‘It can be good there too’: home and continuity in refugee children's narratives of settlement

Drawing on refugee children's narratives about their experiences of settlement after prolonged stays in asylum centres, this article explores how the process of home-making is experienced in the everyday lives of children (7–12 year olds) settling with their parents in Norway. This article examines the importance of home as a material and relational space where children's expectations of an ideal home and existing standards together influence the process of home-making. Settlement is found to be a turning point in the lives of refugee families; it is a way of making oneself at home, sustaining continuity in children's world of movement, as well as linking space and time in their lives.     

Estranging Ireland: The underground self of the Irish free state in Joseph O’Neill’s Land Under England

Land Under England is an out of print, rarely-cited Irish science fiction novel by the author Joseph O’Neill. Written at a time of crisis in Irish society in the 1930s, the novel has been relatively ignored in studies of the literature of the period. Although critics of science fiction tend to situate the novel as a purely anti-fascist work, taking its cues from events happening in Europe, this article places the novel firmly within its postcolonial Irish context, opening up the text to alternative readings based on the writings of Irish historians, as well as Marxist, cultural materialist and postcolonial critics. The article also utilises documents such as work written by O’Neill in his capacity as a civil servant, letters to the author from the controversial author Francis Stuart, and reviews contemporary to the publication of the novel.     

‘Dead dads’: memory narratives of war-related fatherlessness in Germany

After the Second World War, there were estimated to be around 20 million half-orphans in Europe. In Germany alone, 5.3 million soldiers killed in action left behind approximately 1.2 million widows, nearly 2.5 million half-orphans and about 100,000 complete orphans. This article examines how men and women from various social strata in western and eastern Germany remember their fathers who died in the war and in what way he has been stored in the family's collective memory. The analysis focuses on 30 life-history interviews with men and women from eastern and western Germany with various social and religious backgrounds, all of whom were born between 1935 and 1945 and had little or no memory of their fathers. The following questions are relevant: what memories did children have of their fathers, and what images of them were related by mothers and relatives? What individual, political, social and memory-cultural factors characterise a child's memory of her or his father? The article also analyses trans-generational transmissions and conflicts of how the father's past is remembered.     

Political imprisonment and the sanctity of death: performing heritage in ‘Troubled’ Ireland

The ‘Troubles’ is a euphemism associated with sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until the late 1990s. Similarly, that term also is used to depict turmoil in all of Ireland between 1916 through 1924. During both eras, political imprisonment coupled with various forms of political violence (e.g. bombings, executions, and prisoner abuse) marred Irish society in ways that invoke socio-religious meaning. In particular, the sanctity of death captures the intense semiotics of those events and points to further theorising along lines of the Durkheimian tradition. As we shall examine herein, violations of the sanctity of death compound social conflict and the resistance it creates. Fieldwork was undertaken in Dublin and Belfast where official landmarks were explored in-depth: Kilmainham Gaol and the Crumlin Road Prison, respectively. Additionally in Belfast, other – unofficial – cultural sites provide further evidence of socio-religious symbolism, most notably the Irish Republican History Museum, Roddy McCorley’s Club in West Belfast, and murals in both Loyalist and Republican communities. Whereas Durkeimian theory remains at the forefront of the analysis, insights also are informed by heritage studies, in particular notions of cultural performance in contested societies.     

‘Living Liminality’: everyday experiences of asylum seekers in the ‘Direct Provision’ system in Ireland

Mechanisms to exclude people seen as ‘other’ which were once considered exceptional have now become normal. Global patterns of increased state security lead to people on the move or seeking protection being detained, dispersed and deported, their lives treated as ‘waste’ or ‘reject’. The Irish ‘Direct Provision’ system is part of an increasing network of liminal, or threshold, spaces, situated between and within borders, in which such people are detained or forced to wait in often inhumane conditions and often for years at a time. Based on ethnographic participatory photographic research, this article explores the ways in which imposed liminality plays out in people’s everyday lives in ‘Direct Provision’. The article looks at how liminality is lived in spatial and temporal terms and develops the idea of ‘ontological liminality’, a means of expressing the ways in which a chronic sense of fear, insecurity, invisibility and a highly controlled existence are lived and internalized; it also shows the ways in which people negotiate this imposed liminality through everyday practices, creating various forms of attachment, engagement and belonging. Exploring the concept of liminality in this context holds broader implications not only for understanding experiences of people waiting or held in the increasing number of refugee camps, border zones and detention centres in and beyond Europe, but also provides insight into the architectures of exclusion created by states to contain or exclude the ‘other’.     

‘Homes’ and being ‘at home’ in New Zealand: women's place-making in internationalised higher education

Research on students' experiences in internationalised higher education largely assumes students' autonomy and privileges their public selves. New Zealand research is no exception. Little attention has been paid to students' lives beyond classroom contexts; how national policy and institutional practices shape students' everyday experiences and ‘home’ lives similarly and differently. In addition, gender is afforded scant attention or considered only as a secondary concern, and people whose partners or family members are international students are invisible. This article endeavours to address the relative inattention to gender in international education research and the invisibility of women whose partners are international students. It draws on data from interviews with 17 women involved in a broader doctoral research project during 2005 and 2006. The women were either migrant or international students or had partners enrolled as international students. The article uses ‘home’ as a lens for examining women's situated and transnational place-making and factors that promoted or precluded a sense of belonging in New Zealand. It draws connections between women's accounts of ‘home’ and feeling ‘at home’, and broader politics, policies and institutional practices in New Zealand higher education.     

‘Peace begins at home’: Geographic imaginaries of violence and peacebuilding in northern Uganda

While there is an acknowledgment of the importance of geographic and historical context in contemporary feminist scholarship on the relationship between domestic violence and warfare, there remains an assumption that mainstream narratives will tend to separate these forms of violence or, if connections are acknowledged, warfare will be given primacy. Based on ethnographic research in northern Uganda, I demonstrate how the presence of Orientalist narratives of violence in peacebuilding programs disrupts these assumptions by not only drawing connections between domestic violence and warfare but prioritizing domestic violence. I argue that these narratives of violence, and their associated geographic imaginaries, contribute to uneven geographies of intervention – geographies in which racialized bodies and intimate spaces are associated with war and thereby seen as appropriate sites for peacebuilding. By engaging with peacebuilding programs as sites of geopolitical negotiations in which variously scaled actors are vying for position in the post-war landscape, I argue that the tendency for peacebuilding programs to focus on a singular site of intervention – ‘the Acholi home’ – says less about the centrality of this site to the creation of peace than it does about the centrality of this site in maintaining the networks of mutual legitimization amongst peacebuilding partners.     

Geographies of religion and spirituality: pilgrimage beyond the ‘officially’ sacred

Abstract

The papers in this special issue, Geographies of Religion and Spirituality: Pilgrimage beyond the ‘Officially Sacred,’ are placed in the context of a comprehensive theoretical overview of the role that the sacred plays in shaping, conducting, controlling, and contesting pilgrimage. As scholarship examining the lived experiences of travelers has demonstrated, pilgrimages need not necessarily be religious in nature, nor be officially sanctioned. Rather, if pilgrimages are perceived as ‘hyper-meaningful’ by the practitioner, the authors in this special issue argue that a common denominator of all of these journeys is the perception of sacredness—a quality that is opposed to profane, everyday life. Separating the social category of ‘religion’ from the ‘sacred,’ these articles employ an interdisciplinary approach to theorize sacredness, its variability, and the ways in which it is officially recognized or condemned. Thus, the authors pay particular attention to the authorizing processes that religious and temporal power centers employ to either promote, co-opt, or stave off, such popular manifestations of devotion, focusing on three ways: through tradition, text or institutionalized norms. Referencing examples from across the globe, and linking them to the varied contributions in this special issue, this introduction complexifies the ways in which pilgrims, central authorities, locals and other stakeholders on the ground appropriate, negotiate, shape, contest, or circumvent the powerful forces of the sacred. Delving ‘beyond the officially sacred,’ this collective examination of pilgrimages, both well-established and new; religious and secular; authorized and not; the contributions to this special issue, as well as this Introduction, examines the interplay of a transcendent sacred for pilgrims and tourists so as to provide a blueprint for how work in the geography of religion and the fields of pilgrimage and religious tourism may move forward.     

The development of the longbow in late medieval England and ‘technological determinism’

Traditional understandings of the development of the medieval English longbow and its role in the fourteenth-century ‘infantry revolution’ have recently been challenged by historians. This article responds to the revisionists, arguing based on archaeological, iconographic and textual evidence that the proper longbow was a weapon of extraordinary power, and was qualitatively different from – and more effective than – the shorter self-bows that were the norm in England (and western Europe generally) before the fourteenth century. It is further argued that acknowledging the importance of the weapon as a necessary element of any credible explanation of English military successes in the era of the Hundred Years War does not constitute ‘technological determinism’.     

‘Now’, ‘now’, ‘even now’: temporal deixis and the crisis of the present in some Northern Irish poems of the Troubles

The problem of how to describe and account for the present can be identified as a particular preoccupation of poets of the so-called Northern Irish renaissance. This article examines how the temporal deictic ‘now’ functions in some well-known poems by Seamus Heaney, Michael Longley and Derek Mahon. All three poets explore how to combine the plausibility of lyric derived from an individual consciousness with the authority of narrative derived from social interactions. This article will do three related things. First, it will argue that discussing ‘now’ as a temporal deictic enables us to appreciate the full ambiguity and complexity of some poems written at the height of the Northern Irish Troubles. Second, the article will argue that these poems reveal that ‘now’ actually functions in poetry more complexly than some theorists of deixis have allowed. Finally, the article will suggest newly fruitful ways of combining literary stylistics with more conventional close reading.     

A Land and a People of Extremes – Ireland and the Irish in German Cinema

Irish film history has often been seen as a pragmatic “creative bricolage” that draws almost exclusively on images of Ireland and Irishness that have emanated from the cinema industries of the USA and the United Kingdom. Yet, Ireland has also featured in the film industries of other non-Anglophone countries and the images produced in these contexts also represent an element within the vast and extensive archive of Irish filmic images. This article writes the first chapter in the expansion of Irish film history by examining the depiction of Ireland and Irishness in German film. Ireland and the Irish, not unlike the Anglo-American gaze, are depicted as a people and a land of extremes marked by an intensity of emotion, nationalism, Catholicism and alcohol, while extremes of poverty and wild untameable landscapes also feature prominently.     

Consumption and the ‘Social Self’ in Medieval Southern England

Over the last 30 years we have become increasingly aware of the commercialising nature of the medieval English economy. However, these insights have had little impact on narratives of consumption, which persist in seeing it as a characteristic of modernity. Here it is argued that we must move away from seeing an early modern consumer revolution and instead think about consumption in medieval society, particularly to examine the implications of commercialisation for identity and selfhood. A framework is developed, building upon David G. Shaw’s use of the ‘social self’ and the writing of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, to explore how the increasing variability, and wider range, of objects impacted upon the negotiation of selfhood in the 13th–15th centuries.