Abstract
Teaching sensitive histories in post-conflict societies makes particular demands on educators to understand students’ identities and their relationships to the past. This paper expands our understanding of post-conflict youth identities and experiences of history education through a small-scale study of students’ life stories in Northern Ireland which defied sectarian boundaries in different ways: some were children of interfaith marriages, while others attended integrated schools or were part of cross-community peace-building organisations. Participants saw themselves as forging new identities and ‘moving on’ from the past, although this process was fraught with ambivalence. I describe these expressions of identity through Ulrich Beck’s (1992) model of triple individualisation. For these ‘post-sectarian’ students, school history was seen largely as a tool towards achieving qualification, far removed from their everyday struggles of self-fashioning.
Highlights
The politically charged nature of history education is often especially palpable in deeply divided societies where anxieties about plural historical narratives and identities are always close to the surface
While many young people do have strong attachments to traditional binary identifications (Furey et al, 2017), with some involved in paramilitary activity (McAlister et al, 2018; O’Carroll and Carroll, 2021), others identify as ‘Northern Irish’ as opposed to ‘British’ or ‘Irish’, and/or identify as part of a political project to transcend the divisions of previous generations (McNicholl et al, 2019)
Much academic literature on Northern Irish history education primarily focuses on students who are understood to have a strong sense of identification with separate communities (Barton and McCully, 2005, 2007; Curran, 2013; Smith, 2005)
Summary
The politically charged nature of history education is often especially palpable in deeply divided societies where anxieties about plural historical narratives and identities are always close to the surface. While many young people do have strong attachments to traditional binary identifications (Furey et al, 2017), with some involved in paramilitary activity (McAlister et al, 2018; O’Carroll and Carroll, 2021), others identify as ‘Northern Irish’ as opposed to ‘British’ or ‘Irish’, and/or identify as part of a political project to transcend the divisions of previous generations (McNicholl et al, 2019) These latter youth identities have been invested with optimism, popularly seen as cause and consequence of ‘a new dawn’ for Northern Ireland (McNicholl, 2017). I argue that these subjectivities have profound consequences for how history education is experienced, and I outline the challenges this may pose to history teachers
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