Critical Topographies of Class, Coloniality and Erasure: walking Cork's southern inner city

Description

This walking paper mobilises a critical urbanist and criminological lens to reveal the entanglements of class, coloniality and spatial power in Cork’s southern inner city. Through an embodied methodology of walking, the work traces sites associated with execution, confinement, deportation and wider social harms . These are approached not as isolated locations, but as interconnected sites and places within a longer history of colonial and post colonial governance, class stratification and punitive control. Foregrounding the notion of “critical topographies”, the work elaborates how landscapes of violence and exclusion are both materially inscribed and symbolically obscured. It considers how processes of dispossession, rooted in colonial domination and extended through modern urban policy, have produced enduring patterns of marginalisation. Particular attention is paid to their afterlives: how stigma becomes spatially embedded, how certain neighbourhoods are marked as deviant or dangerous, and how such designations legitimise ongoing surveillance, intervention and neglect. The paper also interrogates practices of erasure. Sites of historical harm are often unmarked or selectively commemorated, contributing to forms of collective amnesia that obscure structural violence. By walking these routes, the research reactivates suppressed narratives and reveals tensions between official histories and lived experience. Ultimately, the paper argues that Cork’s urban landscape cannot be understood without attending to the layered interplay of colonial legacies and class dynamics that continue to shape the urban condition. The walking methodology not only renders visible these hidden geographies of harm, but also challenges dominant spatial narratives, opening possibilities for more just and inclusive approaches to urban memory and governance

Period	17 Apr 2026
Event title	Symposium of the British/Irish Section of the European Group for the Study of Deviance and Social Control
Event type	Conference
Location	Cork, IrelandShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International