Conflict, Memory and Migration: Northern Irish Migrants and the Troubles in Great Britain

无论是被框定为国家内部冲突，还是英国上一次殖民战争，在30年的时间里夺走了近4000人生命的北爱尔兰动乱，自20世纪60年代末以来一直与现代英国人的主导叙事保持着紧张关系，给英国政客、政策制定者和舆论塑造者带来了代表性和合法性的持久问题。然而，很少有北爱尔兰学者或现代英国历史学家研究这场冲突的历史和记忆，因为它对英国的国家、文化和社会产生了影响，他们也没有系统地研究这场冲突对生活在英国的普通人的意义。一个特别被忽视的领域是北爱尔兰人独特的移民旅程，他们在动乱之前和期间在英国定居、工作和养家糊口，在那个时期，围绕北方及其人民和政治的政治和话语背景发生了复杂的变化。该项目将对这些移民的经历进行首次调查，利用他们对定居的记忆来发现北爱尔兰冲突的含义是如何在英国文化中表达出来的。这些记忆将与对英国动乱的流行话语和文化表现的分析结合在一起，特别关注冲突时代(C.1969-98年)的新闻、电影和电视报道，将从冲突后的角度重新评估其意义。通过这些方式，这个项目将以北爱尔兰移民经历为视角，通过收集新的洞察力，了解英国动乱历史和记忆的国内意义，同时利用这个案例研究，对移民经历的动态与宗教-种族冲突、文化接受和大众记忆等更广泛的社会过程之间的关系，形成新的理论理解。调查人员将研究北爱尔兰内部宗派主义形成的经历对英国新教徒和天主教徒、工会主义者和民族主义者在动乱之前和期间的移民经历的影响的研究问题；性别、社会经济背景、教育程度、世代和居住地的差异对在英国形成独特形式的北爱尔兰移民主体性所起的作用；文化接受或其他过程在多大程度上为北爱尔兰人的重新安置和适应战略带来特殊问题；以及苏格兰和英格兰对北爱尔兰新教徒和天主教徒的不同反应如何表明骚乱的文化影响和英国人的英国化表现的地区差异。该项目将结合口述历史理论、记忆研究、文化研究和心理分析理论的研究方法，开辟新的跨学科领域。将对在伦敦、曼彻斯特和格拉斯哥地区定居的C.90名北爱尔兰移民及其后代进行深入的半结构化访谈，利用这种三方比较来阐明不同地区背景下骚乱的不同社会和文化影响。话语分析将被用来解释Trouble和北爱尔兰种族在英国印刷和视觉媒体中的表现方式的变化。我们的第三个调查工具是最具创新性的：一个由选定的研究参与者组成的互动纪念论坛。项目成果将通过共同撰写的专著、期刊文章、期刊特刊、书籍章节、会议论文、国际会议、英国广播公司4台广播纪录片、一系列播客和项目网站传播。

Whether framed as an internal state conflict or Britain's last colonial war, the Northern Ireland Troubles, which claimed almost 4000 lives across a thirty-year period, have existed in constant tension with the dominant narratives of modern Britishness since the late 1960s, posing enduring problems of representation and legitimacy for British politicians, policy-makers and opinion-formers. However, very few scholars of Northern Ireland or historians of modern Britain have examined the history and memory of the conflict as it has impacted upon the state, culture and society in Britain, nor have they systematically investigated the meanings of the conflict for ordinary people living in Britain. An area of particular neglect has been the distinctive migrant journeys of Northern Irish people who settled, worked and raised families in Britain in the years before and during the Troubles, a period when the political and discursive contexts surrounding the North and its people and politics underwent complex change. This project will undertake the first ever investigation of the experiences of such migrants, using their memories of settlement to discover how the meanings of conflict in Northern Ireland have been articulated within British culture. These memories will be examined alongside an analysis of popular discourses on, and cultural representations of, the Troubles in Britain, paying particular attention to press, film and television coverage from the conflict era (c.1969-98), the significance of which will be reassessed from a post-conflict vantage point. By these means, this project will use the Northern Irish migrant experience as a lens through which to glean new insights into the domestic significance of the history and memory of the Troubles in Britain, while at the same time using this case study to evolve new theoretical understandings of the relationship between the dynamics of the migrant experience and wider societal processes of religious-ethnic conflict, cultural reception and popular memory.The investigators will address research questions concerned with the impact of formative experiences of sectarianism within Northern Ireland on the migrant experiences of Protestants and Catholics, unionists and nationalists, in Britain in the years before and during the Troubles; the role played by differences of gender, socio-economic background, educational attainment, generation and place of settlement on the shaping of distinctive forms of Northern Irish migrant subjectivity in Britain; the extent to which processes of cultural acceptance or othering produced particular problems for Northern Irish people's resettlement and adaption strategies; and the ways in which different responses to Northern Irish Protestants and Catholics in Scotland and England suggest regional differences in the cultural effects of the Troubles and the performance of Britishness in Britain.The project will break new interdisciplinary ground by combining research methods derived from oral history theory, memory studies, cultural studies and psychoanalytical theory. In-depth semi-structured interviews will be conducted with c.90 Northern Irish migrants and their offspring settled in the areas of London, Manchester and Glasgow, using this three-way comparison to illuminate the different social and cultural implications of the Troubles within different regional contexts. Discourse analysis will be used to account for the shifting ways in which the Troubles and Northern Irish ethnicities have been represented within print and visual media in Britain. Our third investigative tool is the most innovative: an interactive remembrance forum involving a selection of the research participants. The project findings will be disseminated through a co-authored monograph, journal articles, a journal special issue, book chapters, conference papers, an international conference, a BBC 4 radio documentary, a series of podcasts and a project website.