Designing Within Paradox: Community-Led Futures in Post-Conflict Northern Ireland

My PhD research proposes that place-based co-design and participatory action research can function as forms of anticipatory governance in contexts marked by political instability, institutional distrust, and the ongoing legacies of conflict, where past and present remain entangled in everyday life. The study adopts an emergent and adaptive design, in which participatory engagement evolves differently across contexts while remaining grounded in relational and practice-based inquiry. Anticipatory governance is understood here as emerging through participatory and imaginative practices that inform present-day decision-making. Developed through two case studies on Rathlin Island and in the Greater Shankill area of Belfast, the project examines how visual, embodied, and participatory methods illuminate alternative pathways for governance.

Northern Ireland provides a compelling context for examining institutional unfitness - moments when governance systems become unable to respond to this social needs or sustain public confidence. Here, peace is not experienced as a fixed endpoint but as an ongoing negotiation shaping everyday life and future-oriented thinking. This is reflected in the systemic instability and recurrent collapse of its power-sharing institutions (Carmichael & Knox, 2025; Haughey & Loughran, 2023; Birrell & Gormley-Heenan, 2015).

Anticipatory governance refers to the ways futures thinking, imagination, and participatory practices inform present-day decision-making (Guston, 2014; Kimbell & Vesnić-Alujević, 2020). In this research, it is understood as an emergent, community-led process shaped through co-design in contexts of institutional instability.

The first case study focuses on Rathlin Island, Northern Ireland’s only inhabited offshore island, and forms part of the AHRC-funded Future Island-Island project (Kimbell et al., 2025). It offers a longitudinal example of community-led anticipation. The study began as a retrospective, participatory exploration of an existing civic design history centred on visual minutes (graphic recordings), examining how participatory and visual methods were embedded within a specific local context. Sustained relational engagement led to collaborative interpretation and the co-creation of new representational outputs, including a visual timeline shaped by community preferences. Although this did not constitute a formally facilitated PAR cycle, it involved meaningful participation in how experiences were interpreted and carried forward.

Narrative and thematic analysis helped illuminate how creative tools and visual documentation function as governance infrastructures, making collective knowledge visible and strengthening community voice. They also reveal how community collaboration evolved into co-production with government and wider partnerships over time, echoing arguments about community-driven governance infrastructures (Kimbell et al., 2025). The case also highlights the importance of ‘islandness’ - place-based identity, interconnectedness, and shared stewardship - in shaping how futures are imagined and enacted (Baldacchino, 2005).

The second case study, in the Shankill area of Belfast, engages a contrasting context: an urban loyalist community shaped by persistent social inequalities, intergenerational trauma, and mistrust of formal institutions. This practice-based PAR study involved iterative co-design workshops exploring possible futures.

Through sensory, relational, and creative practices, participants worked with paradox, holding tensions of pride and loss, memory and possibility, hope and scepticism - an approach that contributes to the development of futures literacy (Miller, 2018; Candy & Dunagan, 2017). Within this setting, these methods support participants to work with paradox: holding together the simultaneous pull of pride and loss, memory and possibility, hope and scepticism. Rather than resolving these tensions, co-design creates space for them to be explored and sustained as part of anticipatory practice.

The Shankill case illustrates how anticipatory work unfolds where governance is both present and absent -felt in its effects yet often unstable or inaccessible as a mechanism for shaping long-term futures. A form of ‘islandness’ emerges here: participants described experiences of isolation, boundedness, and exclusion, shaping how futures are negotiated under conditions of constraint and disconnection (Kelman, 2023).

Together, the cases demonstrate how place-based contexts shape the ways communities engage with futures, and how participatory practices adapt to relational, social, and political conditions. Across both sites, visual, embodied, and creative methods make futures more accessible, experiential, and emotionally resonant.

In this research, co-design operates as a means of engaging with futures where formal governance is experienced as unstable, distant, or insufficient. Anticipatory practices are enacted through community-led, situated processes that enable collective reflection, imagination, and negotiation of possible futures. This positions co-design not simply as a method of participation, but as a way of engaging with governance itself, aligning with DiSalvo’s (2022) framing of design as democratic inquiry and participatory design scholarship that
positions communities as active publics in shaping civic futures (Björgvinsson, Ehn & Hillgren, 2010).

Drawing on over two decades of community practice, my positionality is rooted in relational ethics, mutual trust, and recognition of community knowledge as expertise. The study is underpinned by trauma-informed and reflexive practice, recognising that anticipation in post-conflict places requires sensitivity to memory, identity, and lived experience (Dietkus, 2022).

By focusing on how communities navigate paradox and imagine futures amid institutional instability, this research contributes to Governance, Justice, and the Public while intersecting with Futures Literacy and Embodied Futures. It highlights how anticipatory practices can become forms of governance where formal systems remain fragile or unresponsive, and foregrounds ethical dislocation as a defining feature of post-conflict Northern Ireland. In this sense, community-led futures work becomes not only a creative process, but an ethical
and political act.

These findings surface key tensions at the heart of designing within paradox in post-conflict contexts: How do communities imagine shared futures when unresolved histories remain present in everyday life? How can design hold conflicting truths without forcing premature consensus? Ultimately, the research argues that community-led anticipatory practices can serve as experimental sites of governance - spaces where alternative futures are imagined, rehearsed, contested, and made tangible through collective creativity.