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In this paper we argue that nonprofit, nongovernmental organisations (NGO5) constitute crucial sites at which welfare state restructuring and neoliberalism are enacted and materialised in everyday life practices. This paper responds to recent calls from geographers to move to finer scales of analysis that enrich our understanding about the geographies of welfare state restructuring and neoliberalism. Our response is based on case-study research of NGOs that provide social services to migrants in Minneapolis-St Paul, USA, and Toronto, Canada. We draw on the concept of `translation' to show the agency of NGOs in articulating macroscale programmes of governance into concrete regulations that govern the conduct of everyday life. The case studies demonstrate the usefulness of seeing NGOs as translation mechanisms to current debates about the role of NGOs amidst welfare state restructuring and the rise of neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper the political fortunes and identities of Irish Catholics in US and Canadian cities are explored through a comparative study of Buffalo and Toronto. Local spaces of political administration in the urban arena, such as wards, were significant in affecting the generation of sociopolitical networks of power which in turn had implications for the sense of political identity and involvement felt by Irish Catholics within these two places. The importance of such spaces, however, was also contingent on the interaction between these cities' Irish Catholic populations and wider geographies of social, economic, and ethnoreligious relations over time as well as on the topographies and traditions of political power that extended beyond the municipal scale in both societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]