Search

The abstract is included in the text.

How do artistic practices and knowledges enhance scholarly interrogations of Irish pasts and presents, and contribute to more publicly-minded ways to remember possible futures? This special issue of The Irish Rcuicw, edited and \Vritten by Irish Studies scholars, artists and cultural geographers, builds upon recent work calling attention to the significance of place-based and embodied creative practices that imagine and perform alternative Irelands.

Proceedings of the international Landscape Values: Place and Praxis conference hosted by the Centre for Landscape Studies (NUI Galway) on behalf of UNISCAPE. 75 papers that consider how landscapes acquire, enshrine and amplify values, how they find expression, can be recorded, managed and valorised. Not

[No abstract available] peer-reviewed

International audience; Looking at representations of the Irish landscape in contemporary literature and the arts, this volume discusses the economic, political and environmental issues associated with it, questioning the myths behind Ireland's landscape, from the first Greek descriptions to present day post Celtic-Tiger architecture.

[Introduction to the collection Anáil an Bhéil Bheo: Orality and Modern Irish Culture (Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009)] While the connections between oral and textual traditions in Ireland have been the focus of much scholarly work in the past, less consideration has been paid to the theoretical concept of “orality” and the corresponding significance of oral texts in modern Irish culture and society. The present collection of essays seeks to explore the relationships between such interrelated islands, and to highlight the connections between orality and textuality that, at different times and for different reasons, have not been recognised, foregrounded or integrated into our general understanding of how these forms of cultural discourse have operated in an Irish context. This volume is the result of a rich interdisciplinary collaboration, which began with the hosting of a conference dealing with the ways in which modern Irish culture has navigated its way through the “surrounding sea of orality”. One of the central aims of the conference was to address and sensitively navigate the critical faultlines that permeate and shape our understanding of Irish literate and oral cultures. An additional concern was to foster an interdisciplinary critique of Irish oral and textual cultures that would draw on many disciplines to disrupt and complicate the too easy and dichotomising alignment of orality with the Irish language, the traditional and rurality, and print literacy with the English language, modernity and urbanity. While much disciplinary-based work is vital to Irish Studies scholarship, an interdisciplinary approach that rigorously interrogates and integrates such disciplinary strands can highlight previously occluded connections, offer new insights, and on occasion can evolve new interpretive strategies that further our understanding of the key issues under investigation. Not

This thesis examines the cultural legacy of the landscape of the West of Ireland and its lasting impact on the contemporary visualization of the region. Through a critical examination of the historic underpinning and contemporary resonances of the construction of the trope of “the West,” the thesis lays the foundation for the examination of how contemporary artists negotiate this inherited mythos of place in the period 1990-2017, a trope largely constructed through the arenas of culture and tourism in conjunction with the modern Irish state. Tourist imagery and fine art dealing with the landscape of the West of Ireland present two very strong, yet often oppositional, projections of modern Irish identity that inhabit the same cultural space. Through case study analysis in individual chapters, the thesis examines how artists, particularly in the media of fine art photography and socially engaged art practice, renegotiate their engagement with the landscape of the West in a way that mediates between the local and the global, Irish and international arts practices, and in particular, that navigates the politics of representation. While much research in this area has focused on Irish Art History and Tourism Studies, there remains a scholarly gap in critically examining the broader context of visual culture as expressed in Irish tourist imagery and fine arts practice. It is argued here, that the prism of ‘the West’ is essential in understanding the renegotiation of cultural identity through visual culture in twenty-first century Ireland. 2025-02-21

This thesis contributes to the growing academic interest in the second-generation of migrants and the connections they maintain with their parental places of origin. It focuses on the children of the Irish emigrants to England of the 1950s and the decision, by some, to ‘return’ to Ireland, as adults. The past twenty years have seen an increase in immigration to Ireland from a range of countries and included in this are the second-generation from England. Although both immigration and return to Ireland have been recently researched, this is the first time that this group have been recognised as a discrete migration flow and their experiences have been studied. The thesis aims to uncover how an emotional connection to the parental home country and a predisposition to return there is established through everyday lives in the ‘host’ country, combined with the positive experience of holiday visits. It employs a qualitative approach to access the range of influences on the migration experience with the intention of allowing a more nuanced understanding to emerge from the perspective of the migrant and to access the feelings and emotions associated with a return to a perceived ‘home’. In interpreting the everyday lives of the second-generation Irish I draw on Bourdieu’s (1977, 1990) theory of habitus and social field. This proposes that individuals develop a set of taken-for-granted behaviours (dispositions), which collectively make up a habitus and are attuned to a particular social environment (field). The research finds evidence that the second-generation Irish in England acquired a set of dispositions as a result of which an emotional connection was formed with Irish ways of being and with Ireland as a perceived place of origin. Despite this, their experience of return is not a straightforward ‘homecoming’ and their accounts illustrate some of the challenges of return for second-generation returning migrants. 2021-02-05

This thesis examines the visual representation of the Canadian Arctic and adjacent regions during the period of the Franklin search expeditions from 1848 to 1855. The study traverses the disciplines of literature, visual culture, history of art, and historical geography. Through in-depth analysis of pictures and texts, the thesis contributes to our knowledge of nineteenth-century visual culture, exploration and travel literature, as well as Arctic studies. In previous critical studies, the literary Arctic has long been privileged to the detriment of the visual. Visual studies that exist take the form of broad surveys that focus on metropolitan representations. Through analysis of archival material, this thesis counteracts that neglect. I reveal the significance of visual sources and show how they interacted with accompanying texts during the mid-nineteenth century, when representations of the Arctic multiplied due to the fascination with the disappearance of the Franklin expedition into the Northwest Passage. I explore sketches, paintings, and illustrated periodicals created in the Arctic by expedition members in conjunction with published material, such as travel narratives, prints, and contemporary reviews, to further understand the representation of the Arctic in this period. Close analysis of little-known and popular representations reveals new insights into Arctic exploration and Victorian culture. Paying particular attention to the reception of various media, I examine how the on-board pictures feed into a metropolitan version of the Arctic transmitted through engravings, lithographs, and panoramas. The scientific, and often sentimental, representation of the Arctic in the on-board records is quite different to the sensationalized Arctic that was presented to the public. The appearance of the environment, even when “facsimiled” from on-the-spot sketches, was frequently significantly transformed for the mid-Victorian commercial marketplace in Britain and elsewhere. Although the metropolitan Arctic revolved around a fulcrum of heroism in a threatening environment, the visual culture of the ship reveals a more complicated narrative that is sometimes local, familiar, humorous, and domestic. The on-board visual culture of the nineteenth-century Arctic has been obscured and the public performance of the dominant “man versus nature” trope still reverberates in polar imaginaries today. The genealogical bank of imagery that we have inherited from nineteenth-century lithographers, publishers, and panorama painters continues to shape our view of the Arctic and has geopolitical and environmental implications for the twenty-first century. 2022-02-05

Cultural landscapes are the product of innumerable changes wrought by generations in order to meet their aspirations, vanities, ambitions and weaknesses (Sudjic 2006: p.326). The inescapable nature of architecture makes it the ideal vehicle for those in power to manifest their authority, taste and will in the landscape by the buildings and monuments they construct and conserve and also the historical events and myths they commemorate and disseminate. In the 1960s, many Yugoslav landscapes were altered by the construction of abstract Partisan spomenik (monuments) which dominated the skylines of former battle sites. This paper will discuss the how the collapse of Socialist ‘regime of memory’ and Yugoslavia has left these landscapes as legacies of a lost world of yesterday. It will consider how changing values are reflected by physical landscape changes and also by how and which critical events are commemorated.

At the turn of the 20th century, there was a striving in Europe to establish a balance between the constructed city fabric and green space. Parks and squares with greenery became just as important as showcase buildings and entities within the city center. This paper investigates Belgrade’s green areas, taking a concise look at their transformation in the historical context: changes in the city center during the 19th century, and concern for health and hygiene in the first half of the 20th century. The paper presents the production of green spaces in Belgrade’s city center through the metamorphosis of devastated and abandoned public and private spaces, and through the creation of new green areas. This paper examines the relationship between culture and nature in Belgrade, within the context of its urban history, and its place values, changed by the new capitalist production of space.