Making home in the Irish/British borderlands: The global and the local in a conflicted social space

The process of making spaces into home places has become a topic of interest as the intensity and speed of global relations and the mobility of people increase. This article examines an Irish nationalist woman's struggles to make a “homeplace” in a Northern Ireland border town, a space marked by long‐term political conflict. It shows that the practices entailed in producing the material and phenomenological aspects of home take place in a transnational field and that transnational relations are enabling for this woman and her female working class neighbors. The article demonstrates the articulation of the personal to the political and links that relationship to struggles with the state and in the global political economy. It notes the power differentials in globalizing processes. The article concludes that these working class women extend their personal concerns to public spaces by connecting local cultural practices to transnational forces.

Key words:

• Home
• Conflict
• Transnationality
• Nation states
• Accountability

Notes

I use Irish/British or British/Irish to indicate the borderlands’ subjective dimension. When Irish is the first term of the binary, it signifies that the people being described define the borderland space as Irish primarily. When British is the first term, it means the borderlands are British for those under description. The state and its agents, of course, live in the British/Irish borderlands. The Irish nationalists in the area, for the most part, subjectively define the territory as Irish.