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Migration from Northern Ireland: narratives

Funded by AHRC.

Director: Liam Kennedy
Research Fellow:

Emigrates Poster

The project
The general aim is to gain an understanding of the migration experience of Northern Irish Protestants. Accordingly the project targets areas where Protestants comprise a significant proportion of the Irish migrant group: England (Liverpool and London) and Canada (Toronto). The specific issues being explored include:

  • the various contexts of Northern Ireland migration: internal (with rest of UK), cross-border (with Irish Republic) and external (overseas)
  • how the migration experience forefronts issues of political and religious identity and sectarianism
  • the relationship between emigration and return migration, the Northern Ireland conflict, the Peace Process and the Belfast Agreement
  • through an examination of the migrant experience to deconstruct the complexities of Irish Protestant identities which have, largely to date, been merged in literature and media into a single monolithic entity, and most often discussed in negative terms

Approach:
The life narrative methodology or biographical approach has been chosen for this investigation because, in telling their own stories, individuals actively construct their identities, their group identity and their conception of the world around them. These personal testimonies can have political force, according to the philosopher Lyotard, because of their potential to challenge 'powerful narrative apparatuses' and 'established regimes of thought.' Halfacree makes the case for employing a life narrative approach in migration research, asserting that 'thinking of migration as a story' is key to getting beyond the historically dominant economic discourse of migration to discover an alternative set of values, priorities and motivating factors. Lawson argues for the theoretical and political potential in 'migrant ambivalence' expressed in life narratives which can challenge ruling-group discourses of citizenship, equality, opportunity, and modernization. The power of the individual voice to poignantly articulate issues of identity and conflict specifically in the case of Northern Ireland has been demonstrated in the work of McKay, McKittrick, O’Connor and others.

Outputs: a monograph and specialist articles for journals such as Immigrants & Minorities.