Mark Justin Rainey

• Doctor of Philosophy
• Research Associate at Ollscoil na Gaillimhe – University of Galway

How does cultural and creative work contribute to place-based sustainability and resiliency? — This is the topic of IN SITU Webinar #3, the last (but not least!) event of the IN SITU webinar series "Creative vitality in non-urban areas?". 📅 On Tuesday, December 5, 2023, at 14h30-16h30 CET, our hosts and IN SITU partners Mark Justin Rainey (Univers...

This article presents the case for a reconceptualised form of engagement around development at a local scale within a medium-sized city. Deploying ideas gleaned from literature on emergence, the article explores how a non-teleological form of development might engage with stakeholders in an urban regeneration area. Focusing on three distinct social...

This paper details the contextual and conceptual elements involved in setting up an Urban Lab in the city of Galway, Ireland. The paper specifies the set-up of a lab in the post-industrial area of Nuns' Island, through a detailed reading of pertinent ‘lab-centred’ literatures. It contributes to this literature by (1) analysing a lab in the explicit...

Two sculptures of Friedrich Engels have recently been installed in Greater Manchester, the city where the social philosopher spent most of his working life and was the focus of his proto-ethnographic account of the early industrial city. The first sculpture is a fibreglass ‘fabricated ruin’ set within a newly rebuilt section of the University of Sa...

In this paper, we map the evolution of approaches to development in Ireland since the formation of the state. With reference to the current national and international context, we make the case for the adoption of a transformational approach to development in one of Europe’s most centralized countries. We highlight the growing literature on socio-ec...

Based on ethnographic research undertaken between 2012-2014, this article focuses on the experiences and narratives of four refused, male asylum seekers living in a network of emergency night shelters located in churches across Greater Manchester, UK. Without the right to work and under No Recourse to Public Funds, many refused asylum seekers are p...

> This paper draws on ethnographic research carried out in a network of emergency night shelters for refused asylum seekers in Manchester, UK. Located in churches throughout the city, these shelters provide informal accommodation for men who have been made destitute following the refusal of asylum claim. With particular focus on volunteers working...

Repairs, like many of the people who carry them out, often constitute an invisible background that ensures the smooth functioning of everyday life-worlds. This extended introduction instead places them centre stage, situating the theory and practice of repair at the intersection of a number of different fields, from Science and Technology Studies t...

This article brings together Sophocles’s tragedy, Oedipus at Colonus, with an account of the 2013 Lampedusa disaster in which over 300 migrants perished off the coast of Italy. This juxtaposition conflates the ancient and the contemporary in order to draw out a decisive feature of border regimes: they not only produce legal and social ambiguity amo...

This paper uses the glass and steel Urbis building in Manchester as a prism via which we might look at cultural, political and economic change in England over the last twenty years or so. It takes stock of neoliberalism, museum and popular culture in England during that time, and tries to sense different political, cultural and economic turns, at t...