The Meaning of ‘Moving On’: From Trauma to the History and Memory of Emotions in ‘Post-Conflict’ Northern Ireland

Abstract

‘Trauma’ has become a pervasive trope in discourse and practice concerned with the affective legacies of the Northern Ireland Troubles. This article argues that its productivity may now be exhausted. Whether homogenised as the trace of an unspeakable wound or medicalised as PTSD, orthodox concepts of trauma offer limited understandings of subjectivities shaped by violent conflict and the possibilities of their transformation. These constraints are identified in three areas: academic studies of the history and memory of the Troubles, victims' support, and storytelling conceived as an aspect of peacebuilding. The article advocates shifting the frame of investigation towards conceptions of the internal world of embodied feelings and the meanings ascribed to emotions, that are capable of recognizing the complex temporalities of emotional experience and exploring the shifting modes of its management, containment, expression and performance within social and political relations and practices. In object-relations psychoanalysis, Raymond Williams' ‘structures of feeling’, and the emerging field of emotional history, the article locates critical resources with potential to inform new thinking about the affective legacies of the Irish conflict and the meaning of ‘moving on’.

Event centrality and conflict-related sexual violence: A new application of the Centrality of Event Scale (CES)

“…7 This is important to underline in the context of Bourke’s (2012) comment that ‘from the 1970s sexual assault was widely agreed to be exceptionally traumatic’ (p. 31, emphasis in the original). It is an individual’s reaction to an event and the meaning, if any, that s/he attaches to it that are crucially determinative of its impact (Dawson, 2017: 84; Ganzevoort, 2008: 20). Such factors are shaped by the wider socio-political-cultural context, which is precisely what this article explores.…”

The symbiosis of oral history and agonistic memory: Voices of 68 and the legacy of the past in Northern Ireland

“…Legacy issues go well beyond the question of contested memories and feed into and off sensitivities around identity, culture, and symbols. Such factors translate into significant and substantial issues (such as the plight of victims, reparations, compensation, memorialisation, and commemoration, to name but a few) that remain unresolved and have a tangible and important impact on the daily lives of much of the Northern Irish population (Pinkerton 2012, Brewer & Hayes 2015, Dawson 2017. The inherent difficulties in confronting these challenges provide some explanation as to why, in the early years of the peace process, the issue of the past was very much kept in the background while the foundations for peace were laid.…”

Book review: Post-Conflict Memorialization. Missing Memorials, Absent Bodies

“…This argument is not new in the field of cultural memory studies and a long list of researchers have focused on these aspects. In the introduction of this volume, we find references to many of them, including Caruth (1995), Olick and Robbins (1998), Misztal (2003), Radstone (2007), and Dawson (2017). The choice of the editors to mainly focus on trauma theorists is easily understandable, but theories that have emphasized the role of silence in the field of cultural memory studies (a notion which is actively used in the volume) could have been a clarifying supplement to the suggested theoretical framework (e.g.…”