Laura McAtackney’s research while affiliated with Aarhus University and other places

This article focuses on the role of food interpretation in prison museums and penal heritage sites, which has been underexplored in recent critical analyses of penal tourism and heritage. The authors argue that food is a fundamental part of the lived experience of confinement and detention and lends itself to multiple forms of interpretation and programming activities. Following an overview of existing literature on food insecurity and the different research methods available in recounting stories about food and food insecurity, the article is divided into three main sections. These explore the connections between the built heritage of prisons and the wider landscape, personal and political experiences of hunger, and the potential of art and creativity in negotiating food insecurity. The article concludes with reflections on how food narratives can be further used by prison museums to engage with contemporary issues of social justice, sustainability, decoloniality, and abolition.

The city of Belfast in Northern Ireland has been made and remade through cycles of violence during its 400-year “history.” The most recent manifestation of violent conflict associated with the city was a low-level civil war euphemistically known as “the Troubles” (ca. 1968–ca. 1998). Alongside the enduring markers of bombings, civil unrest, and attempts to police and disrupt them, presences and absences can also be assigned to forced and facilitated movements of communities, the “planned violence” (O’Neill 2018) of road-building schemes, and what were designated at the time as “slum clearances.” But there have been attempts to disrupt—and reinsert—attempted erasures of conflict when associated with enduring social injustices. This article will examine a site associated with the bombing of McGurk's Bar in 1971 to reveal how the material memory of the past has been “re-presenced” to disrupt attempts to disappear sectarian violence as a form of activism in the contemporary.

It is less than a decade since the Irish government published the McAleese Report, which accepted the state’s role in facilitating abuse in Catholic Church-run Magdalen Laundries. At the time the then Taoiseach Enda Kenny tearfully apologizing for the state’s involvement, alongside promising redress for survivors. Although much has been achieved since that time, one aspect that has not been resolved is how we remember and memorialize that past. Of the 10 Magdalen Laundries that operated in postindependence Ireland, seven have been demolished or substantially redeveloped and three are currently in various degrees of dereliction. This article considers the potential for extant Magdalen Laundries to become sites of conscience. It will explore this potential through the lens of temporality, materiality, and spatiality and will ultimately argue for the need to explore scalar power relations if Magdalen Laundries are to truly reflect past injustices as well as become meaningful places in the contemporary.

The nature of Ireland's place within the British Empire continues to attract significant public and scholarly attention. While historians of Ireland have long accepted the complexity of Ireland's imperial past as both colonised and coloniser, the broader public debate has grown more heated in recent months, buffeted by Brexit, the Decade of Centenaries and global events. At the same time, the imperatives of social movements such as Black Lives Matter and Decolonising the Curriculum have asked us to reflect on the assumptions, hierarchies and norms underpinning the structures of society, including the production of knowledge and the higher education system. This round table brings together scholars from diverse disciplinary and methodological backgrounds to examine the prospects, possibilities and challenges of what decolonising Irish history might mean for our field. It sets these discussions within broader frameworks, considering both the relationship of Irish historical writing to postcolonial theory and the developments in the latter field in the last twenty years. It also reflects on the sociology of our discipline and makes suggestions for future research agendas.

The social life of the newly created ‘laboring classes’ in the post-emancipation Caribbean has been relatively unexamined across a number of disciplinary perspectives. This paper argues for the need to bring together a variety of sources to enable researchers to gain a better understanding of this important, transitional time in Montserrat’s history. Using evidence gathered from archives in the Caribbean, North America and the British Isles, materials excavated from a previously undocumented schoolhouse structure in the north of the island, and local memories of education on Montserrat, this paper illuminates an almost forgotten aspect of the lives of nineteenth-century laboring classes: the aspiration of education.

This paper uses archaeological studies of political imprisonment in Ireland to show how (im)material interventions at Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin are central to understanding evolving identity and memory in post-partition Ireland. This heritage prison is not only an “icon” of historical struggle, it is a material entity where archaeological methodologies can help to uncover the past realities of imprisonment. Furthermore, it is a highly political place in the present where conflict continues regarding who “wins” the peace in the realm of public memory. This paper argues that archaeological approaches to a transitional heritage site are ideally placed to illuminate not only experiences of its functional past but also its evolving relationship with contemporary society as a form of future-making.

Historical, contemporary, and future-oriented urban identities are presently being challenged worldwide at an unprecedented pace and scale by the continuous influx of people into cities and the accompanying effects of deindustrialization, conflict, and social differentiation. Archaeology is unique in its capacity to contribute a materialist perspective that views recent and present-day struggles of cities as part of longer term cycles of urban life that include processes of decay, revitalization, and reclamation. The aim of this volume is to position contemporary archaeology in general, and studies of cities in particular, as central to the discipline of archaeology and as an inspiration for further interdisciplinary, materially engaged urban studies. In doing so the contributing authors collectively challenge prevailing approaches to cities. Whereas scholars have routinely conceptualized contemporary cities within the bounds of particular analytical categories, including cities as gendered, deindustrialized, global, or urban ecological units of study (see Low 1996 for an overview), the cities discussed in this volume do not fit neatly into these individual analytical units, nor do they exist outside the influence of capitalist policies or institutions (Harvey 2012: xvii). They are instead recognized by the authors as operating within increasingly globalized systems, but also, following Jane Jacobs’ concept of open cities (2011), as places that are full of alternative possibilities. Rather than adhering to particular classifications of cities, the volume’s contributions are intentionally broad and attentive to the dynamics of the local and everyday in specific urban places—the politics, people, interventions, and materialities of specific urban places and the ways in which these dynamics operate across conceptual categories, temporal boundaries, and spatial terrain. Contemporary Archaeology and the City consciously employs a critical, materially engaged perspective that considers urban centres as both discrete and networked entities that are interrelated with places beyond geopolitical city limits. While many cities have characters formed from their vibrancy and centrality, their successful functioning often also relies upon the exploitation and even ruination of peripheral and rural hinterlands. The preceding chapters are original contributions inspired by the fieldwork of archaeologists who work in Europe, North America, Africa, Australia, and Western Asia. They incorporate a diversity of perspectives from across contemporary archaeology and beyond in responding to very different national, social, institutional, and cultural contexts.

Contemporary Archaeology and the City foregrounds the archaeological study of post-industrial and other urban transformations through a diverse, international collection of case studies. Over the past decade contemporary archaeology has emerged as a dynamic force for dissecting and contextualizing the material complexities of present-day societies. Contemporary archaeology challenges conventional anthropological and archaeological conceptions of the past by pushing temporal boundaries closer to, if not into, the present. The volume is organized around three themes that highlight the multifaceted character of urban transitions in present-day cities - creativity, ruination, and political action. The case studies offer comparative perspectives on transformative global urban processes in local contexts through research conducted in the struggling, post-industrial cities of Detroit, Belfast, Indianapolis, Berlin, Liverpool, Belem, and post-Apartheid Cape Town, as well as the thriving urban centres of Melbourne, New York City, London, Chicago, and Istanbul. Together, the volume contributions demonstrate how the contemporary city is an urban palimpsest comprised by archaeological assemblages - of the built environment, the surface, and buried sub-surface - that are traces of the various pasts entangled with one another in the present. This volume aims to position the city as one of the most important and dynamic arenas for archaeological studies of the contemporary by presenting a range of theoretically-engaged case studies that highlight some of the major issues that the study of contemporary cities pose for archaeologists.

Kilmainham Gaol (1796–1924) became the de facto holding center for political prisoners in Ireland by the mid-nineteenth century. Officially closing in 1910, it reopened a number of times for “emergencies” before its final closure after the Irish Civil War (1922–23). After 1924 it lay abandoned until reopening as a heritage attraction in the early 1960s. It was taken into state protection in 1986. Using a range of graffiti assemblages predominantly dating from 1910 onwards this paper will explore the “imperial debris” of contested narratives of meaning, ownership, and identity that the prison walls continue to materialize.

Archaeologically based explorations of colonialism or institutions are common case-studies in global historical archaeology, but the “colonial institution”—the role of institutions as operatives of colonialism—has often been neglected. In this thematic edition we argue that in order to fully understand the interconnected, global world one must explicitly dissect the colonial institution as an entwined, dual manifestation that is central to understanding both power and power relations in the modern world. Following Ann Laura Stoler, we have selected case studies from the Australia, Europe, UK and the USA which reveal that the study of colonial institutions should not be limited to the functional life of these institutions—or solely those that take the form of monumental architecture—but should include the long shadow of “imperial debris” (Stoler 2008) and immaterial institutions.