Dixon, Rt Hon. Sir Thomas James, (29 May 1868–10 May 1950), PC for Northern Ireland, 1930; HML for the County of the City of Belfast since 1924

Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Annika Björkdahl ◽  
Stefanie Kappler

This chapter shows that war-making and peace-making “take place” and that sometimes the legacy of conflict obscures manifestations of peacebuilding. The analysis of a “bridge that divides” in the city of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo and a “wall that unites” in Belfast, Northern Ireland, casts light on the benefits that a spatial reading of peace can provide to understand the ways in which spatial infrastructures are lived by the people who use them. The process of space-making (the generation of meanings from a material location) will help explain the agency that emerges by the creators, users, and inhabitants of (post)conflict spaces.


Author(s):  
Amy Richlin

Although ignored in current treatments of Roman political culture, women were active in the streets of Rome and throughout Italy in the war-torn mid-Republic. Comedy is the best contemporary witness, developing as it did from the 270s BCE onward. City sackings entailed rape, enslavement, loss of kin, and the movement of refugees across Italy, and the resulting issues inflect the content of comedy, emblematized in a slave-woman’s fake jewelry in the shape of the goddess Victoria. Comedy addresses women in the audience, while, onstage, women move through the city and participate in political actions and discourse, laying claim to rights. In Livy’s later accounts of the Punic Wars, women appear in religious worship and reacting to war news, demonstrating bereavement like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They even join in the fighting, in ways seen in Vietnam and Northern Ireland, or as Cicero’s wife Terentia defended her own home.


1984 ◽  
Vol 24 (93) ◽  
pp. 69-91 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. S. Walker

The Commonwealth Labour Party (Northern Ireland), hereafter referred to as the C.L.P., came into existence on 19 December 1942. Its birth was the result of a split in the ranks of the Northern Ireland Labour Party (N.I.L.P.). This split centred on the personality and the political outlook of the man who had led the N.I.L.P since 1932, and who was to be leader of the C.L.P during its five-year lifespan: Harry Midgley.Midgley (1892-1957) was, by the time of the formation of the C.L.P., one of the best-known and most controversial politicians in Northern Ireland. Born into a working-class protestant home in north Belfast, he acquired an early political education as a youth through the medium of the Independent Labour Party organisation in the city. He was close, at least initially, to William Walker, the most outstanding labour leader produced by the north of Ireland during the early troubled years of the labour movement. In addition, he met and listened to some of the most eminent spokesmen of British labour, most notably Keir Hardie. Midgley served his time as a joiner in the Workman Clark shipyard (where his father was a labourer) before spending a brief period in America in 1913 and 1914. After serving in the Ulster division in the First World War, he returned to Belfast in 1919 and quickly got himself a job as a trade-union organiser with the Linenlappers’ Union.


2017 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-35 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shany Payes

This article examines the impact of contact-based educational encounter strategies of shared learning on Jewish–Arab relations in Israel. It analyses a programme of education for shared life that takes place in a mixed (75% Jewish/25% Arab) city at the centre of Israel since 2012. The programme aims to mitigate Jewish–Arab relations in the city amidst tensions resulting from the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, unequal power relations and hostilities between the groups. Uniquely, it assimilates shared life education into the generally separate educational system in the city, and uses methods of shared learning – adopted and adjusted in part from an educational approach developed in Northern Ireland. Given the inequalities between Jews and Arabs in Israel, in education as well as more generally in socioeconomic parameters, this article studies the prospects of success in achieving educational and social cohesion goals through face-to-face contact and shared learning. The research is based on over 25 interviews as well as observations throughout the programme’s activities.


2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 176-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ulrike M. Vieten ◽  
Fiona Murphy

This article explores the ways a salient sectarian community division in Northern Ireland frames the imagination of newcomers and the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees. We examine the dominant ethno-national Christian communities and how their actions define the social-spatial landscape and challenges of manoeuvring everyday life in Northern Ireland as an ‘Other’. We argue all newcomers are impacted to some degree by sectarianism in Northern Ireland, adding a further complexified layer to the everyday and institutional racism so prevalent in different parts of the UK and elsewhere. First, we discuss the triangle of nation, gender and ethnicity in the context of Northern Ireland. We do so in order to problematise that in a society where two adversarial communities exist the ‘Other’ is positioned differently to other more cohesive national societies. This complication impacts how the Other is imagined as the persistence of binary communities shapes the way local civil society engages vulnerable newcomers, e.g. in the instance of our research, asylum seekers and refugees. This is followed by an examination of the situation of asylum seekers and refugees in Northern Ireland. We do so by contextualising the historical situation of newcomers and the socio-spatial landscape of the city of Belfast. In tandem with this, we discuss the role of NGO’s and civil support organisations in Belfast and contrast these views with the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees. This article is based on original empirical material from a study conducted in 2016 on the experiences of asylum seekers and refugees with living in Northern Ireland.


Author(s):  
Adrian Devine ◽  
Bernadette Quinn ◽  
Frances Devine

This paper assesses whether or not a cultural event can play a peacebuilding role during the post violence phase of conflict. Cultural expression has long been a contentious issue in Northern Ireland, no more so than in Derry/Londonderry, the city at the centre of this study. Adopting a qualitative approach, the authors used the city’s Fleadh Cheoil (2013) event as a case study and found that it served three of the seven-peacebuilding functions outlined by Paffenholz and Spurk (2010): social cohesion, in-group socialisation and intermediation/facilitation. The findings suggest that the event enabled positive change by building ‘bridges’ and developing intercommunal trust and cross culture understanding. This did not happen by chance and nor was it unproblematic. However, inclusivity was a core objective and the event was planned and managed accordingly. This required strong leadership, risk taking, sensitivity and a willingness to negotiate and compromise. In turn, this created the conditions for cross community dialogue that had ramifications beyond the cultural realm. Whilst this paper has demonstrated how a cultural event can play a role in peacebuilding, it does not suggest that culture events are a panacea for sectarianism, bias or conflict in Northern Ireland or elsewhere. However, if planned properly they can contribute to the peacebuilding process by providing an opportunity for people to navigate difficulties and develop shared experiences in complex and challenging conditions. These can help build trust, tolerance, understanding and confidence that enable divided societies to co-exist more peacefully.


Author(s):  
Sandra Moffett ◽  
T. M. McGinnity ◽  
M. Callaghan ◽  
J. Harkin ◽  
D. N. Woods

This chapter outlines the journey that the city of Londonderry (Derry), Northern Ireland, undertook when converting a traditional walled city to a technology-enhanced wireless city. The chapter presents an overview of the three project strands, namely wireless city (civic aspect), wireless walls (tourism aspect), and wireless campus (educational aspect), along with the contribution made by each partner organization. A detailed case study of the educational element is presented, employing a dual qualitative/ quantitative research approach. The case study focuses on the experience of one academic member of staff in using the wireless initiative via Tablet PC and SMART classroom. Quantitative analysis to gain insight into usability of wireless networking services and wireless technologies is presented from both a staff and student viewpoint and finally conclusions are drawn on the overall project experience. The project successfully, completed in December 2006, has received a number of awards for its innovative approach.


Author(s):  
Laura McAtackney

Contemporary archaeology has often combined the study of material culture with a strong social justice imperative, including examining the causes of abandonment of social housing (Buchli and Lucas 2001) and constructing lived experiences of homelessness (Zimmerman et al. 2010). Within this burgeoning field, archaeologies of cities have a significant role to play in interpreting the social implications of transition and change in the city by engaging with the spatial and temporal dimensions of material realities. By explicitly materializing the forgotten or hidden aspects of the post-industrial city, contemporary archaeology allows us to view global processes through the lens of local material expressions. Hilary Orange’s edited volume Reanimating Industrial Spaces (2014) is indicative of the current fascination in contemporary archaeology with the meaning of abandoned places of industry, the link between people and places and the often difficult transition from functional industrial places to post-industrial heritage spaces. Such volumes use a variety of methodological approaches to show how people, place and materials constitute the contemporary, post-industrial city. In doing so they reveal how contemporary archaeology has the potential to critique official narratives that frequently highlight resurgence and development while ignoring inconvenient truths of degradation, unemployment and poverty (see also Ernsten, Chapter 10). The latter experiences speak to this case study of East Belfast in Northern Ireland. For a society of its size Northern Ireland has been the subject of intense political and academic scrutiny, indeed often being accused of over-analysis to the point of exceptionalism (including Whyte 1990). Much of the research has centred on social relationships in urban areas impacted by internecine violence, however, in recent years this focus has shifted to the persisting problems of segregation and sectarianism as a remnant from the Troubles (c.1968–c.98) into the peace process. With the fifteen-year anniversary of the Belfast Agreement of 1998 (hereafter ‘the Agreement’) in 2013—a peace accord that at the time was positively greeted as the end of violence and initiating a move toward ‘normalisation’ (Irish News 2005)—there has been much debate as to the ongoing lack of substantive societal change. At the level of civic politics progress has been made, even if it has been non-linear and at times in danger of derailment.


Author(s):  
Lizzie Seal ◽  
Maggie O’Neill

This chapter focuses specifically on the issue of space, place, violence and transgression drawing on case studies in Canada and Northern Ireland. ‘Imagining spaces of violence and transgression in Vancouver and Northern Ireland’ focuses first of all on the lives of indigenous women and sex workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). For 26 years, on 14 February, Valentine’s Day, women of the DTES have led a memorial march through the city, stopping at the places and spaces where women were murdered or went missing. The chapter draws on material from walking methods, participatory photographs and interviews with women who attended the march in 2016 to examine spaces of past, present and future in their lives. Continuing the theme of the construction and impact of space and borders explored in the previous chapter, this chapter also examines the history of the ‘peace walls’, ‘peace lines’ or ‘border lines’ in Belfast in the context of spaces of war, violence and conflict in Northern Ireland. Specifically,the ‘architecture of conflict’ is explored through criminological scholarship on the conflict in Northern Ireland. As with the Vancouver case study, arts-based walking methods are utilised that explore these border spaces through sensory, kinaesthetic, multi-modal research with citizens of Belfast.


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