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What role does memory play in migrants’ adaption to the emotional challenges of migration? How are migrant selfhoods remade in relation to changing cultural myths? This book, the first to apply Popular Memory Theory to the Irish diaspora, opens new lines of critical enquiry within scholarship on the Irish in modern Britain. Combining innovative use of migrant life histories with cultural representations of the post-war Irish experience, it interrogates the interaction between lived experience, personal memory and cultural myth to further understanding of the work of memory in the production of migrant subjectivities. Based on richly contextualised case studies addressing experiences of emigration, urban life, work, religion and the Troubles in England, chapters illuminate the complex and contingent relationship between politics, culture and migrant identities, developing a dynamic view of the lived experience of British–Irish relations after 1945. Where memory is often regarded as a mechanism of antagonism within this relationship, Life History shows how migrants’ ‘recompose’ memories of migration as part of ongoing efforts to adapt to the transition between cultures and places. As well as shedding new light on the collective fantasies of post-war migrants and the circumstances which formed them, Life History thus illustrates the cultural and personal dynamics of subjective change over time: migrants located themselves as the subjects of a diverse and historically evolving repertoire of narratives, signalling adaption, difference and integration as co-articulating features of the Irish experience in post-1945 England.
households. It zooms in on a different group – middle-aged women – and their affective and economic relationships with younger daughters and daughters-in-law. Drawing on life history interviews and focus group discussions with seventeen Syrian women in Jordan in spring 2019, this article explores the diverse monetary and non-monetary contributions of middle-aged women to the livelihoods of refugee families. For the sake of this article, we understand ‘middle-aged’ women as
This is a study of how lifestyle choices intersect with migration, and how this relationship frames and shapes post-migration lives. It presents a conceptual framework for understanding post-migration lives that incorporates culturally specific imaginings, lived experiences, individual life histories, and personal circumstances. Through an ethnographic lens incorporating in-depth interviews, participant observation, life and migration histories, this monograph reveals the complex process by which migrants negotiate and make meaningful their lives following migration. By promoting their own ideologies and lifestyle choices relative to those of others, British migrants in rural France reinforce their position as members of the British middle class, but also take authorship of their lives in a way not possible before migration. This is evident in the pursuit of a better life that initially motivated migration and continues to characterise post-migration lives. As the book argues, this ongoing quest is both reflective of wider ideologies about living, particularly the desire for authentic living, and subtle processes of social distinction. In these respects, the book provides an empirical example of the relationship between the pursuit of authenticity and middle-class identification practices.
This book is about understanding how former combatants come home after war, and how their political lives are refracted by the war and the experience of coming home itself. In particular, it captures the political mobilization among former combatants as they come home from three very different types of war: civil war (Colombia), war of independence (Namibia), and interstate war (United States involvement in the Vietnam War). The book provides a much-needed long-term perspective on peace. It also demonstrates the artificial division between literatures across the Global North and Global South, and demonstrates how these literatures speak to each other just as the three cases speak to each other. The novel use of interviews to document life histories and the inside perspective they provide also give a unique insight into the former combatants’ own perspectives on the process of coming home and their sense of political voice. This book is not about peacebuilding in the sense of interventions. Rather, it examines peace as a process through studying the lived experiences of individuals, displaying the dynamics of political mobilization after disarmament across time in the lives of fifty former combatants. The book demonstrates how the process of coming home shapes their political commitment and identity, and how the legacy of war is a powerful reminder in the lives of these former combatants long after the end of the war.
combatants in particular are a crucial part of this transition to peace. Wars politicize combatants in a number of different ways, either explicitly or inadvertently. This book is about understanding how former combatants come home after war and live politics. It captures the challenges and opportunities for political mobilization among former combatants as they come home from three very different wars. Depicting their political life histories after war sheds light on how former combatants’ identities and war experiences shape their political involvement long after the war
in the challenges families faced across the generations. This book aims to document and explain the changing rhythms, textures and meanings of Irish family life from a sociological perspective through an innovative qualitative longitudinal approach, drawing on two major datasets newly available through the Irish Qualitative Data Archive (www.iqda.ie): Life Histories and Social Change and Growing Up in Ireland. See Panel i.1 below for a detailed description of the datasets and how they are used throughout the book. These datasets are described as qualitative because
that there was knowledge and experience in the treatment for this injury. Four individuals showed evidence of walking with unhealed and unstable fractures. Summary The exceptional preservation and environment demonstrated at the archaeological site of Kellis and its surrounding cemeteries have allowed for unprecedented bioarchaeological analyses of human remains. All stages of the life cycle, from foetus to old age, are represented in the Kellis 2 cemetery, allowing for the reconstruction of individual life histories and a clearer understanding of how individuals
finding satisfactions in them nor feminist critics from seeing them as articulating the contradictions of a woman caught up in and in her own way resisting the hegemony of dominant representations of women in a patriarchal society. Kurys’ life history Given that Kurys’ films interweave fictional elements with material drawn from the author-director’s personal life, a synopsis of Kurys
polarized explanations for return offered by contemporary critics in both Britain and Australia, and shows how a life history approach can offer a more complex and nuanced set of explanations of return migration. In particular, the chapter focuses on the nature, meaning and significance of ‘homesickness’ in the migrant experience. The argument is informed by analysis of three sets of life history sources. Most important is an archive at the University of Sussex. Funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Board has
experiences. Whilst drawing upon the interpretations of events and life histories we aid the contextualisation of some broader arguments presented elsewhere in the book. Such personal points of reference reveal much about the nature of the social fabric and social changes across time. Broadly, it considers the extent to which former prisoners draw upon established understandings of ‘the past’, and how these