Chapter 1 examines how locality matters to the Eclogues, and how the poetry collection conceptualizes and constructs local place. In Eclogues 1 and 9, Vergil stresses the importance of local dwelling, representing multifaceted place attachments between individuals and their familiar homes. At the same time, in dramatizing the effects of land confiscations, Vergil probes the highly contingent nature of place, defined by unstable boundaries and through power relations. In addition to providing new readings of these particular poems, this chapter lays the foundation for the rest of the book by exploring the concept of local place and showing how a multifaceted examination of place making and place attachment offers a more nuanced and fuller reading than a focus on landscape, nature, or an opposition between town and country. The chapter then turns to an apparent problem with this place-based reading of the Eclogues: the poems’ ambiguous settings. Drawing on Theocritus and Cicero, it shows that the Eclogues are interested in the many intersections and cross-fertilizations between actual and fictional places. The poems construct local places, even if they cannot be located.

Much migration research takes as its point of departure the migrant and the act of migration. In contrast, the Introduction foregrounds migrants and their families, treating migration projects like those at the heart of the book as domains of interaction between those who move and those who stay. It introduces and situates key concepts and topics, including ‘moral economies of transnational kinship’, imagination and distance, Christianity, and generation. The Introduction also discusses migrants’ arrival in the United Kingdom and the immigration context at the time, as well as the methodology used in conducting multi-sited fieldwork. It concludes with an outline of the book’s six chapters, which consider moral economies of transnational kinship from multiple perspectives and angles, from multiple social and geographic locations.

This chapter focuses on struggles to dwell in the city that characterised a strand of both racist practice and responses to it.From attempts to purchase collectively housing to the rarely told stories of organised squatting and the emergence of the black housing movement, the forces of racist exclusion produced a Newtonian response; collective endeavours to claim the right to find somewhere to live in the cities of post-war Britain. These social movements racialised both the claim to dwell in the city and the challenges to patterns of discrimination. But the struggles which emerged from the grassroots and grew over the 1970s and 1980s also in some ways ran their course over time for reasons that are also considered in this chapter.

The final chapter revisits some of the tenets of the narrative paradigm, based on the analyses presented in the preceding three chapters, and suggests ways in which the concept of narrative rationality may be further developed and nuanced. Fisher distinguishes between objectivist knowledge and praxial knowledge and argues that it is the latter type of knowledge that narrative rationality seeks to ‘foster and support’. This distinction is used by the authors as a starting point to develop a model for situated epistemologies based on insights drawn from Fisher’s narrative paradigm, proposals put forward by some of his critics, the work of thinkers such as Heidegger and Kristeva, as well as more recent work on narrativity.

Christine Cusick argues in this chapter that “an ethics of environmental engagement [often] decenters a sense of nation,” revising our sense of identity honed within discourses of political modernity. She focuses on this crucial aspect of ecological dwelling, countering the rise of nationalist discourses in the twenty-first century. Irish literature, like many other postcolonial literary traditions, is in a bind here: Questions related to borders and border transgressions (central to the discourse of political modernity) need to be rethought in the present. Cusick notes that “Implicit in the question of border mapping is the familiar question about how a critical discourse might approach texts as locally embedded without denigrating global import.” The essay draws on the work of the geographer Nessa Cronin and the polymathic narratives of Tim Robinson but moves beyond them to center contemporary Irish writers.

The fundamental problem defining the human condition, both ontological and metaphysical, is the problem of the movement from a wilderness to a dwelling place. This teaching is couched in the first letter of the Torah, which is itself the foundation of creation. The beit with which the Torah begins designates a “house,” the shelter that we are summoned to transform into a dwelling place. What is a dwelling place? It is a space into which we invite another, the stranger - the space opened up by the Torah that commands the Jews to attend to the care of the stranger. Drawing upon the Hebrew language, this chapter examines Jewish thinking about exile and return. Arguing that exile is not a punishment but is itself part of the Jewish journey to redemption, this chapter addresses (1) the relation between exile and revelation, (2) the condition of the soul in exile, and (3) the traumatic isolation of exile. The chapter shows that (1) Jewish thinking about any spiritual journey is different from the thinking that characterizes Western speculative thought, and that (2) for Jewish thought, exile is a metaphysical condition