Contemporary Northern Research Articles

Human Rights and Theatre Practice in Northern Ireland: A Round-Table Discussion

This round-table discussion, edited by Eva Urban and Lisa FitzGerald, took place on 5 July 2019 as part of the conference ‘New Romantics: Performing Ireland and Cosmopolitanism on the Anniversary of Human Rights’ organized by the editors at the Brian Friel Theatre, Queen’s University Belfast. Lisa FitzGerald is a theatre historian and ecocritic who completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Centre de Recherche Bretonne et Celtique (CRBC), Université Rennes 2 and the Rachel Carson Centre for Environment and Society, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. She is the author of Re-Place: Irish Theatre Environments (Peter Lang, 2017) and Digital Vision and the Ecological Aesthetic (forthcoming, Bloomsbury, 2020). Eva Urban is a Senior Research Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security, and Justice, Queen’s University Belfast, and an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Irish Studies, QUB. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011) and La Philosophie des Lumières dans le Théâtre Breton: Tradition et Influences (Université de Rennes, 2019). Rosemary Jenkinson is a Belfast playwright and writer of five short story collections. Her plays include The Bonefire (Rough Magic), Planet Belfast (Tinderbox), White Star of the North, Here Comes the Night (Lyric), Lives in Translation (Kabosh Theatre Company), and Michelle and Arlene (Accidental Theatre). Her writing for radio includes Castlereagh to Kandahar (BBC Radio 3) and The Blackthorn Tree (BBC Radio 4). She has received a Major Individual Artist Award from the Arts Council of Northern Ireland to write a memoir. Tom Maguire is Head of the School of Arts and Humanities at Ulster University and has published widely on Irish and Scottish theatre and in the areas of Theatre for Young Audiences and Storytelling Performance. His heritage research projects include the collection Heritage after Conflict: Northern Ireland (Routledge, 2018, co-edited with Elizabeth Crooke). David Grant is a former Programme Director of the Dublin Theatre Festival and was Artistic Director of the Lyric Theatre in Belfast. He has worked extensively as a theatre director throughout Ireland and is co-investigator of an AHRC-funded research project into Arts for Reconciliation. He lectures in drama at Queen’s University Belfast.

Pluriversal Literacies: Affect and Relationality in Vulnerable Times

AbstractThrough a consideration of literacies in theory and international policy, this article pushes at the edges of existing frameworks of functional and sociocultural literacies. In critique of existing policy directives, the author explores an approach to literacy that engages in the affective and posthuman relationality of human and environment and in the plurality of literacies globally that are overshadowed in prevailing models of literacy education. The author was motivated by a commitment to literacy education responsive to a world that is unsustainable in its current practices, to a world that faces increasing fragmentation and vulnerability (socially and ecologically) while certain types of expertise, technologies, and global infrastructures continue to proliferate. As a mainstay of education and a tool of social change, literacies are inseparable from policy and practices of sustainability, equity, and development. Pluriversality is a concept emerging from decolonial theory that provides a counternarrative to contemporary Northern assumptions of the universal. Building on a history of ideas around pluriversality gives sociopolitical and ecological momentum to affect and relationality in literacy studies. The author challenges normative constructions of literacy education as Eurocentric and neocolonial, effectively supporting a pedagogy that normalizes certain practices and people and, by extension, sustains inequity and environmental degradation. Through interwoven research projects, the author highlights the contentious aspects of functional and sociocultural approaches to literacy and the possibilities of moving beyond them. In doing so, the author describes and demonstrates the practical and political implications of affect theory and relationality in literacies education in a plural anthropocenic world.

“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”: Reading Trauma in Ciaran Carson’s Poetry

“One Step Forward, Two Steps Back”: Reading Trauma in Ciaran Carson’s Poetry Carla Anderson (bio) The Northern Irish poet Ciaran Carson was born and raised in 1950s Belfast in an Irish Catholic family living on the Falls Road, which is the heart of West Belfast and an Irish Catholic community within the city. While talking about his childhood in an interview, Carson refers to himself as “a guy from the Falls Road” before even mentioning Catholicism, indicating the importance of the Falls as a geographical locator that is coded with deeper meanings of identity.1 In his poetry, too, place frequently acts as a stand-in for identity. Although both Carson’s poetry and his prose often reflects his personal experiences and history, it is also fictionalized. Even The Star Factory, a book-length essay exploration of the deep history of Belfast that includes details from his own life, is not meant to be a memoir, as he explains in the same interview: “You never really know how things were exactly. We reinvent it all the time.”2 In his poetry, Carson deconstructs and recombines bits of history, news stories, and personal experiences to create a space in which the traumatic experiences of the Troubles can be processed and expressed through his writing. Similarly, places in his poems constantly shift and change, complicating the easy security that comes out of knowing where one is from. His poetic forms often feature nonlinear narratives and stylistic structures that echo the complexities of how trauma is experienced, and thematically, his poems emphasize the generative potential of constant change, even as it can be disorienting. Rather than remaining trapped in a cycle of traumatic thoughts, the speakers in Carson’s poems make use of this generative change to regain some creative autonomy. The Troubles, thirty years of intense sectarian conflict in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until the late 1990s, caused over 3,900 deaths and has had a deep and lasting impact on Northern Irish society. One psychology study from 2013 found that the highest type of traumatic experience reported by adults in Northern Ireland was what the researchers called “network events,” a term that encompasses witnessing traumatic events that affect a “loved one” or witnessing [End Page 125] serious injury, death, or a dead body.3 This study, along with others, emphasizes the severity of post-traumatic response to secondhand traumas as well as firsthand experiences—for example, witnessing a serious injury could be traumatic just as much as personally experiencing that same injury. In this way, even citizens who did not directly experience a personal trauma were still traumatized by the Troubles. Nor did the official end of the conflict bring peace or closure: journalist Lyra McKee further points out just how deeply the trauma has influenced the society even long after the conflict had passed by noting that since the cease-fire in 1999, the suicide rate in Northern Ireland has nearly doubled and, as of 2016, exceeds the number of deaths attributed to the Troubles.4 Given the extent of the impact of the Troubles, trauma often dominates the conversation about contemporary Northern Irish history. As scholar Jim Smyth notes in his introduction to a collection of essays about the Troubles, the rhetoric surrounding this period fixates on Ireland’s long history of colonial oppression, rebellion, and violence to amplify a prevailing notion that the Irish are stuck in a permanent divide and unable to escape from a cycle of sectarian violence.5 In this cultural context, it is even more vital to discuss poetry that pushes back against a narrative of being “stuck.” In Ciaran Carson’s work, memory is unreliable, which allows the speakers in his poems to evade a relationship to history that is fixed and inescapable. References to the Troubles appear throughout the body of Carson’s work, particularly his poetry, prose, and memoir writings. This prevalence suggests that events from this time are deeply influential to Carson, who returns to similar themes from his earliest works up through his final collection of poetry. Significantly, despite reconsidering familiar themes, his work emphasizes change and evolution—both in his writing styles and in how...

TOM PAULIN'S POETRY OF TROUBLES

This paper is part of my PhD thesis. It examines contemporary Northern Irish Literature written in English with the help of the theoretical approach of Irish Studies. It aims to introduce and make a critique of poetry written by Tom Paulin, a contemporary British poet who is regarded one of the major Protestant Irish writers to emerge from Ulster province. The thread pursued in this analysis relates to an investigation of how ideological discourses and the issues of identity are represented in the poet’s work. The author’s critical evaluation of existing ideologies and identities and his attempt to respond to them will also be analyzed. Four poems from three different collections are investigate. Paulin’s poems function as testimonies, denouncement and criticism of the Irish history.

The Potential of Interactive Negotiated Narratives in Rebuilding and Reimagining Northern Irish Society

This research explores the role of the writer in interactive transmedia production through a research project that has been primarily designed to take place within contemporary Northern Ireland. Red Branch Heroes was created, in association with Bellyfeel Productions1, as a prototype for a more extensive fictional interactive web series that will be known as The Eleven. The author developed a game-like scenario where, through their play, the audience influenced and developed character and story elements. The research asks if interactive forms such as transmedia offer any new storytelling potentials to the people of Northern Ireland and how such projects can contribute to debates about e-politics and e-democracy in post-conflict societies. Evidence is presented in this article to suggest that the ‘negotiated narratives' formulated in this prototype offer further creative community-building possibilities, in neutral spaces that can facilitate discourses about the future.

Women between Religion and Spirituality: Observing Religious Experience in Everyday Japanese Life

A large majority of Japanese people describe themselves as mushūkyō, ‘non-religious’, even though they participate in several religious-related cultural practices that socialize them to accept spiritual attitudes without the mediation of organized religion. This phenomenon fits well into the ‘spiritual but not religious’ formula of the contemporary Northern European and North American sociological debate, in which the ‘religion’ and ‘spiritual’ categories denote interdependent, although not always reciprocated, domains. Drawing upon two sets of qualitative data on women belonging to five religious organizations (Shinnyoen, Risshō kōseikai, the Roman Catholic Church in Japan, Sōga Gakkai, and God Light Association (GLA)), in this study, I argue that the religion–spirituality distinction not only fails to capture the empirical reality of contemporary Japanese religions, it also does not take into account new modalities of religious and spiritual experiences of people with such affiliations. Their experiences are expressed through the socio-cultural milieu and the language of religion and spirituality available to them in contiguous and complementary ways. In this respect, the aim of this article is to discuss such aspects of Japanese women’s religious and spiritual experiences that have often eluded scholars writing on Japanese religiosity in order to broaden the focus of reflection to include the mushūkyō aspect and the presumed religion–spirituality mismatch.

A preliminary investigation of cranial sexual dimorphism in a Northern Territory population

ABSTRACTIn the discipline of forensic anthropology, the concept of population specificity ensures that the most accurate methodologies are applied to a given set of skeletal remains. It has been shown that the use of sex estimation standards derived using a population that is temporally and/or geographically removed from the population of the decedent results in misclassification and an unacceptably large sex bias. The current study explores the latter by applying two established cranial sex estimation standards, Giles and Elliot (1963) and Franklin (2013), to a previously untested population from the Northern Territory, Australia. The results demonstrate a reduction in classification accuracy when applying both standards, with an increase in the sex bias for all discriminant functions tested. These results indicate that utilizing foreign standards to estimate sex within the Northern Territory will likely result in misclassification, thus indicating the need for more accurate standards that reflect the sexual dimorphism in the contemporary Northern Territory population.

Writing the Northern Powerhouse: evaluating the Northern Writers’ Awards as a potential model of intervention for addressing regional representation in the ‘London-Centric’ UK literary industry

Despite the UK government’s Northern Powerhouse agenda, the UK literary industry remains staunchly focused on a predominantly London-base. When it comes to Northern writers, representations of the North in contemporary literature and Northern voices on the stage, small and big screens, UK government has suggested that the literary industry is guilty of persistently underrepresenting the 55.4 million members of the public who live outside the capital city. This research adopts a case study approach to the problem, examining one regional creative industry award, the Northern Writers’ Awards (NWAs), as a potential model of intervention for enhancing participation, professional development and talent pipelines of Northern writers to the wider UK literary industry. The research analyses how and why the NWAs: enable career development opportunities for creative talent through partnership-based training and knowledge exchange; retain the economic impact of regional creative talent to improve the economy of the North by developing creative writers within the region; and enhance diversity in the UKwriting industry by addressing issues of representation and by reaching writers from all backgrounds across the North.

Approaching the Debtera in Context

This article presents an ethnographic study of the use of talismanic practices in the management of emotions in contemporary Northern Ethiopia. Here, the socially reprehensible emotions of jealousy and lust are contextualized within the Christian Orthodox system. I argue that such a study must lead to an exploration of how the materialization of the immaterial through the talisman is fundamentally problematic within the Orthodox context. Emotions are deemed reprehensible because of their close relationship to the body and the material. They signal an excess, an inability to contain, a loss of control over the schism that must divide mind and body. I ask the question: to what extent does the talisman function as a “sub-system,” managing emotions through witchcraft in parallel to the more normative systems within the Orthodox context?

Neither/Nor: The rejection of Unionist and Nationalist identities in post-Agreement Northern Ireland

Since 2006, according to the Northern Ireland Life and Times Survey, the largest portion of people in Northern Ireland identify themselves not as Unionist nor Nationalist but as Neither. This fact is difficult to tally with the patterns of polarised election results and the narratives of a ‘culture war’ that dominate most analyses of contemporary Northern Ireland. This article examines the existence of this large portion of the population in Northern Ireland who reject the identities upon which the 1998 Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement is centred. We find that those identifying as neither Unionist nor Nationalist are predominantly female, they come from all religious backgrounds, all age groups, and both British and Irish national identities. The majority of those who identify as Neither appear to do so as a statement of rejection of what is on offer from the political parties in Northern Ireland; rather than supporting a centrist party, they support no party at all. The article concludes that the 1998 Agreement has created the conditions for a growing number of people to identify as neither Unionist nor Nationalist, but at the same time it makes the emergence of any strong alternative, ‘third way’ type of politics difficult to envisage.

Spruce and beech as local determinants of forest fungal community structure in litter, humus and mineral soil

Beech forests reaches its native distribution limit in SE Norway, but is expected to expand substantially northwards due to climate warming. This may potentially result in a fundamental transformation of contemporary Northern European forests, with tentative effects on the associated belowground fungi. Fungal communities mediate vital ecosystem processes such as ecosystem productivity and carbon sequestration in boreal forests. To investigate how soil fungi is affected by the vegetation transition from spruce to beech forest, we sampled litter, humus and mineral soil in a forest landscape dominated by beech, spruce or a mixture of these. The fungal communities in the soil samples were analyzed by DNA metabarcoding of the rDNA ITS2 region. Although soil layers were the most important structuring gradient, we found clear differences in fungal species composition between spruce and beech plots. The differences in fungal community composition were most evident in the litter and least in the mineral soil. Decomposers, most notably Mycena, dominated the litter layer while various mycorrhizal fungi dominated the humus and mineral layers. Some ectomycorrhizal taxa, such as Cenoccocum and Russula, were more abundant in spruce forests. Differences in fungal community composition between forest types can potentially have large impacts on carbon sequestration rates.

Existence of Waqfs Without Waqf Institution in the Sokoto Caliphate: Contemporary Challenge for Northern Nigeria

The paper examines, from a historical context, Hausa culture as the foundation of the social and economic life of the Sokoto caliphate that succeeded Hausa states. The general purpose of the paper is to determine the existence of waqf institution from that examination since philanthropy, including donating waqf (Islamic endowment), is rooted in a people’s culture. Documentary analysis of books, thesis and online articles was used for the study. Findings revealed that certain Hausa cultural beliefs and practices contributed to the nonexistence of waqf as an institution in the caliphate and that created an institutional-vacuum in the waqf culture of Muslims in contemporary Northern Nigeria. This vacuum presents a challenge that should be overcome through ways that include introducing philanthropy education, with emphasis on waqf, at all levels of education in the region.

‘Things We’d Rather Forget’: Trauma, the Troubles, and Magical Realism in Post-Agreement Northern Irish Women’s Short Stories

The post-Good Friday/Belfast Agreement period has witnessed an efflorescence of magical realist fiction by Northern Irish women authors. Although these texts were published during an ostensibly ‘post-conflict’ moment, recurrent trauma linked to the Troubles manifests in the form of magical realist narrative elements such as surrealist, fantastic, and phantasmal events and characters. This essay considers the ways in which the magical realist mode is useful to women writers within the context of contemporary Northern Irish culture. The dialectical structure of magical realism makes this mode well-suited to post-Agreement, ‘post-conflict’ literature, which ricochets back and forth across the ‘post-’ marker in order to explore how the past impinges upon the present. This study analyses work by Jan Carson, Bernie McGill, and Roisin O’Donnell, authors whose magical realist texts address the ‘living ghosts’ of the Troubles. Their stories investigate the transgenerational memory of trauma and the ‘legacy’ of the conflict and consider the ways in which these are transmitted. They examine the impact of this transmission on the family unit – particularly upon younger generations – and contemplate the nature of the society that they will inherit. These writers utilise the magical realist mode as a means to challenge received narratives about Northern Ireland and to engage with the memory of trauma, which has been sublimated by the progressivist discourse of the Agreement.

Multilingual Theatre in Brittany: Celtic Enlightenment and Cosmopolitanism

In this article Eva Urban describes a historical tradition of Breton enlightenment theatre, and examines in detail two multilingual contemporary plays staged in Brittany: Merc’h an Eog / Merch yr Eog / La Fille du Saumon (2016), an international interceltic co-production by the Breton Teatr Piba and the Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru (the Welsh-language national theatre of Wales); and the Teatr Piba production Tiez Brav A Oa Ganeomp / On avait de jolies maisons (2017). She examines recurring themes about knowledge, enlightenment journeys, and refugees in Brittany in these plays and performances, and presents the argument that they stage cosmopolitan and intercultural philosophical ideas. Eva Urban is Senior Research Fellow at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, Queen's University Belfast. She has held a Région de Bretagne Postdoctoral Research Fellowship at the Centre for Breton and Celtic Studies, University of Rennes 2, a research lectureship in the English Department, University of Rennes 2, and a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Cambridge. She is the author of Community Politics and the Peace Process in Contemporary Northern Irish Drama (Peter Lang, 2011) and has published articles in New Theatre Quarterly, Etudes Irlandaises, Caleidoscopio, and chapters in book collections.

Can diversity promote trust? Neighbourhood context and trust in the police in Northern Ireland

ABSTRACTThe association between trust in the police and neighbourhood context is well known. Police seem to enjoy more trust when community settings are perceived as orderly, cohesive and well-functioning, and trust seems to be lower when order and cohesion seem attenuated or under threat. Yet, little attention has been paid to the association between neighbourhood diversity and trust in the police. Allport's contact hypothesis suggests that because diversity increases intergroup contact and thus a sense of cohesion, it may promote trust in the police. We use data from a nationally representative survey conducted in 2014, combined with Census and other local-area data, to explore the association between ethno-religious diversity and trust in the Police Service of Northern Ireland. We find that trust is higher in more diverse areas, primarily because Catholics living in such areas report significantly higher levels of trust than their counterparts living in less diverse areas. We interpret these results in light of what policing means in contemporary Northern Ireland, almost two-decades after the country's landmark reform of policing began.

In the Footsteps of the Stoics: Teaching Local and Global Citizenship in Northern Ireland

Contemporary Northern Ireland is a divided society “in transition”, in the aftermath of a conflict that lasted thirty years. The school system is mainly separated, with a minority of “integrated schools” (63 to date), mixed schools with protestant and catholic pupils - only seven pupils in one hundred attend this type of schools. In this context, teachers and educational researchers have developed some interesting inclusive practices. The article explores the most recent developments in the Northern Irish education system, highlighting the new vision of “shared education”, with programmes of meeting and collaboration among different schools, which is – at least at a political level – supplanting the view of “integrated education”. It also considers the programme for “Local and Global Citizenship” (LGC) in compulsory education, and its potential for the construction of lasting peace and social change, especially if connected to the teaching of philosophy and the use of philosophical enquiry in the classroom. https://doi.org/10.26803/ijlter.17.3.5

Theorising the survival of rebel governance: a primer from a Northern Irish nationalist community

ABSTRACTThis article aims to explain how informal institutions that emerge as part of rebel governance regimes during periods of conflict survive the transition to peace, with a particular focus on the continued presence of informal justice institutions in select communities in contemporary Northern Ireland. The development of this particular form of controlling political violence is explored as part of a broader republican rebel governance regime and a model of development is proposed which focuses on the protracted isolated development thereof. This approach demonstrates that such development produces more resilient institutions, which are able to survive both the transitions to peace and a post-conflict context which sees increased challenges from the state. These particular challenges are further evaluated for their inefficiency as they serve as feedback mechanisms further guaranteeing the stability of the ideational structures underpinning the informal institutions, which are based on a delegitimised statutory framework.

Conceiving Neighbourhood in Northern Nigerian Fiction

Representations of neighbourhood in contemporary Northern Nigerian fiction are a departure point for scholars exploring the structures and sources of ethnic and religious violence. Using Edify Yakusak’s After They Left and Elnathan John’s Born on a Tuesday, Slavoj Zizek's analysis of the concept of neighbour is applied here, to engage theoretically with Northern Nigerian social conditions. This framework illuminates the links existing between the everyday experience of neighbourhoods in real life, and their imaginative representations in the literary arts.

Tales of a tireur: being a savate teacher in contemporary Britain

A tireur is a male practitioner of savate, a martial art relatively unknown in the UK but popular in France, Belgium and much of central Europe. Savate, which is also known as French kickboxing or boxe francaise, is very much a minority sport in contemporary Britain and Northern Ireland, and its enthusiasts have received little research attention from social scientists. This article is a collaborative case study of one tireur: James Southwood. It draws on ethnographic research on the classes taught by Southwood, a British teacher who is an international medallist. The interrelationships between this teacher’s pedagogy, his enthusiasm for savate, and his biography are explored, drawing on his life history and the events in his classes. The small world of savate in Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in which teachers find it hard to make a living, and the success of this teacher as an international competitor, are contrasted herein. The article also introduces Bourdieu’s concept of habitus in a way parallel to the work of Wacquant on boxing.

How stand-ups construct and are constructed by the ‘Northernness Effect’

ABSTRACTI argue that a cultural bias I dub the ‘Northernness Effect’ impacts on perceptions of Northern English performers and expresses a classed and gendered cultural imperialism by which the region is stigmatised and Othered in relation to more socially and economically powerful South of England. I use original empirical research based on 27 interviews with Northern performers and a content analysis of 260 newspaper comedy reviews to demonstrate that this stigma is based on embodied cultural capital, mainly by means of performers’ accents. The Northernness Effect also reifies the region as stuck in the past, as exemplified by the archetype of the ‘Northern Comic’ which haunts contemporary Northern stand-ups. I argue that this figure, epitomised by the excessive comedian Bernard Manning, functions as a ‘female grotesque’ and a barbaric other to the civilised middle-class man who is England's ‘somatic norm’. I suggest that stand-up is a form in which the Northern imaginary and hegemonic working-class masculinities and femininities can be challenged and resisted, as well as potentially reinforced. I briefly illustrate how contemporary Northern stand-ups Sophie Willan, Janice Connolly and Lucy Beaumont have enacted this resistance by ‘Queering’ ways of being a Northern woman.