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Exploring the complex dynamics of twenty-first century spatial sociality, this volume provides a much-needed multi-dimensional perspective that undermines the dominant image of Northern Ireland as a conflict-ridden place. Despite touching on memories of “the Troubles” and continuing unionist-nationalist tensions, the volume refuses to consider people in the region as purely political beings, or to understand processes of placemaking solely through ethnic or national contestations and territoriality. Topics such as the significance of friendship, gender, and popular culture in spatial practices are considered, against the backdrop of the growing presence of migrants, refugees and diasporic groups.
“Milena Komarova and Maruška Svašek’s edited volume is a commendable piece of scholarship on Northern Ireland that manages to be ambitious in scope but never scattershot in execution… a magnificent work on the outbound orientation of mobility and sociality and, lamentably, how this sociability brushes up against the walls and the persistent, dichotomous views of two opposing communities that constrain and reify them.” • JRAI
“A very welcome and timely contribution… This is a book that manages to be both detailed and insightful in its elaboration of fascinating empirical data whilst also being very strong in its conceptual and methodological contribution.” • Katy Hayward, Queen's University Belfast
“This volume will set a new benchmark for the ethnographic study of life in the north of Ireland today. Focusing on practices and discourses of placemaking, it explores many of the nooks and crannies of everyday life that are perhaps less than visible to the outsider… It is a pleasure to read and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the place in question, and its people, but also to the wider anthropology of the contemporary world.” • Richard P Jenkins, Sheffield University
“[This book] represents a valuable addition to the literature on Northern Ireland due to the manner in which it integrates the new with the established, the perspectives of the majority communities with those of the new minority communities and in the way that it foregrounds women's perspectives.” • Neil Jarman, Queen's University Belfast
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Spatiality, Movement and Place-Making
Maruška Svašek and Milena Komarova
Chapter 1. Growing up with the Troubles: Reading and Negotiating Space
Angela Stephanie Mazzeti
Chapter 2. Crafting Identities: Prison Artefacts and Place-Making in Pre- and Post-ceasefire Northern Ireland
Erin Hinson
Chapter 3. ‘Recalling or Suggesting Phantoms’: Walking in Belfast
Elizabeth DeYoung
Chapter 4. ‘Women on the Peace Line’: Challenging Divisions through the Space of Friendship
Andrea García González
Chapter 5. ‘You Have No Legitimate Reason to Access’: Visibility and Movement in Contested Urban Space
Milena Komarova
Chapter 6. ‘Lifting the Cross’ in West Belfast: Enskilling Crucicentric Vision Through Pedestrian Spatial Practice
Kayla Rush
Chapter 7. Engaging amid Divisions: Social Media as a Space for Political Intervention and Interactions in Northern Ireland
Augusto H. Gazir M. Soares
Chapter 8. Belfast’s Festival of Fools: Sharing Space through Laughter
Nick McCafferty
Chapter 9. Criss-crossing Pathways: The Indian Community Centre as a Focus of Diasporic and Cross-Community Place-Making
Maruška Svašek
Chapter 10. Sushi or Spuds? Japanese Migrant Women and Practices of Emplacement in Northern Ireland
Naoko Maehara
Chapter 11. Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Belfast: Finding ‘Home’ through Space and Time
Malcolm Franklin
Afterword: Cupar Way or Cupar Street – Integration and Division around a Belfast Wall
Dominic Bryan
Index