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

无论是作为一个内部国家冲突或英国的最后一次殖民战争，北方爱尔兰问题，在三十年的时间里夺去了近4000人的生命，一直存在于与现代英国的主导叙事自20世纪60年代末以来，提出了持久的代表性和合法性的问题，为英国政治家，政策制定者和舆论形成者。然而，很少有北方爱尔兰的学者或现代英国的历史学家研究过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，也没有系统地研究过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方爱尔兰人独特的移民旅程，他们在麻烦之前和麻烦期间在英国定居，工作和抚养家庭，这一时期围绕北方及其人民和政治的政治和话语背景经历了复杂的变化。该项目将首次调查这些移民的经历，利用他们对定居的记忆，发现北方爱尔兰冲突的含义如何在英国文化中得到阐述。这些记忆将一起检查流行的话语分析，和文化表征，在英国的麻烦，特别注意从冲突时代（c.1969- 1998），其意义将重新评估的新闻，电影和电视报道从冲突后的Vantage位置。通过这些手段，这个项目将使用北方爱尔兰移民的经验作为一个透镜，通过它收集到的历史和记忆的麻烦在英国的国内意义的新见解，而在同一时间使用这个案例研究，以发展新的理论理解之间的关系的动态移民的经验和更广泛的社会进程的宗教种族冲突，文化接受和流行的记忆。调查人员将解决与北方爱尔兰内的新教徒和天主教徒，工会和民族主义者的移民经验的影响有关的研究问题，在英国的前几年和期间的麻烦;性别、社会经济背景、受教育程度、世代和定居地的差异在英国北方爱尔兰移民主体性形成中的作用;文化接受或其他过程在多大程度上给北方爱尔兰人的重新安置和适应战略带来了特殊问题;以及苏格兰和英格兰对北方爱尔兰新教徒和天主教徒的不同反应表明，在麻烦的文化影响和英国人在英国的表现方面存在地区差异。方法来源于口述历史理论、记忆研究、文化研究和精神分析理论。深入的半结构化访谈将进行与c.90北方爱尔兰移民和他们的后代定居在伦敦，曼彻斯特和格拉斯哥的地区，使用这种三向比较，照亮不同的社会和文化的问题在不同的区域背景下的影响。语篇分析将被用来解释英国印刷和视觉媒体中的麻烦和北方爱尔兰民族的变化方式。我们的第三个调查工具是最具创新性的：一个互动式纪念论坛，涉及选定的研究参与者。将通过合著的专著、期刊文章、期刊特刊、书籍章节、会议文件、国际会议、英国广播公司4台广播记录片、一系列播客和项目网站传播项目结果。

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.