‘The “PB” and the aestheticization of violence in Northern Ireland’

In this short article I feature examples of the creative appropriation and transformation of a protest vehicle such as the petrol bomb. I show that the human imagination can create an aesthetics out of even the street protest, and can creatively carnivalise, play and translocate such practices and violent stances into the dance studio, the theatre, and even the everyday.

‘Glimpses into the unmentionable: Montserrat, tourism and anthropological readings of “subordinate exotic” and “comic exotic” travel writing’

This article explores the relationship between anthropology and identity through the process of travel writing and reading. Specifically, the article examines a range of travel writing about the British Caribbean colony Montserrat to read into the culture of the writer. These deconstructive ‘glimpses into the unmentionable’ reveal an implicit racism. The travel writing texts are also found to divide into two types of representation – the ‘subordinate exotic’ and the ‘comic exotic’.

Between “the Housewife” and “the Philosophy Professor”: Music, Narration and Address in Ousmane Sembene's Xala

The acclaimed Senegalese filmmaker Ousmane Sembene conceptualised himself as a modern day griot (West African oral performer), producing often didactic films that address a diverse spectatorship. Examining Xala, this paper argues that this address cannot be fully understood without attention to the film’s complex music/image relationships, which refigure classical and modernist film aesthetics to mobilise a discourse that recalls oral performance. In this way, Sembene negotiates the tensions of address generated by a spectatorship that is situated in the culturally hybrid spaces between the literate and the oral, the urban and the rural, and the global and the local.

Carrying religion into a secularising Europe: Montserratian migrants' experiences of global processes in British methodism

Migrants to Europe often perceive themselves as entering a secular society that threatens their religious identities and practices. Whilst some sociological models present their responses in terms of cultural defence, ethnographic analysis reveals a more complex picture of interaction with local contexts. This essay draws upon ethnographic research to explore a relatively neglected situation in migration studies, namely the interactions between distinct migration cohorts - in this case, from the Caribbean island of Montserrat, as examined through their experiences in London Methodist churches. It employs the ideas of Weber and Bourdieu to view these migrants as 'religious carriers', as collective and individual embodiments of religious dispositions and of those socio-cultural processes through which their religion is reproduced. Whilst the strategies of the cohort migrating after the Second World War were restricted through their marginalised social status and experience of racism, the recent cohort of evacuees fleeing volcanic eruptions has had greater scope for strategies which combat secularisation and fading Methodist identity.

Demonstrating the merits of the peer research process: A Northern Ireland case study

This article discusses the benefits and challenges of involving peer researchers in social research projects. A research project on pupil participation in policy making on school bullying in Northern Ireland’s schools was commissioned by the Office of the Northern Ireland Commissioner for Children and Young People and undertaken by the National Children’s Bureau in conjunction with researchers from Queen’s University Belfast in fourteen schools across Northern Ireland, utilizing a mixed methods approach. We trained and employed nine 15–18-year-old peer researchers to support them in this project. After the project’s completion, we conducted interviews with six of the peer researchers to investigate how they experienced their involvement in the research. We discuss the findings from these interviews and contextualize in a review
of literature on research involving children and young people.

Metaphor and Maltese Art: Explorations in the Temple Period

Temple Period Malta in the 3rd millennium BC saw the production of a range of figurative and decorative art and architecture that implies a richly populated spiritual and cognitive world associated with ritual practice in life and death. The paper explores the potential to categorize the figurative art into distinct groups, and how these various images might represent aspects of the cosmology and social concerns of a prehistoric island society.

Mortuary ritual of fourth millennium BC Malta: the Zebbug tomb from the Brochtorff Circle (Gozo).

Malone, C.A.T., et al., including Trump, Bonanno, Stoddart, Gouder

Research with children: methodological issues and innovative techniques

In the past few decades, a growing body of literature examining children’s perspectives on their own lives has developed within a variety of disciplines, such as sociology, psychology, anthropology and geography. This article provides a brief up-to-date examination of methodological and ethical issues that researchers may need to consider when designing research studies involving children; and a review of some of the methods and techniques used to elicit their views. The article aims to encourage researchers to critically reflect on these methodological issues and the techniques they choose to use, since they will have implications for the data produced.