Thesis defence Alec Forss: Finding Common Ground: Place-making and Coexistence in Post-conflict Belfast

This ethnographic study attends to the overarching question of how a divided city becomes shared after violent conflict. It does so by focusing on the case of post-conflict Belfast in Northern Ireland. Despite the elapse of more than a quarter of a century since the 1998 Belfast peace agreement, Belfast remains a heavily segregated city, not least in terms of residential segregation based on ethno-political identity and social class. Yet, the city has also been the subject of policy and urban planning agendas which promote the normative imaginary of a more shared city, including the Belfast Agenda which envisions a city free from the legacy of conflict by 2035. Based on a total of nine months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2021-22, with follow-up fieldwork in 2023 and 2025, this is an urban study of socio-spatial continuity and change with a primary focus on the city’s segregated areas in the north and west of the city. Taking an anthropological lens, the study investigates how the city is produced and constructed ‘from below’ by the social and spatial practices of its urban dwellers. While these reproduce sectarian divisions, the study also demonstrates how identity, belonging, and participation can be renegotiated as part of an inclusive place-making that gives rise to alternative claims, perceptions, and experiences of a more shared city. By viewing space and place as the dynamic subject of processes and practices, this can challenge the simplified reductionism of a methodological nationalism that confines people to bounded containers of space and identity. Through taking an epistemological stand-point of the ‘in-between,’ it contributes to partially qualifying the dominant image of Belfast as a divided city. This study takes a multi-faceted approach to the topic by filtering the concept of place-making through different sites and settings in the city. Collectively, the chapters explore and contextualize the practices of people in variously embodying, managing, modifying, and imagining space to generate alternative possibilities: that is, of finding ‘common ground’ to come together, with and despite difference. These illuminate ‘openings’ in the context of entrenched division for something different to emerge.

The thesis in Diva

Contact:
Charlotta Widmark, Dir of Studies 3rd Cycle
E-mail: charlotta.widmark@antro.uu.se