Project Outputs

Community archiving and exhibitions

Conflicted Identities employs a co-production methodology, inviting activists and members of the Irish community in each site to donate ephemera, documents, and photographs from their private collections. These materials will stimulate informal community archiving sessions, forming the basis of co-curated exhibitions in centres in Leeds, Liverpool, and Newcastle.

Witness seminars

In each project site, six community activists will give oral history interviews, first with the Principal Investigator and second with their younger friends and relations. Subsequently, interview partners will address public witness seminars around the themes of historical community activism. Serving as launch events for the community exhibitions, these witness seminars will also feature audio clips from interviews.

Academic dissemination

The project's first academic output reflects critically upon how Irish community activism and political commitments in Britain have been presented to wider publics in the media, memoir, and museums and heritage sector. Engaging with Graham Dawson's and Penny Summerfield's theoretical framework of subjective composure, this article will analyse how veteran activists retrospectively evaluate their trajectories as diasporic and politicised subjects. 

Second, the current phase of research contributes to a commissioned book chapter on the Irish diaspora and the British left, for peer-review in a forthcoming Manchester University Press collection edited by Dr Daniel Frost (LSE) and Dr Evan Smith (Flinders University). This chapter analyses how pro-republican Irish milieux expounded emigrants’ ethnic distinction in Britain as a basis for ‘national’ emancipation in Ireland, and how these ideas have been remembered in activist memoir and commemoration.