ABSTRACT
In the research setting of the Northern Irish conflict and its afterlife, the terrain of memory – personal, cultural, and collective – is divided, contested, highly politicised, and charged with difficult and painful emotions. This chapter develops some personal reflections on the author's own experience over more than 25 years researching memory, subjectivity, and the culture of conflict transformation in the context of the Irish peace process. He situates his approach to memory and the Troubles in the context of the epistemology of cultural studies that recognises the salience of the researcher’s subjectivity in relation to the alterity of the researched subject, sketches his own ‘cultural biography’ concerning the Northern Irish conflict, and considers the different trajectories in academic approaches to the conflicted past in Ireland and Britain during the peace process. The author then reflects on his positionality in researching the Troubles, what this enabled, and the contradictions and difficulties engendered by it.
