“Where are we going”: Irish Traveller men imagining individual and collective futures

Irish Travellers were recognised as an indigenous ethnic minority in 2017, which was an important symbolic step in acknowledging the uniqueness of Traveller culture. Drawing on Zittoun & Gillespie’s concept of the imaginative loop, this paper explores how Irish Traveller men imagine the future for themselves and their community, in the context of being an ethnic minority group where mainstream society has restricted many of their cultural practices, including nomadism. Participants were six Irish Traveller men in the South of Ireland. Deductive thematic analysis was applied to the data using analytic dimensions of the imaginative loop model in terms of triggers, imaginative resources, dimensions of time, generalisation and plausibility, and intra-psychological or external outcomes. Emergent themes included Imagining possibilities: Discrimination as a constant; Pride and creation of a Traveller Hero; Where are we going? The rocky road to utopia; and ‘A fair crack of the whip’: Claiming an equal future for their children. Imagination emerged as a site which linked past experience/future possibilities but also as a site of resistance to cultural assimilative pressures, and one of protest and demand, as men asserted a right to equality and parity of esteem, and re-envisioned relationships with the settled community. Implications for mobilising imagination for addressing intergenerational discrimination and social trauma are discussed. Future research could engage with the settled Irish population to explore their imaginings of the future of the Travelling community and culture in Ireland.