Knowing the North?
How we know and interpret the past: Cross-disciplinary approaches to dealing with difficult, recent pasts in the North of Ireland
Background
This project focused on exploring how interdisciplinary approaches can be used to interrogate what it is to know the recent past in the North of Ireland. The starting point was acknowledging that accessing contested pasts is always complicated due to the sheer range of competing claims of knowledge and to due to its ‘alive’ and disputed nature.
Aims
Inspired by the recent controversies regarding the role of official archives in framing the past (including in state-mandated official inquiries into institutional abuse across the island and British government-imposed legacy programs), this project had two key aims –
- to initiate collaborative and discursive cross-disciplinary explorations of what it is to ‘know the past’ in the North and
- to critically assess the potential and limitations of various sources in creating and skewing our knowledge claims.
In working through these two overarching aims, the project was co-directed by Professors Laura McAtackney (Archaeology / Radical Humanities), Patricia Lundy (Sociology) and Roisín Higgins (History) and we decided to work on two interconnected themes with invited stakeholder groups. Our aims were to look at two significant but underexplored areas of interest in the North of Ireland in terms of truth recovery and transitional justice - (1) Gendering Experiences of Conflict (2) Institutions and Institutional Abuse - and to dissect the roles and potentials of particular sources and methods to shape our knowledge of those pasts.
Project events and outputs
Two workshops were brought together on the above themes with invited keynotes (Professors Linda Connolly and Professor Máiréad Enright, respectively) to set the critical tone. The contributors were invited due to their knowledge and experience of the themes because they were victims and survivors, people with experience, advocates for social justice change, community workers, policy makers, heritage creators, and academics. Discussions at the workshops were prompted by pre-circulated questions assessing the role of using various forms of text, memory and materials to explicitly consider how we knew, know and will know into the future about these difficult and contested pasts. Anonymized notes were taken and circulated to the contributors and the project culminated in a public event (Sept 2025) that followed a similar discursive format – and addressing the same themes - as the workshops and was hosted at UCC.
The initial findings of this project are still being explored and will be used to initiate future research projects and co-produce publications.