Imagining Spaces of Violence and Transgression in Vancouver and Northern Ireland

Abstract

This chapter focuses specifically on the issue of space, place, violence and transgression drawing on case studies in Canada and Northern Ireland. ‘Imagining spaces of violence and transgression in Vancouver and Northern Ireland’ focuses first of all on the lives of indigenous women and sex workers in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES). For 26 years, on 14 February, Valentine’s Day, women of the DTES have led a memorial march through the city, stopping at the places and spaces where women were murdered or went missing. The chapter draws on material from walking methods, participatory photographs and interviews with women who attended the march in 2016 to examine spaces of past, present and future in their lives. Continuing the theme of the construction and impact of space and borders explored in the previous chapter, this chapter also examines the history of the ‘peace walls’, ‘peace lines’ or ‘border lines’ in Belfast in the context of spaces of war, violence and conflict in Northern Ireland. Specifically,the ‘architecture of conflict’ is explored through criminological scholarship on the conflict in Northern Ireland. As with the Vancouver case study, arts-based walking methods are utilised that explore these border spaces through sensory, kinaesthetic, multi-modal research with citizens of Belfast.