We are delighted to welcome Professor Graham Dawson – INCORE Visiting Professor – to give a seminar entitled:
“The Afterlife of Feelings in Oral Histories of the Troubles”
The seminar uses Cultural Studies and psychoanalytic theories and methods to explore the emotional dynamics in Troubles life stories and their impact on memory politics and conflict transformation.
Date: 10 December 2024
Time: 4pm-6pm
Venue: Ulster University Belfast Campus, Room BD-01-023
Registration: https://forms.office.com/e/scL7wSEaX7
The Seminar
Professor Dawson will begin by introducing previous work on conflict memories and subjectivities that employs theories and methods from Cultural Studies and psychoanalysis to analyse the psychic and emotional dynamics within life stories of the Troubles, considering their significance for the politics of memory and conflict transformation. This paper will focus on his most recent work concerning oral histories in two collections: the Dúchas Oral History Archive at Falls Community Council in West Belfast and the oral histories recorded for the ongoing AHRC-funded project, Conflict, Memory, and Migration: Northern Irish Migrants and the Troubles in Great Britain (2019-22). Through close engagement with three interviews from these collections, Professor Dawson will discuss methods to hear, understand, and write about the afterlife of embodied feelings derived from experiences up to half a century ago, as well as their materialisation in the ‘flow’ and what is termed ‘associative diffraction’ of memory within an oral history conversation. In conclusion, reflections will be made on the implications of this approach—and of post-positivist oral history practice more generally—for critiquing the policy framework of ‘an inclusive oral history initiative’ in the Northern Ireland Troubles (Reconciliation and Legacy) Act 2023.
About Professor Dawson
Graham Dawson works in interdisciplinary cultural studies on popular memory of war and conflict, with a focus on the memories, legacies and afterlives of the Northern Irish Troubles in Ireland and Britain.
His research investigates lived experience, subjectivity and memory as represented in oral histories and life stories; the temporal dynamics of ‘post-conflict’ culture; community-based memory-work; and the cultural politics of conflict transformation and historical justice. Author of Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (2007) and co-editor of The Northern Ireland Troubles in Britain: Impacts, Engagements, Legacies and Memories (2017), he was Co-I on the oral history project, Conflict, Memory and Migration: Northern Irish Migrants and the Troubles in Great Britain (AHRC-funded 2019-22, continuing informally). His next book, Afterlives of the Troubles: Life Stories, Culture and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland, will be published by Manchester University Press in 2025. Graham was formerly Professor of Historical Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton.
