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THE TROUBLES WITH A LOWER CASE t: UNDERGRADUATES AND BELFAST'S DIFFICULT HISTORY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 November 2018

Sean O'Connell
Sean O'Connell*
Affiliation:
AT QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST
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Abstract

This paper explores the risks and rewards involved in directing undergraduate students engaged on an oral history project in Belfast. It advocates the role of oral history as a tool through which to encourage students’ engagement with research-led teaching to produce reflective assignments on the nature of historical evidence, particularly autobiographical memory. The particular challenges of conducting oral history in a city beset by ethno-sectarian divisions are discussed. This factor has ensured that the historiography of Belfast has focused extensively on conflict and violence. The city's social history is poorly understood, but employing oral history enables the exploration of issues that take undergraduate historians beyond the Troubles as a starting point. This project probed what is called the troubles with a lower case t, via an analysis of deindustrialisation and urban redevelopment in Sailortown (Belfast's dockland district). It provided evidence with which to offer a new assessment on existing historiographical discussions about working-class nostalgic memory and urban social change, one that supports those scholars that problematize attempts to categorise such memory. The testimony also differed in significant ways from previous oral history research on post-war Northern Ireland.

Type
Research Article
Information
Transactions of the Royal Historical Society , Volume 28 , December 2018 , pp. 219 - 239
Copyright
Copyright © Royal Historical Society 2018 

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References

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49 Lynch, A Tale of Three Cities, 35. For a discussion of the issue of ethno-sectarian relations in the Belfast labour movement, see Loughlin, Labour and the Politics of Disloyalty.

50 Loughlin, Labour and the Politics of Disloyalty, 122

51 The Deindustrialized World: Confronting Ruination in Postindustrial Places, ed. Steven High, Lachlan MacKinnon and Andrew Perchard (Vancouver, 2017), 6.

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53 Jones, ‘The Uses of Nostalgia’, 358.

54 This documentary was broadcast on BBC Radio Ulster and BBC Radio 5 Live. It can be accessed on IPlayer: www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b05qg06b#play.

55 Critical commentary by Duncan (pseudonym), Mar. 2013.

56 T. G. Ashplant, ‘Anecdote as Narrative Resource in Working-Class Life Stories’, in Narrative and Genre: Contexts and Types of Communication, ed. M. Chamberlain and P. Thompson (1998), 99.

57 Critical commentary by Anthony (pseudonym), Mar. 2013.