists in relational webs of entanglement, where its power can be multiplied if supplemented with an ethics of care. Like the examples of repair it brings to light, the introduction seeks to hold heterogeneous fragments in relation, positing repair as a ‘material metaphor’ that is invaluable for posing questions in a range of disciplinary arenas.

Third Text

This article brings together Sophocles’s tragedy, Oedipus at Colonus, with an account of the 2013... more This article brings together Sophocles’s tragedy, Oedipus at Colonus, with an account of the 2013 Lampedusa disaster in which over 300 migrants perished off the coast of Italy. This juxtaposition crosses the ancient and the contemporary in order to draw out a decisive feature of border regimes: they not only produce legal and social ambiguity among migrants, but also attempt to instrumentalise and ‘fix’ this ambiguity in favour of the receiving state, with often tragic consequences. This article also outlines the possibility of an alternative ethics that takes place outside this unbalanced relation. By drawing on Vicki Squire’s notion of ‘mobile solidarities’ and Gillian Rose’s wider political category of ‘Ethical Life’, it proposes a more grounded and speculative ethics of repair that both affirms ambiguity and disrupts and troubles the statist framing of the migrant.

Cultural Studies

This paper uses the glass and steel Urbis building in Manchester as a prism via which we might lo... more This paper uses the glass and steel Urbis building in Manchester as a prism via which we might look at cultural, political and economic change in England over the last twenty years or so. It takes stock of neoliberalism, museum and popular culture in England during that time, and tries to sense different political, cultural and economic turns, at the same time as it acknowledges that 'uneven development' on any landscape makes the attempt to describe macro change problematic. To deal with this, the paper introduces a particular figuring of the term 'degentrification', in order to think about the ways in which these essentially dialectical movements operate. We are soliciting a cultural dialectic here, which focuses on one site, but then uses the insights made there - in the tradition of Walter Benjamin and the Situationists - to think through wider cultural, economic and political temperatures in England between the early 1990s and the present day.

Book Chapters by Mark Justin Rainey

The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, The City and Urban Society, 2019

Invited Guest Lectures by Mark Justin Rainey

School of History, Philosophy, Political Science & International Relations, Victoria University o... more School of History, Philosophy, Political Science & International Relations, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. 27 May, 2019.

Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Global Studies, Kyushu University 25 March 2019

Hokkaido University. Institute for International Collaboration. 13 July, 2018.

Department of Geography, School of Environment, Education and Development. University of Manchest... more Department of Geography, School of Environment, Education and Development. University of Manchester. 8 November, 2017

BIAPT North West Conference. Nazarene Theological College. 12 Nov 2016.

Conference Papers, Proceedings, Presentations by Mark Justin Rainey

Technologies of Bordering: Creating Contesting and Resisting Borders. University of Melbourne. 4 ... more Technologies of Bordering: Creating Contesting and Resisting Borders. University of Melbourne. 4 July, 2019.

Researchers for Asylum Seekers Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Melbourne. 15 November... more Researchers for Asylum Seekers Interdisciplinary Conference, University of Melbourne. 15 November, 2018.

Thinking Theologically About Migration. Trinity Centre, Middlesbrough, UK. 5-6 May, 2017.

RGS-IBG Annual Conference, University of Exeter. Sept, 2015. This paper draws on research under... more RGS-IBG Annual Conference, University of Exeter. Sept, 2015.

This paper draws on research undertaken with refused asylum seekers in Manchester, UK. It is an ethnographic study and focus is given to the experience and strategies of men accessing emergency night shelters provided by a local faith-based organisation, the Boaz Trust. As refused asylum seekers, these men have not only been subject to policies of dispersal, but have also been stripped of their right to work, to access public funds and their right to remain in the UK. They have been rendered destitute as a result. While Agamben’s account of the politics of abandonment is a useful explanatory tool for approaching their situation, (Agamben, 1998) in this paper I also intend to foreground a more concrete temporality. This temporality is shaped as a bifurcated ‘waiting’. It is the mundane experience of spending time on the street waiting for the shelters to open and close while also being caught up in long-term, antagonistic and often dysfunctional bureaucratic processes. It is under such a ‘weaponised time’, (Power, 2014) that I intend to consider the day-to-day effects of a politics of abandonment in relation to the refused asylum seeker.

International Conference on Critical Geography, Ramallah, Palestine. July, 2015 This paper draws... more International Conference on Critical Geography, Ramallah, Palestine. July, 2015

This paper draws on ethnographic research undertaken alongside refused and destitute asylum seekers in Manchester, UK. It argues that while a politics of abandonment my provide a useful explanatory tool for the situation of refused asylum seekers in the UK, (Agamben, 1998) this can only be concretised through an account of the temporality of the day-to-day lives of those who have had their asylum claims refused. Focus is given to a network of emergency night shelters organised by the Boaz Trust, a faith-based organisation [FBO] that provides accommodation, advocacy and support to refused asylum seekers in the city. The shelter network includes seven overnight venues and two day-time drop-in centres. Each venue is operated by an individual church that provides its own supplies and volunteers. Located throughout Manchester, from post-industrial working class areas to leafy middle-class suburbs, the shelters can be considered sites of displacement, at the fringes of public life and society. The shelter users are men who, following the refusal of their asylum claim, are simultaneously abandoned by the immigration system and trapped within it. In this specific context, abandonment occurs through the stripping away of legal rights including the right to work, the right to remain in the UK and the right to have recourse to public funds. Being trapped in the system means being caught up in a set of long-term legal processes such as lodging an appeal, waiting for an appeal decision, lodging a Section 4 claim, waiting for a Section 4 decision, waiting for refugee status or waiting for detention and possible deportation.

In this paper I wish to view the shelters as a series of ‘waiting rooms’ in order to highlight the multi-temporal modes of ‘waiting’ faced by those using the shelters. Waiting is both the mundane experience of seeing out the day from a position of destitution, waiting for the shelters to open and close, while simultaneously being caught up in a vicious and antagonistic bureaucratic process. In this respect, waiting is a form of weaponised time (Power, 2014) in which the state seeks to punish an individual, even before it seeks to penalise them. By viewing the shelters as ‘waiting rooms’ I not only wish to insert temporality as a key condition within a politics of abandonment, but also examine how a set of night shelters organised by the charitable sector simultaneously reproduce forms of displacement and weaponised time, while also attempting to mitigate against these conditions.

5th Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies. University of Edinburgh. June, 2015. ... more 5th Interdisciplinary Conference on Emotional Geographies. University of Edinburgh. June, 2015.

This paper focuses on the situation of refused and destitute asylum seekers in Manchester, UK. It is an ethnographic study and particular attention is given to a network of seven night shelters for male refused asylum seekers. These shelters are organized by the Boaz Trust, a local Faith-based organisation [FBO] who provide emergency accommodation, support and advocacy to refused asylum seekers in the city. Drawing on research undertaken in the night shelters between 2012-2014, as both a volunteer and shelter user, this paper argues that the day-to-day lives of the men using the shelters is shaped by a politics of abandonment that manifests itself through the ‘weaponization of time’. (Agamben, 1998; Power, 2014) This ‘weaponization of time’ is formed as a multi-temporal waiting that is both the mundane and repetitive experience of waiting for shelters to open and close and the often dysfunctional bureaucratic processes imposed on the refused asylum seeker. For the men staying in the shelters, arrival and departure are clouded in legal uncertainty. In view of this I wish to challenge views that such disturbed ideas of belonging open up an ethics of hospitality and instead are, more concretely, disturbing experiences. (Derrida, 1994; Malabou & Derrida, 2004; Darling, 2009; Khosravi, 2011) This will open up a critical discussion on how different forms of arrival and departure to and from the shelters come to shape the experiences of the shelter users during their stay.

Town and Planning Review, 2023

Human Geography, 2021

European Planning Studies, 2021

Borderlands, 2020

Identity and Cultural Icons in a Multicultural World : Ethnicity, Language, Nation, 2020

Third Text

Cultural Studies

The Routledge Handbook of Henri Lefebvre, The City and Urban Society, 2019

Graduate School of Integrated Sciences for Global Studies, Kyushu University 25 March 2019

Hokkaido University. Institute for International Collaboration. 13 July, 2018.

BIAPT North West Conference. Nazarene Theological College. 12 Nov 2016.

Thinking Theologically About Migration. Trinity Centre, Middlesbrough, UK. 5-6 May, 2017.

RGS-IBG Annual Conference, University of Exeter. Sept, 2015. This paper draws on research under... more RGS-IBG Annual Conference, University of Exeter. Sept, 2015.

International Conference on Critical Geography, Ramallah, Palestine. July, 2015 This paper draws... more International Conference on Critical Geography, Ramallah, Palestine. July, 2015

UK and Ireland Planning Research Conference, University of Brighton. 12 April, 2012 The 2004 Pla... more UK and Ireland Planning Research Conference, University of Brighton. 12 April, 2012

The 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act re-introduced public participation into the statutory planning process. As local authorities produced local planning policy under Local Development Frameworks, web 2.0 collaborative platforms became an increasingly prominent means of engaging citizens in policy formation. With Local Development Frameworks community involvement and consultation was brought to the fore of the planning process, or ‘front-loaded’ so that ‘consultation begins at the earliest stage of each document’s development’ and that ‘communities are given the fullest opportunity to participate in plan making and make a difference’. This paper draws on interviews conducted with four planners from local authorities within the Greater Manchester and Cheshire areas. Although web 2.0 collaborative tools have only recently been introduced as participatory platforms by local authorities, the tools were regarded by interviewees as playing a central role in present and future policy formation. However, participation remains a highly complex and contested topic and many barriers exist both within and beyond the use of web 2.0 collaborative platforms. The purpose of this paper is to draw on the perceptions and experience of professionals working within planning in order to provide insights into the perceived benefits of web 2.0 while also identifying existing and potential barriers.

This paper presents research undertaken as part of the (Voice Your View) vYv project. vYv is a cross-disciplinary, three-year research project funded by the EPSRC Digital Economy Programme and explores web 2.0 platforms, real-time comment capture, digital technology and input devices in the context of improving public space and the built environment. The project is led by Lancaster University’s School of Computing and Communications and also includes Brunel, Coventry University and the School of Mechanical Aerospace and Civil Engineering at the University of Manchester.

The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the different communication methods used by ... more The purpose of this paper is to provide insight into the different communication methods used by engineering students in order to improve engineering teaching and learning. As part of a second year Project Management module, engineering students participated in collaborative group work. This involved 320 engineering students, organised into 54 groups, competing in a simulated business environment. As part of their final group reports, students were asked to describe and assess the methods of communication used within their group and with members of staff. The student responses identify how online forms of communication were used alongside more traditional forms. The responses also highlighted the perceived advantages and disadvantages of different communication methods and offered valuable insights into student practice within a collaborative learning environment. This paper investigates how these findings can be used to improve teaching techniques within engineering and particularly in supporting large numbers of students in collaborative group projects.
There are two sections of analysis within this paper. The first investigates communication between students engaged in collaborative work; the second considers communication between student groups and teaching staff. Each section will present the methods used and the perceived advantages and disadvantages of each.
The case study results indicate that students utilise multiple means of communication and develop the skill of being able to assess the advantages and disadvantages of specific methods. They can adapt their communication to suit the different methods and will make use of one method to supplement the perceived deficiencies of another. The paper also describes how student perception of communication can be used to inform learning techniques and practices

The importance of recognizing user needs and incorporating them in the design of products and ser... more The importance of recognizing user needs and incorporating them in the design of products and services is widely recognized. This is true not only for products but also for buildings and services. In public building design and refurbishment, consultation often takes place at the start to determine the requirements from the public users. These requirements can be helpful in making major decisions at the conceptual design stage. This paper argues that the detailed feedback from the public on the results of a library refurbishment /redesign project can also be helpful in influencing future designs.

The paper focuses on public feedback from a refurbishment of the public library in Lancaster, UK. The library redesign was part of a nationwide Community Libraries Programme. The Lancaster library was the first of three library refurbishment projects in the Lancashire region. Public consultation took place prior to the library redesign and was a requirement of the project funding. After refurbishment and reopening, a larger post-occupancy consultation took place using an innovative consultation method. During this consultation, sections of the library were still being modified and services were being adapted, this allowed user comments to have a direct impact on aspects of the redesign of the library and an input into the design of other libraries in the area.

The innovative post-occupancy consultation method was supported by technology developed by the EPSRC Voice Your View Project (vYv). This paper will begin with a discussion on participatory design. It will also present an overview of the Lancaster Library case study, including a description of the vYv digital kiosk developed for the consultation. Central to the paper is an analysis of the comments collected from the Lancaster Library case study. The analysis will highlight changes to the library directly resulting from the post-occupancy consultation, the potential use of these comments in future library redesigns and also highlight how vYv can be positioned as tool to be utilised in the front-end of public building design.

A PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIC SERIES OF EVENTS AND PHENOMENA including… Neogeography Deep topography Urba... more A PSYCHOGEOGRAPHIC SERIES OF EVENTS AND PHENOMENA

including…

Neogeography
Deep topography
Urban interventions
Locative media
Collaborative Mapping
Psychogeography is word you may not have heard before. Even if you have, you may not be quite sure what the word means. Is it to do with psychology? Or has it more to do with geography? Is it a combination of the two, and if so, how do they fit together?Over the past century, psychogeography has played an increasingly important part in the radical re-thinking of urban space. From the Situationists who were active in Paris during the 1968 riots, to major London novelists of the 1990s like Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd, to many of today’s leading urban designers, psychogeographic experiments continue to produce unusual and provocative approaches to the city.

And anyone can do it.

For the first time in the UK, TRIP brought together psychogeographers from all over the world, to show new work, exchange ideas, and create new energies.

Taking place between the 19th and 21st of June 2008 in Manchester, TRIP explored the many and various directions in which artists, performers, writers and theorists are taking psychogeography in the twenty first century. TRIP was a new event, combining an art festival and a conference, alongside a parallel programme of fringe activities. Activities took place at various venues in Manchester, including URBIS, Green Room, the Royal Exchange Theatre, and Manchester Metropolitan University. TRIP’s academic conference was organised by Manchester Metropolitian University and took place at the John Dalton Building, Oxford Road. Its programme of papers included several speakers who produced artworks or performances for the public.

The Urbis Research Forum was an informal space for diverse discussions exploring urban issues. E... more The Urbis Research Forum was an informal space for diverse discussions exploring urban issues.

Established in the summer of 2009, the forum was not-for-profit and brings together anyone interested in cities and urban life. The Urbis Research Forum links people together by hosting regular meetings in Manchester for those who live in cities, people who work trying to design, manage and improve them and people who study or analyse them.

Forum activities include talks, roundtable discussions, walks and special events. The meetings will be based around an inclusive and supportive dialogue with topics including, but not limited to, urban planning, history, culture, design and society. The Urbis Research Forum also encourages dialogue about the past, present and future of Greater Manchester.

The Urbis Research Forum received support from MMU, University of Manchester, RIBA HUB, MSA and the ESRC.

This paper uses Engels as a cipher for explorations of the contemporary Manchester landscape, foc... more This paper uses Engels as a cipher for explorations of the contemporary Manchester landscape, focusing on the crash and 'rescue' of the Co-operative bank in 2013.

Human Geography, 2021

Borderlands Journal, 2019

Based on ethnographic research undertaken between 2012—2014, this article focuses on the experien... more Based on ethnographic research undertaken between 2012—2014, this article focuses on the experiences and narratives of four refused, male asylum seekers living in a network of emergency night shelters located in churches across Greater Manchester, UK. Without the right to work and under No Recourse to Public Funds, many refused asylum seekers are pushed into dependency on charitable support and live under threat of arrest, detention and deportation. This enforced destitution interlocks with other mechanisms of deterrence within the UK’s asylum system to produce a weaponised time in which the state uses time to marginalise, destabilise and exert control over asylum seekers and refused asylum seekers. This paper argues that this weaponised time should be considered as a technology of state power alongside dispersal, detention, destitution and deportation. In making this assertion, it also takes stock of the UK’s asylum system and its built-in forms of marginalisation. It also places b...

Human Geography, 2021

European Planning Studies, 2021

Third Text, 2018