Recent scholarship has highlighted the heterogeneity of second-generation Irish identities in Great Britain, yet the varieties of self-identification espoused by the English-raised children of ...Northern Irish parents remain almost wholly unexplored. This article redresses this neglect by examining the relationship between parentally transmitted memories of the Northern Ireland Troubles (c.1969–1998) and the forms of identity and self-understanding that such children develop during their lives in England. Drawing on original oral history testimony and using the concepts of narrative inheritance and postmemory as interpretive tools, it demonstrates the complex correlation that exists between parents’ diverse approaches to memory-sharing and their children’s negotiation of inherited conflict memory as they position themselves discursively within contemporary English society. Based on a close reading of five oral history interviews, the analysis reveals a spectrum of creative postmemory practices and identity enactments, whereby narrators agentively define themselves in relation to the meanings they attribute to inherited memories, or the dearth thereof, as they navigate their tangled transnational affinities and allegiances. The article also explores how these practices and enactments are subtly responsive to narrators’ changing relationships to their narrative inheritances as their experience and awareness of their own and their parents’ lives deepen over the life course.
Scar Issues: The Year in Ireland Harte, Liam
Biography (Honolulu),
2020, 2020-00-00, 20200101, Volume:
43, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
The graphic foregrounding of "the localised, singular, and unique body in pain" (Dillane et al. 5) in a crop of confessional narratives published during 2018 and 2019 provides us with a timely ...vantage point from which to measure the current extent of this eclipse and take stock of the cultural significance of body-centered life writing in contemporary Ireland. "By the time we find him, he has been lying in a small pool of his own shit for several hours" (5): the first sentence of the opening essay, "Notes on Intemperance," about Pine's father's alcoholism and associated illnesses, encapsulates the book's unvarnished aesthetic and introduces us to the stark reality of managing the care of a sick parent in chronically deficient public health care systems. Pine's feminist protest against oppressive masculine power structures and value systems is amplified by Sinéad Gleeson in Constellations, a formally adventurous volume of autobiographical reflections that artfully grapples with themes of power, gender relations, and what Michel Foucault referred to as "the fundamental codes of a culture-those governing its language, its schemas of perception, its exchanges, its techniques, its values, the hierarchy of its practices" (xxii). ...Pine and Gleeson frequently carry on an intertextual dialogue through their intense meditations on the female body as a fiercely contested site where biology and culture converge, producing some strikingly reciprocal commentaries on topics such as "the warped idea that blood is taboo when it comes out of a vagina" (Pine 105) and the "anachronistic idea . . . that a woman is not fully a woman until she is a mother" (Gleeson 127).
The measurement and evaluation of the nonacademic impact of publicly funded university research have been important components of the funding model that has existed in the UK higher education sector ...since 2014, the year in which "research impact" was incorporated into the Research Excellence Framework (REF) as a key performance indicator. Chief among the methodological challenges created by the impact agenda is the need to develop mechanisms to capture and evaluate the longer-term impact of research findings beyond the academy. This paper responds to this need by offering a case study of the positive role a combined life-history and narrative analysis methodology can play in capturing the deeper subjective impacts of public engagement activity. Drawing upon the authors' experience of public engagement and an analysis of semistructured interviews with nonacademic partners, the paper demonstrates how research impact reception functions as a plural and differential process that is personally and socially mediated. Based on this finding, it argues that research evaluation mechanisms need to be sensitively calibrated to facilitate a fuller appreciation of the emotional, situational, and historical dynamics that shape the impact of public engagement activity.
This article explores the use of research-based theatre as an alternative mode of research representation and audience engagement in the field of Irish migration studies. Although theatre-based ...methods of research inquiry and presentation have attracted growing academic interest in recent decades, there are few examples of research-based projects that originate in literary or historical research, and fewer still that have resulted in full-scale theatrical productions. My English Tongue, My Irish Heart is one such work, a play that purposefully seeks to expand the public reach of research outward from universities into the communities that were originally studied. The first part of the article outlines the play's origins and development; the second explores the chief conceptual and artistic challenges that arose during its creation; and the third presents a critical evaluation of the play's reception, drawing on audience feedback data collected during its month-long tour of Ireland and the UK in May 2015.
This is an an authoritative, up-to-date account of the development of Irish Studies over the past two decades. The authors examine the key debates that have underpinned recent scholarship and analyse ...critical concerns that have shaped the subject's remarkable growth. They trace the institutional fortunes of Irish Studies in Ireland, the USA, Canada, Australia and Britain and features in-depth critical accounts of specific trends and themes within Irish historiography, literary criticism, religion, migration, music, cultural geography, sport and media culture.
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