This course explores the longstanding and complex relationship between the Irish and African diasporas as a means of engaging broader themes of ethnoracial groupmaking, post/coloniality, and inequality in multicultural democracies. People of Irish and African descent have lived in close proximity for four centuries-- a result of transatlantic migration, forced and otherwise. Relations between the two groups have been marked by both conflict and collaboration, shaped by prevailing conceptions of identity, hierarchies of belonging, and access to pathways of upward mobility in “new” world societies. In the last two decades, however, Ireland has become the site of that encounter. A booming “Celtic Tiger” economy of the 1990s has transformed an emigrant society into an immigrant one, as migrants from around the world have relocated there. As a growing population of Irish citizens of African descent has come of age, the country is grappling with new questions about what it means to be Irish, be it by way of birth, passport, immigration, ancestry, or culture—in Ireland now. Given these changes, Ireland is an ideal site to engage some of the most pressing questions of our time: What is required to create a multicultural democracy? How can belonging that doesn’t depend on sameness be made real? What counts as “same” and “different”? How do societies manage the ordeal of integration? The course takes place mainly in Dublin with short trips to the west of Ireland and Belfast. Site visits may include the EPIC The Irish Emigration Museum, Frederick Douglass Walking Tour and the Ulster Museum, among others.