Choose one of the following Essay Titles*

• According to Peggy Mc Intosh (1992) it is difficult to challenge a system of hegemony because those that it privileges are reluctant to give up their privileges. Examine how a system of privilege operates at both the macro and micro levels vis-à-vis Travellers and outline the main challenges such a system presents to those trying to redress the social inequalities they experience.
• Although Travellers’ right to self-determination is protected by a range of international agreements including the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, the UN Declaration on the Rights of Persons Belonging to National or Ethnic, Religious or Linguistic Minorities and The Framework Convention on National Minorities adopted by the Council of Europe, Travellers in Ireland had been campaigning for ethnic status for the past 20 years. It was finally granted on 1^st March, 2017. Discuss the merits and demerits of getting ethnic status for Travellers in the context of the existing protections available to Travellers as an ethnic minority.
• Arland D. Jacobson claims that “the purpose of humiliating others within larger social contexts is to disempower them and to control them, and at the extreme, to eliminate them” (2013). Write a critical analysis of the ways in which the Irish media have contributed to the denigration of Travellers as a cultural minority. In your essay, please also identify any ways in which a counter-narrative to negative stereotyping has taken place in the media.

The Encyclopaedia of Race and Racism (2013) suggests that there are three strands of everyday racism: “the marginalization of those identified as racially or ethnically different”; “the problematization of other cultures and identities”; and “symbolic or physical repression of (potential)

• resistance through humiliation or violence”. Do these three forms of everyday racism operate in Ireland in equal measure for Travellers or are some more pervasive than others?
• Prior to the largescale migration of the past 20 years, Irish Travellers were deemed the archetypal “Other” in Irish society. Discuss the origins and development of this “Othering” discourse with reference to Irish Travellers in contemporary Ireland.
• “Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of their world.”

― Paulo Freire (1970) Pedagogy of the Oppressed. Has education in Ireland operated as a liberatory or an oppressive system for Irish Travellers?

• Intersectionality, as defined by Deborah T. Meem et al, refers to ‘our complex awareness that we inhabit – and are inhabited by – multiple categories of identity and that our experience of several identities taken together may be emotionally, culturally and materially different than the experience of any one particular identity category by itself’. Write an essay on how the intersections of sexism and racism potentially impact on the lives of Traveller women.
• Contrary to much common-day wisdom the legal and institutional repression of nomadism in Ireland is very old and multifaceted discourse incorporating “anti-Irish” and other essentialist tropes and stereotypes as relating to Irish people under colonial rule, Irish Travellers and the marginalization of nomadic groups within the modern nation-state. Discuss the development and gradual “naturalization” of this discourse in Ireland with reference to the negative stereotyping of Travellers generally.