Tales From the Borderlands

Representations, Identity, and Structuring the Social World

Moscivici (1973) points to a twofold function of social representations, that is, to order the social reality in which an individual is immersed and to facilitate communication between individuals by “providing them with a code for social exchange and a code for naming and classifying unambiguously the various aspects of their world and their individual and group history” (p. viii). This does not imply that the individuals who form social representations hold the same positions. Rather, social representations are not monolithic, but they can reflect as much the convergence or divergence inside a given community. The social representation of a given phenomenon is largely determined by group interests and knowledge about a particular phenomenon. The social representations in the given time of a society are not static but dynamic entities that alter according to the changing demands of the present.

With regard to the migration process, representations are crucial tools in identity formation. They make up the common culture and so construct the symbolic boundaries and thereby identities of social groups and communities (Howarth, 2002). As individuals familiarize themselves with the prevailing representations in their society, they “come to re-interpret, to re-construct, and so to re-present” (Howarth, 2002, p. 18). This leads to a process of negotiation of one’s identity within a given cultural milieu. By rejecting certain kinds of representations and embracing others, individuals make sense of who they are, often reinforcing their place in the community and their positive self-image.

The crucial tools that individuals employ in the process of creating social representations are anchoring and objectification. Anchoring integrates the representation into a network of significance, marked by social values, generating a system of interpretation (Doise, Spini, & Clémence, 1999). To cope with a new idea or perception, we begin by anchoring it to an existing social representation. Anchoring is related to the processes of naming and classifying, allowing us to organize and structure the social world in a meaningful way. Objectification allows an abstract thing to become more concrete. First, new information is sorted out, selected and simplified, and then organized into a visual or figurative model, representing the key elements of the object of the representation (Abric, 2001). The objectification may be an icon, a metaphor, or trope, which comes to stand for the new phenomenon (Wagner et al., 1999) in a process called figuration. Another way in which objectification takes place is personification, which involves associating idea with a particular person.

In what follows, I will discuss the process of constructing of social representations among Polish migrants in Belfast. I will point at different ways in which Polish migrants make sense of urban space of Belfast. Before I do this, I will sketch the context in which they find themselves, referring to the Northern Irish conflict and to the migration of Poles to the United Kingdom.

The Northern Irish Conflict

The conflict in Northern Ireland is on the surface level a struggle between those who wish to see Northern Ireland remain part of the United Kingdom and those who wish to see the reunification of the island of Ireland. However, this view is simplifying as it does not take into account the complexity of its social underpinnings. Siobhan McEvoy (2000) argues that it is a conflict about identity and territory with economic elements. The identity is principally determined in terms of religious affiliation, as the two local main groups define themselves nominally as Catholics or Protestants (Whyte, 1990). Yet religious labels are not the only signifiers of identity; depending on the context, “British,” “Ulsterman,” “Unionist,” “Loyalist,” or “Orangeman” may equate with Protestant, whereas “Irish,” “republican,” or “nationalist” may stand for Catholic. Hence, in Northern Ireland, “group identity is complex rather than simple, multiplex rather than single-stranded” (Jenkins, 1996, p. 111), and the Northern Irish conflict itself is triggered off by historical, religious, political, economic, and psychological factors.

Although the peace process started after the 1998 Good Friday Agreement between the British and Irish governments and political leaders from Northern Ireland, Belfast still bears traces of its violent past. In such a context, religion remains a dominant boundary marker and is one of the central dimensions of social identifications. According to Mitchell (2005), these dichotomous divisions exist in every sphere of public life, determining the individual’s place in the society.

Such an ongoing division between Catholics and Protestants extrapolates onto the urban structure of the city of Belfast. Its inhabitants read space “in highly intricate ways in a situation in which all space is identified as either ‘ours’ or ‘theirs’” (Lysaght, 2005, p. 140). According to Donnan (2005), such practice of “ethnising space can be especially keen at borders, especially so at those that are contested” (p. 78).

There are many elements in the landscape that differentiate it as belonging either to one side or the other—to Catholic or Protestant, Nationalist or Unionist, Republican or Loyalist. Catholic and Protestant parts are often delineated by peace lines (Cairns, 2000) and are also often demarcated by “flags, painted curb stones, murals and parades” (Svašek, 2009, p. 130). Such a spatial segregation has shown little sign of decreasing during times of peace. In relation to this, movement outside of local residential areas requires the “navigation of a complex topography of politicized space” (Lysaght, 2005, p. 135).

There were various initiatives in the 1990s and 2000s to prompt urban regeneration and to “open the city centers to all communities and develop a common civic culture for Belfast” (Bryan, 2003, p. 264). This involved attracting global capital and investing in new large-scale projects, which funded complexes such as Castle Court, the Odyssey Centre, and a Hilton Hotel. Initiatives were also aimed at organizing cultural events, such as St. Patrick’s Day or Belfast Carnival, to give Belfast a sense of a multicultural environment. At the same time there have been attempts to promote inclusive public space, which was linked to putting down Loyalist displays (see Bryan and Stevenson, 2009) and encouraging painting of new murals, which would promote cultural diversity (such as a Latin American mural in Ormeau Park).

As a result of increased intra-European population flows, due to the opening of the EU labor market, Belfast in the 2000s experienced a large immigration wave. This sudden influx of people coming from outside the local conflict has given an additional layer of intricacy to the already complex social matrix of Belfast. The areas of Belfast that traditionally were considered as either Protestant or Catholic became penetrated by the members of other ethnic groups, such as Polish, Lithuanians, Latvians, Slovakians, and so on. Geoghegan (2010) comments that in such a context, new migration may bring about significant social changes within the local community, which could become more inclusive and more pluralist. Yet at the same time he observes that it may lead to a situation in which new migrants will be “simply hoovered up into existing sectarian blocks” (p. 107). This statement seems to be consistent with the representations that Polish migrants construct of the current social changes in Northern Ireland. While on one hand there are visible tendencies to point that existing divisions will be overcome in a favor of a model of a pluralist society, on the other hand my informants notice that Polish migrants are at risk of being engulfed by the existing local system of ethnic classifications. I will come back to this later in this article; in the next section, I will briefly describe background to the situation of Polish community in Belfast.

Polish Migration to Northern Ireland

Polish migration to the United Kingdom following May 1, 2004, the accession date of new member states to the European Union, took place on an unprecedented scale. In the period from May 1, 2004, to March 31, 2009, the highest proportion of approved applicants were from nationals of Poland (66% of the total). The overwhelming majority of Polish migrants are aged between 18 and 34 years, with only a small percentage (less than 18%) aged 35 years and older, and without dependants in the United Kingdom (93%; Ruhs, 2006). According to Owen, Fihel, and Green (2007), 25% of Polish migrants hold higher education diplomas, but despite this, work in blue-collar sectors, mostly in construction, agriculture, hospitality, and cleaning (also see Kaczmarczyk, 2005, Łukowski, 2004).

With regard to Northern Ireland, since 2004 it experienced a disproportionate number of A8 citizens seeking work relative to the rest of the United Kingdom. More specifically, between May 2004 and June 2010, Northern Ireland had a quarter more A8 citizens (28%) registering with the WRS on a per capita basis than the rest of the United Kingdom. There were almost 23 WRS registrations for every 1,000 persons in Northern Ireland, compared with nearly 18 WRS registrations for every 1,000 persons in the United Kingdom as a whole. Looking at the data from a different angle, between May 1, 2004, and June 30, 2010, a total of 1,080,000 people registered with the WRS in the United Kingdom. Of these, around 40,000 people (or 4% of the U.K. total) registered to work in Northern Ireland. In contrast, the Northern Ireland population makes up around 3% of the U.K. population. This confirms the high rate of A8 migration to Northern Ireland. Of the total of 39,615 registrations during this period, more than half (55.7%) were from Poland, followed by Lithuania (18.5%) and Slovakia (13.6%). According to the data provided by Polish Association of Northern Ireland, currently there are about 30,000 Polish nationals living and working in Northern Ireland, and approximately 8,000 of them are in Belfast.

In terms of migrants’ place of origin in Poland, the United Kingdom has been the most popular destination spot for the inhabitants of the counties with a high concentration of industry, with Polish migrants to the UK coming from the following Voivodeships: Kujawsko-Pomorskie (49%), Łódzkie (42%), Śląskie (39%), Mazowieckie (35%), and Dolnośląskie (34%). The UK was less popular among inhabitants of strictly agricultural areas: Opolskie (11%) and Podkarpackie (21%) (Grabowska-Lusińska & Okólski, 2008). This seems to mirror overall trends in Polish migration to Northern Ireland. With regard to the migrants’ destination, the most common locations that Polish migrants choose to live in are Ormeau Road area (where many other foreigners choose to live), the Donegall Road area, East Belfast (Woodstock and Cregagh Road), and North Belfast (Shore Road and Antrim Road). Paradoxically, these locations are predominantly Protestant areas. However, due to the lower rent, Polish migrants decide to live there, penetrating these areas of Belfast and challenging the existing system of social classifications. I discuss this in depth at a later stage of this article in reference to the representations of urban cartography by Polish migrants.

A Note on Methods

Before I examine the migrants’ representations of Northern Ireland, I will now outline the methods used in this study. My research started in December 2008 and lasted for 1 year until December 2009. Although my fieldwork was officially over in January of 2009, since then I have been still “in the field” and continued collecting ethnographic data. During my fieldwork, I took part in activities of the Polish community, in more or less formalized settings. I participated in Polish Saturday School lessons and in dance and drama classes for Polish youth. I also attended Polish-language Catholic masses and visited Friday meetings of Polish parents and children at a local church. Furthermore, I participated in other events, such as the Polish film festival, the Polish picnic, different feasts, and carnival.

To obtain a better understanding of the feelings, emotions, and motives of my informants, I also conducted unstructured interviews. For the purposes of my research project, I conducted in-depth interviews with Polish migrants from a variety of backgrounds (class and place of origin in Poland) and of different family and work situations in Northern Ireland, also maintaining a gender balance. I carried out 35 in-depth interviews (16 with men and 19 with women), and most of my interviewees (29) were people whom I directly met in the field. I also interviewed 6 members of the Internet forum of Polish Belfast. Interviews were conducted in Polish at the interviewees’ homes, in cafés, pubs, parks, or at other public places.

To supplement data gathered by conducting unstructured and in-depth interviews, I also conducted some semi-structured interviews. These were interviews carried out with the representatives of Polish community institutions in Northern Ireland, including the secretary of the Polish Association of Northern Ireland, Maciej Bator; Barbara Snowarska, then the principal of Polish Saturday School; and a priest, Mariusz Dąbrowski.

Whereas participant observation helped me to grasp general context in which migrants find themselves, this article mostly draws on the in-depth interviews. Interviews are important tool in engaging in dialogue with participants and eliciting their descriptions of, experiences with, and interpretations of the sectarian divide of Northern Ireland. I believe that such an approach is important to an understanding of how social representations come to life and how people make sense of their day-to-day experiences as well as their cultural knowledge of the local conflict.

Rigidity of the Ethnic and Religious Boundaries

This section will discuss the tendencies of migrants to represent the local Protestant community as hermetic and impermeable. From various responses of my interviewees, it appears that a significant number of them believe that the history of the Troubles has left traces in people’s day-to-day existence. In their representations they consider the direct impact of the local conflict on the everyday lives of the Polish migrants.

Frequently segregation of the urban space of Belfast is anchored to the concept of safety. In relation to this, narratives of Belfast as a strictly divided city may be permeated with strong feelings of fear. This fear is particularly intensive when migrants walk through the Protestant parts of the city. While I was working at a shop at a local hospital, my Polish colleague Aga and I used to go to work together through the Donegall Road area of Belfast known as “the Village,” which is a predominantly Protestant, impoverished part of the city, with a high crime rate. Aga is a 27-year-old graduate of an English Philology Department in Poland and she seems to be well integrated with the local community. At the time of the interview, she was making friends with Protestant and Catholic colleagues from her workplace. This does not square with her representations of the local community. During the first days of my stay in Belfast, Aga guided me to work through the Village. She said,

Let’s refrain from talking when someone passes by. Once I saw one chick speaking in Polish on her mobile and the locals shouted at her “You Polish bitch.” The Village is a slaughter suburb, you know.

Aga used the figure of a “slaughter” as a means of objectification of the Village area of the city. Such a vilification can be a useful tool in reinforcing migrants’ sense of shared identity based on an “us”–“them” opposition. The figure of a “slaughter” carries a large emotional load and helps emphasize the impermeability of ethno-religious boundaries of the city of Belfast.

When I spoke to Agata, she represented Belfast in a similar manner, also using the concept of safety as an anchor to the concept of a divided city. Agata is a 29-year-old female from Warsaw, who interrupted her studies in Polish Philology to work in the United Kingdom. She had been in Belfast for 4 years at the time of the interview and lived in the Village for several months. When I asked her about the sectarian division of Belfast, she said,

I don’t like Belfast. . . . This is still a working class city. This is not a cosmopolitan city. Their problems [can be] attributed to the fact that they are not used to foreigners. They still have problems with themselves. When I was staying at Donegall and Sandy Row, I had incidents of racial assaults. For example, one day I was walking down the street with my Polish friend and we were chatting with two Irish guys. When they asked us where we were from, and we told them that we were from Poland, they told us to fuck off. They were Protestants.

Interestingly enough, the individuals whom Agata met in the street did not necessarily have to be Protestants, they could have been as well Catholics, who found themselves in this area of the city. However, Agata categorized them as “Protestants” because of their hostile attitude and the area of town they found themselves in. This points to the inclination of certain individuals to represent the Northern Irish conflict as still of great consequence to people’s lives.

Although the Village is a specific impoverished part of the city with a high crime rate, known for the loyalist bonfires displays on 12 July, the representations of Belfast as a divided city were not only confined to this area. For example, Dominika, who at the time of the interview was living in East Belfast, perceives the urban cartography of the city also as consisting of “safe” and “unsafe” zones. Dominika is a 30-year-old female from Kraków, and a graduate of a West Slavonic Studies Department. She has a 1-year-old baby girl and a husband. When I asked her if she made friends with the members of the local community, she told me that she experienced verbal abuse from her drunk neighbor, who knocked on her door at night. Dominika commented on her conversation with another neighbor following the incident:

He said: “it is all because of their drunkenness; please do not think that it is because you are Catholic.” But he had to say that. I know it is because I am Polish, and for them all Polish people are Catholics.

Again, the process of representing Belfast involved not only anchoring the sectarian division to the concept of safety and security but also envisioning the Protestant community as a potential source of affliction and harm.

Importantly, in some cases sectarian division is represented as a determining factor as to whether to stay in Belfast or go somewhere else. In this way conflict is represented with regard to a politics of exclusion and inclusion. The members of the majority group, Protestants, lead to the expulsion of the minority beyond the boundaries of their own ethnic group. Such a way of representing the local conflict was particularly conspicuous in my interview with Łukasz. Łukasz is a 17-year-old boy from Katowice, who came to Belfast in January 2007. At the time of the interview, he was living in East Belfast together with his parents and attending a GSCE course at a local college. He was also in part-time employment at a local bakery. Łukasz told me that he was not willing to stay in Northern Ireland, mentioning other possibilities:

I will go somewhere else, to Dublin or London, but I am not going back to Poland. But more likely Dublin, it is Ireland. But maybe it doesn’t matter. They kill Polish people everywhere, not mentioning Glasgow, I definitely wouldn’t like to live there.

Choosing Dublin as an alternative place to live was attributed to the fact that Ireland is a Catholic country. Given that both in context of Poland and Ireland has been an important identity marker, pointing at Ireland as a preferable place to settle down relates to migrants’ self-identifications as Catholics. Łukasz furthermore observed: “People in Dublin are nicer. They think that Polish people are Catholic so they feel some kind of unity with us.” In Łukasz’s case representing local conflict involves anchoring the socio-religious segregation of the city to the concept of aggression. The Protestant community is objectified as hostile and unfriendly, whereas Catholics are objectified as ‘nice’ and open.

The aforementioned interviews reveal a certain rigidity of socio-religious boundaries between Poles and locals in the migrants’ representations of the Northern Irish. This way of representing the local community is a simplifying picture informed by wider cultural knowledge system of the receiving society (compare further Howarth, 2002). However, alongside these negative representations of the relations of the migrants with the members of the local community go other voices and stories that also should be taken into account. In what follows, I will discuss how Polish people in Belfast represent socio-religious boundaries as permeable and subject to social changes.

Permeability of Boundaries

This section will examine how migrants’ representations seem to allude to a transformation of the old system of reifying categories. While seeing the boundaries of local community as rigid comes in part from unfamiliarity or limited familiarity with the Northern Irish; representing Belfast as changing and malleable may be related to instances of migrants’ more concrete, personal relations with the locals.

A kind of bafflement that such a positioning induces has been reflected in Joanna’s statement. Joanna is a 31-year-old female from Kraków. She holds an MA in physiotherapy and is enrolled in a postgraduate program in education in medical studies at Queen’s University Belfast. She is currently living in Belfast with her parents. On one occasion she told me that her parents would like to move to East Belfast, because in this part of the city there is a large Polish community, commenting,

It is strange isn’t it? I spoke today to this guy who has his company in East Belfast and he said that it is paradoxical—the rent prices are much lower in West Belfast, it is located in a hilly area, and you would think that the Catholic enclave is where Polish people would establish their community. But apparently, they chose East Belfast to live in.

The discourse concentrating on the fluidity of socio-religious boundaries that enables Polish people to live in Protestant parts of the city also involves referring to positive changes observable within in the local community due to the influx of the foreigners.

Michał, who at the time of the interview was living off Ebor Parade in the Village, represented the local community as rejuvenating. Michał is a 31-year-old male from Szczecin, a holder of diploma in Astronomy. He was working at a factory in Poland and in 2005 decided to move to Belfast to look for better job opportunities. At the time of the interview, he was working at a call center and living in the Donegall Road area. When I asked Michał if he thought that the Northern Irish were welcoming to foreigners, he commented,

You cannot generalize. It depends on the individuals. I have not come across direct hostility. It is very individual . . . from what I have observed so far the Irish people are more welcoming to the foreigners, and the Protestants less. However for example I live surrounded by Protestants, and they are simple on the very basic level, but they are very nice. My neighbours across the wall are really very nice. You know we talk often, sometimes they bring some bottle of alcohol. Well, I don’t know. I rather have not come across open hostility.

There is a certain contradiction in Michał’s statement. On one hand he notices that Irish are more welcoming to the foreigners, but on the other hand he observes that his Protestant neighbors across the wall are amicable toward him. It shows tensions between different sorts of representations and different voices speaking within one individual depending on the context in which the discourse is produced. It seems however that Michał’s more direct and concrete exposure to the local community is shaped to a larger extent by the ways he represented the urban space of Belfast. He pointed at visible attempts of the local community to create a more inclusive shared space. He said,

Have you seen these Protestant flags in the Village? It is changing. For example, last year on the 12th of July there were none of them in this street. Not even the Protestants. Nobody paints the pavements anymore. These streets were painted many years ago and the paint is gradually coming off. I was even reading some statistics. Fewer and fewer people want to display the flags, and so on. You know this is as if the dogs were pissing on the wall. To mark the territory.

In Michał’s narrative, clearly the diminishing importance of the sectarian division of Belfast is anchored to the changing physical landscape of the city. By referring to tangible changes, he grasped the dynamic character of the relations between two ethnic categories, Protestants and Catholics. He represents the reasons for the transformations taking place in the Village area in the following way:

Now it [marking territory] makes no sense anymore, because around 6,000 people live here. The majority are not the locals. On this street alone, at least the ¼ of the population are the foreigners. The community here is rejuvenating. Two years ago here there were no Blacks, no Hindus, no Chinese people or Asians, and since the last year they started appearing and they have become something totally normal. The white face of a Pole, Hungarian, Slovakian or Lithuanian is not as striking as it used to be.

Representations of the changing urban space of Belfast are based on racialized ethnic imagery. The space, which used to belong traditionally to either one or another ethnic group (Protestant or Catholic), is penetrated by members of other racial/ethnic origins, becoming more all-encompassing. It appears that in representations the “race” variable gives an additional layer of complexity to what used to be a dichotomously divided society. In this way, Michał represents Polish migrants as a part of wider migrant community, whose presence brings challenge to the former system of social categorizations.

It is interesting to compare in this aspect Michał’s account to Artur’s account. Artur is a 24-year-old male, working at a local engine factory, and strongly involved in the activities of the Polish Association of Northern Ireland. When I asked him whether he believed that religion was an important factor in relations of the Polish migrants with the Northern Irish, he emphasized the dynamic and changing nature of the situation of Poles in Belfast, observing,

No, I don’t [think that religion is important in the relations between the locals and Polish people]. . . . Of course there are areas in which it is better not to turn up if you are Polish, for example Sandy Row. . . . They will not love us there. However it seems that Polish people became part of the local landscape. When I was talking to my former colleague, she told me: “In my workplace there are now Queen’s graduates, Polish people and immigrants.”

Interestingly enough, in Artur’s narrative, Poles are represented as located in a sort of liminal space, in an ambiguous location, and pertaining to neither the local community nor minority group. The local community in Belfast is objectified as “Queen’s graduates”; in this way the importance is taken off the religious factor in favor of level of education as a determinant of one’s social belonging. Their status within the local community is reinforced by representing Poles as non-immigrants. Ascribing them such a status is an important tool in emphasizing their unique positioning in Northern Irish society. At the same time, Artur does seem to recognize that formerly rigid boundaries between Catholics and Protestants are now shifting as a result of their penetration by members of other nationalities and cultures. He referred to his motorbike accident on Sandy Row:

Once I had an accident on Sandy Row on my motorcycle. It was somewhere nearby Royal, you know this local club. . . . I fainted, and they wanted to call an ambulance, but I refused. I was too weak however to take the motor back home. And all of a sudden an elderly woman called a big, muscular guy, and asked him to bring the motorbike to her garden so I could pick it up on the next day. Unbelievable and all of this was taking place in such a hardcore place like Sandy Row.

Sandy Row is a working-class Protestant community in South Belfast and it is a Loyalist area, being associated with UDA paramilitary organization and the Orange Order. Artur locates his story in a context where the borders between dominant ethnic groups are firmly defined. Borders in this sense are represented as “myriad points of immediate interaction, when are where some people easily manage to move forward without much encumbrance, but where and when others are made to delay, or are stopped altogether” (Donnan & Wilson, 2010, p. 6). In this way, Artur represented Belfast as a city that allows for negotiation of ethno-religious boundaries and for transgression of certain “punctuation points” or contact zones.

Whereas many interviewees emphasized positive changes that occur in the areas of the city that are predominantly Protestant, representing the local community as rejuvenating and more inclusive due to the influx of the foreigners, some of them link this to the idea of individual actors being agents of change and social transformation. In this way, they reaffirm their positive self-image. For example, as mentioned earlier Agata noticed a difference in what Belfast used to be like when she first came and what it is like now. She believes that immigration is

the best thing that can happen here, because when they see that apart from the categories Catholic/Protestant there are also other categories which one can use to describe the world. Thanks to the influx of foreigners their own problems can be solved.

While there is a tendency to point at permeability of ethno-religious boundaries in people’s everyday life existence, some migrants represent urban space of Belfast as susceptible to changes by anchoring their representations in the different sorts of services for migrants provided by Protestant chaplaincies. Migrants underline that it is becoming common for the local churches to organize English lessons for foreigners (especially from Eastern Europe) and notice that some of the churches host playgroup activities during this time to allow the migrants’ children to play under supervision of outreach workers. For example, Zuzia represented the diminishing role of religious divide in Northern Ireland commenting:

I was worried at the beginning, how they would receive me. I directly asked Sue whether it mattered to her that I was Catholic and she said that it didn’t. I asked her if Max could join the Bible study and she was very welcoming. I never had problems here because of my religious affiliation.

This is particularly important as migrants depict themselves not only as active agents putting into question the system of social categorizations in their everyday lives in secular relationships with others but also point at inclusive nature of religious congregations in people’s day-to-day existence. These changes are of crucial significance as religion is one of the central factors that lies at the roots of the Northern Irish conflict.

Representing the sectarian divide in the ways mentioned above endows individuals with agency. Migrants represent themselves as capable of negotiating their location within the urban space of Belfast. By weaving their narratives of the changing city, they construct narratives of self, where the self is an active agent, a self-reflexive social actor belonging to communities within which there is a complex web of interactions.

Conclusion

Social representations help render the unfamiliar familiar. This is particularly important in the case of individuals who are away from their home countries and come to terms with a new social reality. Social representations equip them with a sort of safety net, a means through which they can order their everyday life experience. They provide migrants with means of objectifying and categorizing the complex social matrix of Belfast and with anchors to which they can relate their new encounters.

As one can see there are conflicting ways of representing the sectarian division of Northern Ireland and the context in which migrants found themselves. First, migrants represent the local community as hermetic. These representations are molded through an interpretative grid that relates to a wider cultural knowledge. While on one hand it is clear that migrants do represent the local community as having clear cut boundaries, at the same time they appear to represent themselves as social agents endowed with transformative power that is a driving force for the social changes. In a way the discrepancy between the two ways of representing the local conflict may be attributed to the difference between collective and personal perception. Representations of urban space of Belfast as rigid and unchangeable come from collectively shaped perceptions and a wider cultural knowledge. Representing Belfast as a changing city on the other hand stems from individual perceptions, based on direct experiences. While the collectively shaped perceptions are rooted in the history of Northern Ireland and perhaps to a large extent promoted by the mass media, individual perceptions include the voices of the people who reflect on their lived experiences.

The question of varying social representations could be then considered with regard to a structure and agency problem. On one hand it seems that the collective representations of Belfast city boundaries as rigid and impermeable correspond to the notion of structure. On the other hand, individual perceptions of malleability of social boundaries seem to reflect the concept of human agency. While the sectarian division of Northern Ireland is the structure that imposes certain order on the world, individuals possess an ability to contest the existing order. In addition to this, by weaving the stories of Belfast as a changing city, migrants reinforce their positive self-image. Representations in this way are linked to establishing and defending one’s view on the world and one’s position within it. To contest, reinterpret, and reimagine prevailing representations of Belfast as a divided city is an important step for migrants in finding their place in society.