Book Launch: Afterlives of the Troubles

The Memory, Narrative and Histories Research Collective cordially invites you to an online Round Table to launch the new book by Graham Dawson, Afterlives of the Troubles: Life Stories, Culture and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2026)
Focusing on experiential life stories across a range of forms and practices in the lengthening 'afterlife' of the Troubles, this book explores the complex temporal dynamics of 'post-conflict' subjectivities, emotions and memories, and the cultural politics of their representation, seen as a neglected dimension of conflict transformation in the Northern Irish peace process.

About the event:

This book launch will take the form of a roundtable which Graham will kick off with a short introduction to the book’s approach, themes and arguments. Three speakers will then have about ten minutes each to talk about what they find interesting about the book from their own perspective and how it connects to their own work or the wider field. Criticisms and ideas about what’s not talked about, and directions of future work, are also invited. The speakers are:

• Ann Rigney is Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at Utrecht University where she founded the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies. She has played a leading role in the Memory Studies Association and published widely on theories of cultural memory and on memory cultures from the nineteenth century to the present. Ann’s new book, Remembering Hope: The Cultural Afterlife of Protest, was published earlier this year by Oxford University Press in the Studies in Collective Memory series. 

• Claire Hackett is Director of the Dúchas Oral History Archive at Falls Community Council in West Belfast. She is a member of The Stories Network of practitioners from a range of storytelling and oral history projects across Northern Ireland; and of Healing Through Remembering, an independent initiative made up of a diverse membership with different political perspectives working on how to deal with the legacy of the past as it relates to the conflict in and about Northern Ireland. 
• Roisín Higgins is Professor of History at Maynooth University. Her research focuses on the dynamic relationship between past and present, and the ways in which individuals and societies remember and commemorate difficult and contested histories. Roisín’s current work concerns embodied memories of conflict. Her project ‘Sensing the Troubles: Living through conflict in Northern Ireland’, develops a sensory history that illuminates the complex ways in which lives are touched by violence.

The roundtable will then open into a wider conversation about the issues raised, with all the speakers free to engage with each other, and questions and contributions from the audience.  The event will be chaired by Kate (Lucy) Newby, a founder-member of the MNH Research Collective who is an oral historian and Director of the Manchester Centre for Public History and Heritage at Manchester Metropolitan University.
 
About the Book

Focusing on forms and practices of experiential life-storytelling, from oral history and published memoir to personal narratives of justice campaigners and collections of community-based storytelling projects, this new book investigates the continuing emotional charge and felt significance of conflict memories at an increasing distance from the happenings of the Troubles. In this lengthening temporal 'afterlife' of conflict, conflict experience is not 'past' but haunts the present, and memory-work carries future-oriented desires for truth, justice, peace and reconciliation. Interdisciplinary critical perspectives from historical cultural studies, oral history and popular-memory theory inform close interpretative engagement with life stories situated within their cultural, historical, geographical and political contexts. Drawing also on object-relations psychoanalysis, cultural psychology and the history of emotions, the book explores the complex temporal dynamics of 'post-conflict' subjectivities in the endeavour to make sense of remembered experiences of conflict and the feelings attached to them both at the time and afterwards. In a series of case studies tracing developments in the culture of conflict transformation in the evolving peace process, seen through this prism of life-storytelling, Afterlives of the Troubles maps a contested history of legacy policy-making and cultural practices engaged in 'dealing with the past', from the establishment of devolution in 2005-07 through to the Legacy and Reconciliation Act of 2023.

Graham Dawson is Visiting Professor in INCORE (International Conflict Research Institute) at Ulster University, and a founder-member of the MNH Research Collective. Formerly he was Professor of Historical Cultural Studies and Director of the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University of Brighton. His previous books include Soldier Heroes: British Adventure, Empire and the Imagining of Masculinities (1994), and Making Peace with the Past? Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (2007), and, as co-editor, The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration (2000), and The Northern Ireland Troubles in Britain: Impacts, Engagements, Legacies and Memories (2017).