Overview

Focusing on experiential life stories across a range of forms and practices, this book investigates subjectivity, culture and the cultural politics of representation as a neglected dimension of conflict transformation in the Northern Irish peace process. Interdisciplinary critical perspectives from historical cultural studies, oral history and popular-memory theory inform close interpretive engagement with life stories in their cultural, historical and geographical contexts. This enables exploration of the complex temporal dynamics of 'post-conflict' subjectivities in the lengthening 'afterlife' of the Troubles, where feelings attached to conflict experiences are not 'past' but haunt the present, and memory-work carries future-oriented desires for truth, justice and reconciliation. Through case studies responding to the evolving peace process through this prism of life-storytelling, Afterlives maps a contested history of legacy policy-making and approaches to 'dealing with the past', from devolution in 2005-7 through to the Legacy and Reconciliation Act of 2023.

Full Product Details

9781526146496

Table of Contents

Reviews

'This important book provides scholars and practitioners with new ways of understanding the enduring effects of the conflict and the possibilities for conflict transformation. The life stories at its centre are movingly interpreted using new frameworks of analysis. It is an exploration that opens up new fields of enquiry for future studies of individual and collective memories of the conflict. The book repudiates the discourse of moving on and shows the complex dynamics involved in the work of reconciliation and building peace in the long term.' Claire Hackett, Falls Community Council -- .

Author Information

Graham Dawson is Visiting Professor in INCORE (International Conflict Research Institute) at Ulster University.

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