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This work focuses on the efforts of Montreal's Irish Catholics to maintain a cohesive ethnic community throughout the nineteenth century, and on the vital role that the national parish played in this process. The early community directed its attention towards institution building centred around Saint Patrick's church, which had been built for the use of Irish Catholics in the 1840s. Following the dismemberment of the extensive parish of Notre-Dame and the erection of smaller Irish national parishes in the early 1870s, greater emphasis was placed on the creation of a wide variety of parish societies. By discouraging participation in Irish national societies that refused to submit to clerical authority, and by effectively fusing religious and national identification, the clergy ensured the success of parish-based organisation. Broader associations embracing the various Irish-Catholic parish societies were established, and participation in the Saint Patrick's day procession inscribed these affiliations in space. It will be demonstrated that the territorial and social evolution of parishes were intimately connected.

Women made, and continue to make history in Point St. Charles, and in doing so, transform selves, groups and community. / Building on the literature on class and gender in community organising, read through the conceptual lens of "translocational positionality" (Anthias, 2002a), I tell a story of the journeys of a group of ten women activists through four decades of neighbourhood organising. I show that although all the women were first involved in citizens' committees around practical needs such as housing, welfare, urban renewal and education, most of them, stimulated by feminist agitators in their midst, came to new awareness about gender inequalities, to new and deepening analyses, and to individual and collective actions around strategic gender needs. Part and parcel of this spiral of change (Nadeau, 1996) were the tensions that emerged with their families, friends and neighbours, and even with the agitators themselves. Out of these tensions came transformations at the macro level---community, public opinion and government, at the meso level---organisational structures and cultures, and at the micro level---family and selves. / Next I do a metanarrative on the methodology that underlies the project upon which my thesis is based, one that borrows from feminist community organising practice (Gutierrez & Lewis, 1994) to deal with the many ethical dilemmas inherent to feminist life history methodology (Geiger, 1990). In line with the notion of "translocational imaginings in dialogue", the project was conceptualised to pre-figure power-with (Starhawk, 1987) in order to construct narratives of belonging that break with processes of differentiation and stratification. The project is about doing community history with the people who make that history. Because of this, when tensions emerged around power relations, instead of paralysis, individual, interpersonal and collective transformations emerged. / Through this work, I am not only releasing new voices into the collective narrative, but I am also contributing to debates on life history methodology. And, my thesis, and the other historical products that will emerge from this project, will enable organisers and activists to learn from the past, and will, hopefully, entice younger people to get involved in community activism.

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No description available.