AHRC-funded PhD studentship available
Applications are invited for an AHRC-funded PhD at the University of Brighton: “Cross-Community Oral History, Post-Conflict Geography and Conflict Resolution at West Belfast Interfaces”. This Collaborative Doctoral Award is offered under the TECHNE Doctoral Training Partnership Awards scheme. The partner institutions are the University of Brighton and Falls Community Council in West Belfast.
This full-time studentship is funded for three years at standard AHRC rates. The successful applicant will be jointly based at the Centre for Memory, Narrative and Histories at the University and the Dúchas Oral History Archive at FCC. Candidates must be available to begin on 7th January 2019.
This studentship will investigate, evaluate and contribute to further development of the Dúchas Oral History Archive as a tool for conflict resolution and reconciliation in West Belfast. The Archive contains several collections of oral history interviews from residents at the interfaces between the unionist Shankill and nationalist Divis, Clonard and Springfield areas of the city. Drawing on, and contributing to, current academic scholarship on life history and memory of conflict, post-conflict geography, and conflict resolution, the project will critically explore the strategies and practices of history-making and memory-work devised by Dúchas to build relationships across divisions and to acknowledge and reckon with a conflicted history. It will examine the Archive’s conception of the relationship between oral history and conflict resolution, and its role in the societal and policy conversation about the significance of storytelling work in ‘dealing with the past’. Through detailed engagement with the narratives collected in the Archive, it will pioneer their use in making an interpretative history of experiences and memories of ‘place’ on both sides of the interfaces before, during and after the Northern Irish Troubles.
For full details of the studentship, eligibility criteria, and how to apply, go to: https://www.brighton.ac.uk/research-and-enterprise/postgraduate-research-degrees/funding-opportunities-and-studentships/2018-cross-community-oral-history.aspx