Alumnus, Anthropology
Thesis Title: Place-making from the periphery: reimagining place and culture in Belfast's Gaeltacht Quarter
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Hastings Donnan
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About
Siún Carden recently completed her PhD on Belfast's Gaeltacht Quarter, an urban regeneration project which reimagines a deprived and conflict-scarred Irish republican neighbourhood as a vibrant tourist destination and cultural hub, themed around the Irish language.
Her work focuses on what happens when an international model of place as a framing mechanism for recreational experiences of cultural difference is applied to a context in which place is profoundly territorialized. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, her research shows how this attempt to redefine the relationship between the Irish language, the Falls Road and Belfast as a whole relates to the particular situation of Belfast as both a post-conflict and a post-industrial city. Examining the history of Irish as a symbol, and how it has been used to embody the changing status of Irishness in the Belfast cityscape, she analyzes the Gaeltacht Quarter both as part of this process within a city of competing nationalisms, and as part of the global and much theorised trend towards self-conscious place-making in the search for marketable cultural products and identities.
