The
American-Irish: A Visual Ethnography
Jamie
Saris, PhD (Project Director),
Department of Anthropology,
National
University of Ireland, Maynooth
The impact of Irish people on American life has
been immeasurable; the impact of American people on Irish life has hardly been
studied at all. This is surprising
because of the usefulness of the umbrella term Americanisation for thinking
about Irish culture and society, from consumption practices to politics and
management, and from speech styles to the uncanny presence of America in
Ireland’s literary cannon. More
obviously, it is now widely accepted that foreign direct investment from the USA
has been a key driver of the ‘Celtic Tiger’.
This investment has been in the form of financial, intellectual and human
capital. There are currently 570
US-owned companies in Ireland, employing 90,000 people and representing
investments of approximately 40 billion US dollars. Our research project will establish a network panel to drive
exploratory
Our endeavour is to ‘picture’ American-Irish
life: to record in an open-ended way and artistic way the lives of US citizens
who have migrated to Ireland. We
imagine this occurring to the backdrop of ‘Americanisation’, and we conceive
of this as an open process with different times, layers, and material traces; a
process with different and potentially competing spaces, physical and imaginary.
The textual elements of the project will explore people’s senses of
belonging, politics, work and life ways, which will be complimented by the
visual expression of these identities; in turn the visual will provoke further
textual analysis. We envisage the
project being an open and exploratory one, drawing on national and international
expertise and leading the way for future research.
Our Researchers and Members of Our Research Network
Dr A. Jamie Saris
(Project Director) is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of
Anthropology, National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He received his PhD from
the University of Chicago. He held a
Post-Doctorate
Fellowship in Harvard University. He
is Deputy Director of the National Institute of Regional and Spatial Analysis
(NIRSA).
Maeve Hickey (Artist/Photographer)
is an artist and photographer whose multimedia work has
been exhibited in England, Italy, France, Ireland, and Mexico as well as parts
of the United States. She has collaborated on a series of major projects with
the writer and anthropologist Lawrence Taylor, including: Ambos
Nogales: Intimate Portraits of the US/Mexico Border (2002),
Tunnel Kids (2001), and The Road to Mexico (1997).
Dr Mark Maguire (Researcher)
is a contract lecturer in the Department of Anthropology,
National University of Ireland, Maynooth. He
received his PhD from the National Institute for
Regional and Spatial Analysis (NIRSA). He
recently edited a number of issues of the international journal CITY on
contemporary social change in Ireland. He
is author of Differently Irish: a cultural history exploring 25 years of
Vietnamese-Irish identity (2004), and, with Lawrence Taylor, is editing a
book on Dublin city, which will be published by Lilliput in 2007.
He
may be contacted at: Department of Anthropology, Education House, National
University of Ireland, Maynooth, Tel.: +353 1 7083684, e-mail: Mark.H.Maguire@nuim.ie
Professor George E. Marcus (Network Panel Member)
is the Chancellor’s Professor of Anthropology, Department of Anthropology,
University of California, Irvine. He
served as the Joseph D. Jamail Professor at Rice University, where he has
chaired the anthropology department for 25 years. He moved to UCI after a year
as a Fellow at the Centre for Advanced Study in the Behavioural Sciences at
Stanford University. He edited the Late
Editions series from 1993-2000. His
major publications include: Critical Anthropology Now: Unexpected Contexts,
Shifting Constituencies, Changing Agendas (1999), Ethnography through
Thick and Thin (1998), Writing Culture (1986) and Anthropology
as Cultural Critique (1986), and Lives in Trust: The Fortunes of
Dynastic Families in Late Twentieth Century America
(1992).
Tanya Kiang (Network Panel Member) is the Director of the Gallery of Photography, Ireland’s leading centre for contemporary photography. She previously was Editor of Circa Art Magazine and was contract lecturer in Media Studies at Dublin City University and at the National College of Art & Design.
Dr Rebecca Chiyoko King Ó Riain (Network Panel
Member) received her PhD (1998) in Sociology from the
University of California at Berkeley. She
taught in the Sociology Department at the University of San Francisco for six
years and was chair of the department for one year before joining the department
of Sociology at NUI Maynooth as a lecturer.
Her research interests are in race/ethnicity, qualitative methods,
children, multiraciality, and gender. She has published most recently in the Journal
of Asian American Studies, Amerasia Journal and in a number of edited
books on multiraciality and is author of Pure Beauty: Judging Race in
Japanese American Beauty Pageants a forthcoming book to be published by the
University of Minnesota Press in September 2006.