Sites of Fracture: Twentieth-Century Ireland at the Margins of Capitalism

In our current moment of extraordinary ecological and economic challenges, there is a global search for alternatives to models of extractive capitalism. While these alternatives offer critiques of the global reach and power of modern economic processes, they are often profoundly local in their application, such as housing collectives, agricultural cooperatives, or alternate forms of energy provision. These schemes, while seeking to create alternate spaces of cooperation and community, have resided alongside or in opposition to global capitalist formations, with particular local repercussions. We define these as ‘sites of fracture’, where messy, complex interactions between global capitalism and local alternative forms of organisation existed and produced particularly rich seams of memory and evidence. Ireland is understood by many measures to be one of the most globalised economies in the world, and is also a place where ownership of land has had profound political and cultural power. It is an ideal case study for exploring histories of capitalism and developing new place-based tools to understand and share this history. This project will explore the history of two Irish ‘sites of fracture’ located at Killeagh Co. Cork (WP1) and Ballyragget Co. Kilkenny (WP2), to record this history and scope its archival trace. Through site visits and community workshops in partnership with artists and local stakeholders we aim to develop a new method of collaborative and situated research to understand and share the layers of global, local, and more-than-human experience of capitalism and its alternatives over the course of the twentieth century. Our aims are threefold. First, we will expand the archive available to scholars and communities interested in investigating Irish economic and environmental history. Our workshops will foster a network of archivists charged with the care of uncatalogued and at-risk archival material and lead to further work to preserve and interpret that material. Second, in collaboration with local artists, we will develop richer expressive tools in the form of deep mapping for local communities to engage with their own histories of life at sites of fracture. Finally, we will develop new methods drawing on the local landscape to expand our resources for exploring these histories in order to chart and assess the collisions of human and more-than-human aspirations in sites defined by globalised extraction. Through the exploratory pilot work proposed here, we aim to develop and demonstrate the value of the ‘sites of fracture’ framework and our novel methods of collaborative engagement with landscapes and community to global histories of capitalism. Our project will benefit local communities through increased access to archival resources and through new forms of artistic expression. It will create expanded resources and frameworks for the study of economic and environmental history. We will make our results accessible to fields beyond Irish studies through two means. First, we plan an international conference on the concept of sites of fracture that will foster dialogue between our Irish research and other global cases. Second, our project will result in two articles and a book presenting its findings and methodological approaches.