Launch of the “Afterlives of the Troubles” by Professor Graham Dawson

About this Event

You are warmly invited to an interactive discussion chaired by Professor Brandon Hamber (John Hume and Thomas P. O'Neill Chair in Peace, Ulster University). The event will begin with a conversation between Brandon and Graham exploring the book’s approach, themes and arguments. This will open out into an opportunity for questions, comments and discussion from the floor. Drinks and light refreshments will then be served and conversations can continue informally. Participants are welcome to join us afterwards for a drink at The Sunflower and a meal later.

About the Book

Focusing on forms and practices of experiential life-storytelling, from oral history and published memoir to personal narratives of justice campaigners and collections of community-based storytelling projects, this new book investigates the continuing emotional charge and felt significance of conflict memories at an increasing distance from the happenings of the Troubles. In this lengthening temporal 'afterlife' of conflict, conflict experience is not 'past' but haunts the present, and memory-work carries future-oriented desires for truth, justice and reconciliation. Interdisciplinary critical perspectives from historical cultural studies, oral history and popular-memory theory inform close interpretative engagement with life stories situated within their cultural, historical, geographical and political contexts. Drawing also on object-relations psychoanalysis, cultural psychology and the history of emotions, the book explores the complex temporal dynamics of 'post-conflict' subjectivities in the endeavour to make sense of remembered experiences of conflict and the feelings attached to them both at the time and afterwards. In a series of case studies tracing developments in the culture of conflict transformation in the evolving peace process, seen through this prism of life-storytelling, Afterlives of the Troubles maps a contested history of legacy policy-making and cultural practices engaged in 'dealing with the past', from the establishment of devolution in 2005-07 through to the Legacy and Reconciliation Act of 2023.

See

Date: Friday 20 March 2026

Time: 2.00–4.00 pm GMT (including refreshments)

Venue: Ulster University, room BC-00-306, Main Building, York Street, Belfast

Hosted by INCORE, Ulster University

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Host or Publisher INCORE and the Transitional Justice Institute (TJI)