Conference Agenda

In Belfast, murals and street art have permanently inscribed the conflict on the walls. Traditionally, and especially from the 1980s onward, mural painting has been used by different communities to claim spaces and lay a particular narrative and memory of the conflict into public space. Usually, these representations tend to invisibilise women, or show them in stereotypical roles as supporters, innocent victims, or (mythical) mothers. However, following the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, and the rise of street art in the city centre over the past decade, painters have been putting forward new narratives of Belfast, conflict, and peace, and of women in Belfast, conflict, and peace.

Based on the visual analysis of 637 murals and on 18 interviews conducted with politically active women in Belfast, this paper looks into the changing visual memorialisation of women in Belfast. I especially explore how murals shape space, and how they change public spaces of violence. Indeed, I argue that murals both produce and reproduce violent narratives by serving as visual reminders of the conflict and of the exclusion of women. On the other hand, I highlight the evolutions of these visual representations, and their nuanced representations of violence, peace, and gender. To understand these changing visual and spatial narratives, I specifically look at the way women have been visually included or excluded from political representations – including by women themselves – to broadcast narratives about the conflict and the peace process. In this, I particularly look at the links between certain spaces of the city and certain types of representations, focusing on the West Belfast neighbourhood of Ballymurphy and the city centre.

This paper highlights how representations of women have evolved in many murals of the city, but also how they show the remaining spatial differences between neighbourhoods, which do not remember the same violence, the same women, and do not remember them in the same way. Twenty-seven years after the peace agreement, the spatial division of Belfast remains in its walls and in its visual memories.

Deadly shootings in criminal milieus have increased rapidly since the beginning of the twentieth century in Sweden and have therefore gained widespread national and international attention. The politicization of the crime problem has fueled anti-immigration agendas, explaining why inhabitants of racialized working-class neighborhoods where the problem is concentrated have become constructed as the problem, rather than been acknowledged as citizens with the right to security.

In this paper, results from local surveys conducted in collaboration with Folkets Husby, a citizen run community center in Järva, Stockholm, are presented. Exploring experiences of community violence as well as aspect of community resilience, challenges for populations that are under-protected and over-policed are discussed in relation to question of structural racism. A core argument is that inhabitants are in the crossfire – directly and indirectly – of the interpersonal violence from inhabitant involved in crime and the state sanctioned violence that follows form repressive policing practices in the form of racial profiling.

This contribution provides an introductory overview of urban violence research in European cities, focusing on how urban spaces serve as sites for physical and structural, direct and slow, visible and invisible violence. Various forms of violence in cities—from terrorist attacks, to gun violence and sexual violence—are increasingly the subject of research. Violence and the fear thereof are disproportionately dispersed across the urban, oftentimes primarily affecting already marginalized communities, threatening their livelihoods and exacerbating existing inequalities. Yet it can also be directed against urban infrastructure and the built environment that are vital for the functioning of cities. And while researchers do not agree on a common understanding of what makes urban violence urban, it is clear that cities are spaces where violence is perpetrated, experienced, contested and remembered. In many European cities, the question of security is inextricably linked to spatiality, with some neighborhoods more heavily policed or surveilled than others. Violence reshapes socio-spatial conditions of cities; it also alters the ways residents experience security and insecurity in their daily lives. This contribution explores the complex ways in which violence urban space relate to each other, carving out common features and important differences within urban violence research across Europe.