UCLA

This dissertation is grounded in sixteen months of ethnographic research conducted within segregated social housing estates in east Belfast. It investigates the structurally violent aftermath of colonial conflict and how the possibilities for moral experiences and living a good life might orient the lives of residents. During the 2016 Centenaries of the Irish Easter Rising and the British Battle of the Somme, as well as the sudden eruption of the “Brexit” referendum, the melancholic experiences of Northern Ireland’s fraught history led to existential questions about the future. While the 1998 Belfast/Good Friday Agreement ended “the Troubles” (1969-1998), a sectarian and colonial conflict, bitter tensions persist today between Catholic and Protestant communities. This dissertation argues that the lived experiences of the future in the everyday lives of working-class communities constitute the social world in such a way as to challenge the efficacy of the Northern Irish project.

Northern Ireland as a national project remains in a precarious state of unsettledness in the lives of Catholics and Protestants residing in east Belfast’s social housing estates. As documented from the accounts in this dissertation, these areas sustained untold losses during conflict and today endure multiple forms of social and economic deprivation including some of the highest suicide rates in the world despite the 1998 agreement’s promise of community rejuvenation. This dissertation shows that while suicidal ideations, traumatic memories, sectarian hatreds, and drug and alcohol addictions proliferated in the aftermath of conflict, segregation, and unequal access to resources, residents today also actively cultivate alternative futures for themselves and their children for the sake of living a better life. Drawing from person-centered inquiries into the social life of moral worlds, this dissertation examines self and other perceptions of suffering, care, and death for residents of east Belfast. As a result, this ethnographic research highlights the visions of alternative futures arising outside of NGO, paramilitary, and state-controlled circuits.

Each chapter of this dissertation enters into how the future shapes first-person experiences through phenomena such as hauntings, emotions, rumors, narratives, and dreams. These lived experiences show the complex ways that people cultivate, interact, and shape their emergent moral worlds for the sake of creating a more livable future. Death takes on prominent salience in the ethnographic accounts in this dissertation as the complex histories of sacrifice orient many of the participants’ moral ground projects. This dissertation ultimately shows that in order to avoid succumbing to intergenerational despair, many people in east Belfast’s social housing estates actively cultivate alternative possibilities for their future lives and their future deaths.