About

All families are mnemonic communities that make use of self-referential family stories to construct a collective identity. As well as forging cohesion and identification between family members, such stories ‘give messages and instructions; they offer blueprints and ideals; they issue warnings and prohibitions’ (Stone, 2017). When such stories no longer suit a family’s purpose, they are forgotten. In the wake of a sectarian conflict, especially one which has spanned multiple generations, this process is both more complicated and more vital; questions of identity, especially along religious, political, or cultural lines, take on a more urgent significance.

This project will analyse the themes contained in the conflict-related stories that are told within families in Northern Ireland. I will conduct interviews with individuals from across religious, political, and socioeconomic boundaries, all of whom were born in the years following the signing of the Good Friday Agreement in 1998. I will ask participants to reproduce the conflict-related stories they have been told within their own families, before examining what themes the stories contain and what purpose their retelling serves. I will also explore whether the stories make reference to events beyond living memory and, if so, how stories with this broader temporal scope serve the families who tell them and help to reinforce familial ties. Research into intrafamilial storytelling in Northern Ireland is limited and has exclusively focussed on stories related to significant traumatic events. This project draws on a wider pool of narratives, not necessarily trauma-related, exploring what uses families make of the stories they tell. This interdisciplinary oral history project seeks to build on existing work relating to family stories to understand the relationship between family storytelling and the long-running conflict in Northern Ireland, with an explicit emphasis on creatively disseminating its findings to as broad an audience as possible.