Staff

Kevin Ryan

Lecturer

BA (Fine Art Sculpture) Crawford College of Art and Design
BA (Political Science & Sociology; Geography) NUI Galway
PhD (Political Science & Sociology) NUI Galway

Office: 325 Aras Moyola
Telephone: 00 353 91 493111
Email: kevin.ryannuigalway.ie

Member of the Power, Conflict and Ideologies Research Cluster

Profile

I am an active member of IPSA Research Committee 36 (Political Power), and currently Reviews Editor for the Journal of Power (Routledge). In terms of research and teaching, I am interested in power, order and exclusion. I welcome proposals from prospective MA and PhD students on these and related questions.
 

Teaching

Political Ideologies
Political Theory
The Politics of Poverty
The Abnormal: the Sociology and Politics of Difference

Research Interests

I am interested in how the ordering of society (past and present) institutes specific modes of inclusion and exclusion, and in particular the ways in which contemporary discourses of ’social exclusion’ – a relatively new category of social thought and political action – have recoded long-standing problems relating to inequality, poverty and domination. I am currently researching the history of the playground and its connection to citizenship, focusing on the various ways in which the organisation and supervision of children’s play relates to specific conceptions of discipline, freedom, and democracy. 

Selected Publications

Books

M. Haugaard and K. Ryan (Eds) (2012) Political Power: Development of the Field. IPSA and Barbara Budrich.

Abstract: Although power is one of the most central concepts in the social sciences, there is no agreement as to what exactly power is, with some theorists/analysts viewing power entirely negatively, as domination, while others insist that power is the basis of autonomy and a means of empowerment. In this volume, which has been produced by members of the IPSA Research Committee on Political Power (RC36), it is argued that the concept of power has no essence, and is best understood, from Wittgenstein, as a ’family resemblance’ concept. Approaching power from the perspective of social and political theory, political anthropology, organization studies, gender, political sociology, and international relations, the book examines the most influential members of the power family, and in doing so it provides a comprehensive and detailed overview of the field. The book will be an indispensible resource not only for readers interested in the question of power, but also for those with an interest in what W. B. Gallie famously called ’essentially contested concepts’.

Ryan, K. (2007) Social Exclusion and the Politics of Order, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press.

Abstract: The politics of order has long divided those deemed fit to exercise freedom from others perceived to pose a threat to the safety and security of society, with paupers, vagabonds and unmarried mothers (among others) subjected to various controls in defence of social order, historical progress and national unity. In the closing decades of the 20th century this relation between inclusion and exclusion became the explicit focus of political thought and action, in part because the excluded organised to demand recognition, equality and rights, but also due to innovations resulting from structural strains and dislocation. The book traces out the historical roots of this process of transformation, which has assembled a new mode of governing that organises actors and agencies from the spheres of state, market and civil society into various forms of partnership. Taking an original and accessible approach, the book examines the fields of nomadism, disability, youth and lone parenting in detail, and it argues that the shift from an order built on exclusion to one based on the rule of inclusion recasts the modern projects of equality and emancipation, which have neither been accomplished nor abandoned. Instead they have been transformed, with the new arts of government anticipating disturbances while recruiting the socially excluded into the dual task of governing their self and managing order. Drawing on recent Foucauldian-inspired research and governmentality theory, the book will be a valuable resource for researchers and students with an interest in the changing nature of government, policy and political struggle.

Journal Articles

Ryan, K. 2012. ’The new wave of childhood studies: breaking the grip of bio-social dualism?’, Childhood 19(4): 439-52.

Abstract: The article takes as its starting point a new wave of researchers who use concepts such as ’hybridity’ and ’multiplicity’ in a bid to move the study of childhood beyond the strictures of what Lee and Motzkau call ’bio-social dualism’, whereby the division between the ’natural child’ of developmental psychology and the ’social child’ of socialization theory replicates a tendency in modern thought and practice to divide nature from culture. The article offers an alternative approach to understanding modern western childhood, and argues that this emerges not through a division between nature and culture, but in the form of a ’bio-social nexus’ which is irreducible to distinct elements and which provides a way of locating developmental psychology and socialization theory within the same field of practice. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of this for the new

Malesevic, S. and K. Ryan (2012) ’The Disfigured Ontology of Figurational Sociology: Norbert Elias and the Question of Violence’, Critical Sociology 39(2): 165-81.

Abstract: This article scrutinizes Norbert Elias’s figurational sociology by focusing on its ontological foundations. The analytical spotlight is on the inherent tension between Elias’s stance of normative neutrality and detachment, his naturalistic ontology, and an unyielding commitment to directional development. We show how Elias’s social theory does not stand apart, as an external observer, from the figurations it seeks to explain. On the contrary, it constitutes its own outside, and this has consequences when it comes to explaining the ’dark sides’ of the present, and in particular the social sources of organized violence in modernity. It is our contention that Elias’s ontology incorrectly posits violence as the absolute Other of civilization, so that his theory of the ’Civilising Process’ fails to adequately account for the persistence and proliferation of warfare in the modern age.

Ryan, K. (2011) ’Governing the Future: Citizenship as Technology, Empowerment as Technique’. Critical Sociology Vol. 37 (6): 763-78.

 Abstract: This article examines how citizenship can be deployed as a technology of conduct, and how it combines with the technique of empowerment in instituting the behavioural norms that constitute a neo-liberal social order. It conducts a detailed analysis of policy innovations in the Republic or Ireland, where children have recently been recognised as ’active citizens’. This field of innovation is framed by the idea that children should be listened to and included in the decisions affecting their lives. The fact that this concerns children is important, because governing children is a way of acting upon the future. Moreover, governing the future is not a matter of reducing inequalities, but of ensuring the inclusion of all into the neo-liberal ’game between inequalities’ (Foucault, 2008). In cases of failure, the fault lies with the individual player, not with the game.

Ryan, K. (2008) On power, habitus, and (in)civility: Foucault meets Elias meets Bauman in the playground, Journal of Political Power, Vol. 1, No. 3, December 2008, 251–274.

Abstract: Drawing on the work of Foucault, Elias, and Bauman, this article examines how the playground has articulated specific configurations of power/knowledge. Originally designed to cultivate virtue and counteract vice, the playgrounds of the past were to complete the discipline of the schoolroom, assisting the trained master to ’direct’ the child’s thoughts, feelings, and actions. From its tentative beginnings in the work of Rousseau, the strategy of supervised play was intended to conceal its purpose from the child, with power exercised through discreet forms of surveillance and constraint that would, it was hoped, gradually be embodied and re-enacted as self-restraint. Contemporary playgrounds – and here the article focuses on Ireland – no longer claim to be directing the conduct of children. Public playgrounds are framed by the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child, while commercial playgrounds provide a service to consumers of play. Yet, both unobtrusively act upon the child’s capacity for action, and there is a tension between these different modes of provision. Setting recent Eliasian scholarship on ’de-civilising’ processes against Bauman’s theory of ’liquid modernity’, and utilising Foucault’s notion of government as the ’conduct of conduct’, the article examines this tension and shows how it provides insight into the relationship between power, habitus, and (in)civility today.

Book Chapters

Ryan, K. (in press) Governing the freedom to choose: biosocial power and the playground as a ’school of conduct’. In: Francisco Martínez and Klemen Slabina (eds), Playground: Experiencing Responsibility for Choosing. Tallinn University Press.

M. Haugaard and K. Ryan (2012) ’Power in Social and Political Theory’, in Political Power: Development of the Field. In: M. Haugaard and K. Ryan (eds), IPSA and Barbara Budrich.

Ryan, K. (2009) ’Power and Exclusion’, in the Sage Handbook of Power, edited by Stewart Clegg and Mark Haugaard, Sage. 

Ryan, K. (2008) Environmental Conflict and Democracy: between Reason and Hegemony, in Environmental Arguing and Cultural Difference: Locations, Fractures and Deliberations, edited by Ricca Edmondson and Henrike Rau. Peter Lang.

Ryan, K. (2007) ’Truth, Reason and the Spectre of Contingency’, in Ernest Gellner and Contemporary Social Thought, edited by S. Maleševic and M. Haugaard. Cambridge University Press.

Haugaard, M. and K. Ryan (2007) ’Power and Powerlessness’, in Contemporary Ireland: A Sociological Map, edited by S. O’Sullivan, Dublin: UCD Press.

Ryan. K. (2006) ’Hegemony and the Power to Act’ in Hegemony and Power: Consensus and Coercion in Contemporary Politics, edited by H. Lentner and M. Haugaard. New York: Lexington.

Reference Works

Ryan, K. (forthcoming) Agonism, in the International Encyclopaedia of the Social and Behavioural Sciences, 2^nd Edition, James D. Wright (ed). Elsevier.

Ryan, K. 2011. ’Exclusion’, Sage Encyclopaedia of Power, edited by Keith Dowding. 

Ryan, K. 2011. ’Haugaard, Mark’, Sage Encyclopaedia of Power, edited by Keith Dowding. 

Haugaard, M. and K. Ryan, (2008) 'Power, Social and Political Theories of', in Vol. 2 of Encyclopedia of Violence, Peace & Conflict, 3 vols. Lester Kurtz (Editor-in-Chief). Oxford: Elsevier.

Supervision of Research

PhD

Student: Anne Walsh (Co-supervised with Brian McGrath)
Graduated: 2008
Thesis Title: Re-shaping Biographies: A Grounded Theory Study of the Experiences of Mature Students in Higher Education

MLitt

Student: Cian Bryan (Co-supervised with Mark Haugaard)
Graduated: 2007
Thesis Title: The Possibilities of Nationalism: A philosophical and sociological analysis of nationalist arguments

MA in Family Support Studies

Student: Aileen Courtney
Graduated: 2005
Thesis Title: Parent’s perceptions of their support needs when their child is in the care of the Health Service Executive: An Evaluative Study

Student: Sheila Feeney
Graduated: 2007
Thesis Title: The Role of Community Based Projects in Promoting Positive Mental Health as a Protective Factor against Suicide for Young People at Risk

Student: Helen Mortimer
Graduated: 2008
Thesis Title: An Exploratory Study of the Role of a Family Support Intervention Programme in Supporting Children’s Recovery from Domestic Violence

MA in Social Work

Student: Kathryn McGrath
Graduated: 2009
Thesis Title: Social Control Versus Civil Liberty: Risk Assessment of Sexual Offenders in Ireland

MA in Public Advocacy and Activism

Student: Stephen Francis McKay
Graduated: 2007
Thesis Title: Neoliberal Injustice and the Counterhegemonic Potential of the Roman Catholic Church

Student: Bridget Murphy
Graduated: 2009
Thesis Title: (Dis)placed and (Dis)located: The Case for Recognition by two Societies of the ’Forgotten Irish’ in Britain

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