Embodied Conflict: Sensory Histories of the Troubles

Event type: Talk

Please join us on Thursday 14 May at 6pm for the Ulster Society for Irish Historical Studies' annual J.C. Beckett Lecture which will be held at PRONI. All are very welcome. This event will be in person only.

Embodied Conflict: Sensory Histories of the Troubles

‘On bad days it was intangible,’ Clare remembered of Belfast, ‘The city felt different. There was an atmosphere, even though we didn’t leave our gardens.’ When Denis was a child going to school, sometimes he could smell the heavy plastic of burning buses and lorries from a riot the night before, ‘It lingered in the air’. These glimpses into the lives of people who experienced the Troubles do not appear in political narratives of the conflict, but they provide a powerful sensory record of what it was like to live with and in proximity to violence.

In this lecture, Roisin Higgins talks about her work gathering sensory memories in order to write a different history of the Troubles – one that takes account of the sights, sounds, smells, taste and touch of lived experience. It is through our senses that we encounter and make meaning of the world around us, providing historians with vital insights. From the smell of melted plastic in bomb damage sales, to the touch of a cobbled wall on the day of an atrocity, to the deep silence in the wake of an explosion, Roisín’s research aims to capture these almost forgotten aspects of the conflict and to show the importance of the stories we carry in our bodies.

Image credit: The burning bus was taken in Downpatrick in the 1980s and is part of the Bobbie Hanvey collection in Boston College, MS2001_039_885.

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