Branford, A.;
(2021)
‘I’m not Catholic and I’m not Protestant’: Identity, individualisation and challenges for history education in Northern Ireland.
History Education Research Journal
, 18
(2)
pp. 126-147.
10.14324/HERJ.18.2.01.
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Abstract
Teaching sensitive histories in post-conflict societies makes particular demands on educators to understand students’ identities and their relationships to the past. This paper expands our understanding of post-conflict youth identities and experiences of history education through a small-scale study of students’ life stories in Northern Ireland which defied sectarian boundaries in different ways: some were children of interfaith marriages, while others attended integrated schools or were part of cross-community peace-building organisations. Participants saw themselves as forging new identities and ‘moving on’ from the past, although this process was fraught with ambivalence. I describe these expressions of identity through Ulrich Beck’s (1992) model of triple individualisation. For these ‘post-sectarian’ students, school history was seen largely as a tool towards achieving qualification, far removed from their everyday struggles of self-fashioning.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | ‘I’m not Catholic and I’m not Protestant’: Identity, individualisation and challenges for history education in Northern Ireland |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.14324/HERJ.18.2.01 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.14324/HERJ.18.2.01 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © 2021 Branford. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY) 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/, which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. |
| Keywords: | history education, conflict, national identity, individualisation, Northern Ireland |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10138047 |
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