Kathy Prendergast + Catherine Nash Mapping emotion, again Place names continue to fascinate me. This is partly about my work on issues of identity, culture and location in Ireland and other places. But I suspect they have wider appeal. Sometimes the names of local places that are no longer in common use in Ireland have an afterlife on the gravestones of Irish migrants to the United States and in the family trees of their descendants now searching for their Irish roots. These dissonant geographies of memory and forgetting evoke long histories of modernisation and migration and more recent patterns of identity and belonging. I am interested in the ability of place names to suggest partial narratives of settlement, displacement, migration, possession, loss and authority. I like their taken-for-granted nature and their burden of meaning. There is something neat, contained and sensible about their reference to location, but there is also something that is elusive and infinite about them. I like the way they feature in both personal stories and grand narratives, and how they index the intimacy of a well-known place and the bureaucratic rationality of official government gazetteers of standardised names. I am interested too in how they circulate in speech or are written, mapped and catalogued; how they travel, change or are replaced by codes and numbers; their ambiguous charge as the focus of intense local debate; their potency as devices to imagine distant places; their existence in memory. To say they have poetics and politics only begins to trace their diverse registers of meaning. Catherine Nash