Iain Mackinnon

Coventry University | CU · Centre for Agroecology, Water and Resilience

In their response to my Scottish Affairs article ‘Recovering and Reconstituting Gàidheal Ethnicity’, Armstrong et al. present misleading and misinformed beliefs about my views on identity and indigeneity. In doing so they distort and divert from my article’s focus. Armstrong et al.’s own views on identity and indigeneity not only contain problemati...

In the preamble of the response articles to the recent special issue of Scottish Affairs on Scotland's Gàidhealtachd Futures the authors make some negative assertions about the editorial position. This short and positive essay revisits and reiterates the key themes of ‘plurality’ and ‘futures’ that are the focus of the special issue's contribution...

This article analyses some claims made about the Gàidheal identity in Scotland, with particular reflection on a distinct ‘sociolinguistic turn’ within Gàidhlig studies and related research over the last two decades. Through critical analysis of a major sociological survey on the structuring of various markers in framing Gàidheal identity, a normati...

This special issue of Scottish Affairs is the first to be solely dedicated to matters relating to Scotland's Gàidhealtachd. Scottish Affairs has a broad, interdisciplinary readership and this informs our approach as guest editors for the special issue. As such, the focus for the issue is to be future-oriented, whilst necessarily being informed by c...

‘Environmentality’ is a term used to describe the means by which regulatory processes simultaneously redefine both the environment and the subjectivity of those whose environment is being governed by regulation. Today it is considered a key concept of political ecology. Its most comprehensive and influential articulation is by way of a case-study o...

This article examines and contests Scottish historiography's current assessment of the identity and concomitant ideology that formed a basis and motivation for collective political action taken by the indigenous population of the west Highlands and Islands during the second half of the nineteenth century in response to their territorial marginalisa...

On the Gaelic speaking islands of Arranmore (Donegal, Ireland) and Barra (Outer Hebrides, Scotland) the fishermen believe that their livelihood and way of living is being threatened by powerful governmental forces who are not listening to them. In Barra, the dispute centres around two proposed marine Special Areas of Conservation designations while...

Common pool resource theory appears to assume that external authorities are responsible for initiating attempts to ‘decommonise’ common property regimes. An unusual decommonisation proposal put forward in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the 1960s questions this assumption; in this instance the decommonisation proposal was initiated by righ...

Addressing our growing planetary crisis and attendant symptoms of human and human-ecological disconnect, requires a profound epistemological re-orientation regarding how societal structures are conceived and articulated; named here as the collective work of decolonization. Whilst global dynamics are giving rise to vital transnational solidarities b...

This article employs a new approach to studying internal colonialism in northern Scotland during the 18 th and 19 th centuries. A common approach to examining internal colonial situations within modern state territories is to compare characteristics of the internal colonial situation with attested attributes of external colonial relations. Although...

Addressing our growing planetary crisis and attendant symptoms of human and human-ecological disconnect, requires a profound epistemological re-orientation regarding how societal structures are conceived and articulated; named here as the collective work of decolonization. Whilst global dynamics are giving rise to vital transnational solidarities b...

Abstract: Human beings today are living in times of unprecedented social and ecological crisis, a crisis that is to a significant degree of human making. The impending arrival of the Anthropocene geological epoch gives this crisis a name. As academics with a sense of responsibility for our relationships with planetary kin, the awareness of unfoldin...

Since 2007 the Irish government have prevented the fisher-men of the Donegal islands of Arranmore, Tory and Inishbofin from engaging in their generations-old drift-net salmon fishery. We have been involved in supporting the islanders as they organise themselves to find ways to oppose the ban. In this dialogue we reflect on some aspects of our invol...