Book by Margo Shea
The Public Historian, 2021
Review written by Naomi Petropoulos, Queen’s University Belfast.
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Gloucester Writer's Center: Conversations with Writers, 2020
Interview for the Gloucester Writer's Center about my book, Derry City
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Derry City is out!
https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268107932/derry-city/?fbclid=IwAR1KIA-fnfoDRL... more Derry City is out!
https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268107932/derry-city/?fbclid=IwAR1KIA-fnfoDRLZvJzP1J_qf3UCXVSxgPIux5rjHQySSxCM8ZWjXyaC4t-E
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The book traces the social and cultural history of Catholic and nationalist Derry from the end of the 19th century to the 1960s through the lens of memory and thus explores how engagements with memory can help us better understand history.
When they were producing formal historical accounts & local chronicles, telling ghost stories and transmitting folklore, staging commemorative activities, performing engagements with the past, leaving traces on the cityscape, preserving material culture and more, Derry's residents charted contemporary experiences just as much as they reflected on historical events. This book investigates and contextualizes these dances with the past in order to illuminate little-known aspects of Derry in the years before Partition and during the decades that saw Catholics and nationalists negotiate the challenges of being seen as a "suspicious minority" in Northern Ireland even as they grappled with estrangement with those on the other side of the Irish border.
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Articles & Abstracts by Margo Shea
in Carolyn Birdsall and Danielle Drozdzewski, eds. in Doing Memory Research: New Methods and Approaches, Palgrave, 2018
The socially constructed nature of memory and the well-documented ties between place and memory m... more The socially constructed nature of memory and the well-documented ties between place and memory make collaborative and participatory research methodologies particularly significant to scholarship in memory studies, place attachment and place-making. This chapter explores how participatory research methodologies combined with digital tools, including participatory project design, crowdsourcing, participatory community mapping and community curation can render more visible the individual and social functions of cultural memory to researchers and participants in collaborative projects. Participatory methods contribute to our understanding of memory’s role in place-making by making visible performances of memory that simultaneously honor individual representations and narratives, construct intimate publics and make visible community identities through collected and collective memories. Operating at the junctions of inclusivity and selection, of naming and making, scholars and their co-researchers construct meaning and negotiate its broader and deeper significance together using these methods. The widely democratic nature of memory, place-based knowledge and place attachment offers possibilities for understanding them and their intersections in new ways.
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in Katrina Srigley, Stacey Zembrzycki, and Franca Iacovetta, eds., Beyond Women’s Words: Feminisms and the Practices of Oral History in the Twenty-First Century, Routledge, 2018
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in Emotion, Affective Practices, and the Past in the Present, published by Routledge, 2018
This chapter is a scholarly reading of the 2015 "Temple" project that explores the ephemeral mem... more This chapter is a scholarly reading of the 2015 "Temple" project that explores the ephemeral memorial process as a case study to discuss the ways in which both heritage practices and emotions are necessarily spatialised, contingent, embodied, relational and performative. Temple’s contributions to post-conflict place-making and ‘dealing with the past’ in Derry/Londonderry can be more fully understood if the affective practices exhibited through this participatory public art project are linked more explicitly to the study of heritage practices and processes in post-conflict Northern Ireland. It was successful because Temple was neither a repository for Troubles-related memories nor a container for quotidian suffering. It was both. The memorial process it enacted invited participants to acknowledge the intertwined composition of their emotional inheritances.
Through its form, composition, location and crowd-sourced construction and interpretation, Temple structured, quite literally, an open-ended process of meaning-making.
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This article explores the challenges and opportunities that accompany efforts on the ground to n... more This article explores the challenges and opportunities that accompany efforts on the ground to nurture innovation as we promote stewardship, preserve valued places, advance education, and facilitate citizens’ connection to their parks and historic sites in the second century of the National Park Service. Using the first nationally designated historic site, Salem Maritime, as a case study, we examine efforts to grapple with bureaucratic inertias, entrenched patterns of insularity, and reliance on top-down authority. Support from leadership is necessary to allow education and interpretation staff on the ground to invite scholars, teachers, school districts, community educators, park neighbors, and others to participate in developing more engaged, complex, multi- vocal, and democratic histories and a broader vision for the new century in the NPS.
KEY WORDS: interpretation, collaboration, community engagement, public history, multiple narratives, National Park Service
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Spatializing Politics: How We Know Politics Through Space
This article examines the role of urban renewal in Derry's urban core as an important and often o... more This article examines the role of urban renewal in Derry's urban core as an important and often overlooked process that was interwoven through the civil rights era and through the early years of conflict.
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International Journal of Heritage Studies, May 2010
The question of how to ‘deal’ with the past in post‐conflict Northern Ireland preoccupies public ... more The question of how to ‘deal’ with the past in post‐conflict Northern Ireland preoccupies public conversation precisely because it separates a violent history from a fragile peace and an uncertain future. After a brief examination of contemporary Northern Ireland's culture of remembrance, this article provides some analysis of the potentials and dangers of efforts to confront the legacies of the Troubles. I argue here that the challenge for post‐conflict heritage work in Northern Ireland lies in forging practices that permit and facilitate different ways of encountering complex and contradictory histories. These new efforts to remember encourage citizens to incorporate disparate, often conflicting memories into a patchwork of collected memory. Through a presentation of two case studies, this article offers an analysis of this memory work in an effort to show that it is as difficult as it is necessary. By forging a new tradition in memory work that transcends the long history of dual narratives and begins to make space for broader, more complicated engagements with the past, citizens are building their capacity to acknowledge, understand and respect difference. This opens up new conceptions of heritage that accommodate the incalculable complexity that accompanies reckoning with social and cultural inheritances. In settings in which the past is negotiated by ordinary citizens, heritage simultaneously demands and creates new spaces for public discourse.
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ABSTRACT
“ONCE AGAIN IT HAPPENS:” COLLECTIVE REMEMBRANCE AND IRISH IDENTITY IN CATHOLIC DERRY,... more ABSTRACT
“ONCE AGAIN IT HAPPENS:” COLLECTIVE REMEMBRANCE AND IRISH IDENTITY IN CATHOLIC DERRY, NORTHERN IRELAND 1896-2009
MARGARET SHEA, B.A. UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
M.A. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
Directed by Professor David Glassberg
This dissertation explores Catholic nationalist residents of Derry, Northern Ireland’s expressions of memory over the course of the twentieth century. It contributes to histories of the city within the context of Northern Ireland and deepens understandings of memory and historical consciousness by charting memory work – discussions, writings, displays, commemorations, festivals, protests, religious celebrations, memorials, oral histories, personal accounts and community conversations that simultaneously invoke, draw on and construct the past. The uses of memory provide a map of changes as well as consistencies in Catholics’ and nationalists’ construction of their cultural, social and political identities.
Memory has often been credited with deepening divides between Derry’s Protestant unionist and Catholic nationalist communities and exacerbating civil and political conflict. The ways memory work has invented, constructed, justified, continued, or alternately mitigated or collapsed political, religious, economic, social and cultural divides are central to the larger history of the city. Understanding how collective remembrance has changed over time adds to historical interpretations of the conflict. At the same time, the ways key events in the history of the conflict affected memory work lend insight that further memory studies.
The focus here on the memory work of Catholic and nationalist Derry both de-centers Troubles-related memory work and offers new explanations for civil conflict that come out memorial expressions. A demographic majority since 1850, Catholic nationalists in the city constituted a political minority until 1973. As they sought recognition locally, worked to influence broader debates over political, social and economic issues, and endeavored to maintain their Irish identity, they drew on the past both to articulate and to formulate their experiences. By following the ways political, religious and community leaders, journalists and ordinary people participated in the construction of the past, it is possible to ascertain the way they understood the present at different moments in the city’s history. Through battles over Home Rule, responses to establishment of the Northern state, endeavors to obtain civil rights, efforts to maintain community cohesion through the Troubles and initiatives to heal privately and publicly in the post-conflict era, the concerns of Catholics and nationalists in Derry were expressed through their memory work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v
ABSTRACT ix
LIST OF TABLES xii
LIST OF FIGURES xiii
CHAPTER
1. SITUATING THE PAST IN CATHOLIC DERRY 1
2. FROM UNDER THE HEEL OF THE MINORITY: CHALLENGING PROTESTANT
MEMORY AND POWER IN PRE-BORDER DERRY 1896-1921 55
3. AGAINST THE WISHES OF THE INHABITANTS: MEMORY AS MOORING IN
‘CASTAWAY’ DERRY 1922-1945 134
4. TICKLING THE LION’S TAIL 1945-1966 211
5. CHANGE IN THE ‘TREMBLING DERRY AIR’ 1966-1968 287
6. NARRATING RUPTURE: THE TROUBLES, MEMORY AND URBAN RENEWAL
IN CATHOLIC DERRY 1969-1994 337
7. CLAMORING VOICES AND DENSE SILENCES: POST-CONFLICT MEMORY
WORK IN DERRY 1994 -2008 403
8. WHATEVER YOU SAY, SAY SOMETHING: REMEMBERING FOR THE FUTURE IN NORTHERN IRELAND 463
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………....512
LIST OF TABLES
Table Page
1.Housing Allocation by Ward....................................................................................297
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Talks by Margo Shea
Understanding the civil rights movement and the passions it aroused as an extension of Catholic c... more Understanding the civil rights movement and the passions it aroused as an extension of Catholic community life in Derry city, instead of a break from it, suggests that the events of the late 1960s have a long and diverse historic lineage. The motivation to call for political, social and economic change stemmed from something more than frustration, a newfound sense of entitlement, inspiration gleaned from television sets broadcasting global civil rights’ struggles or the agitation of young bucks of the baby boomer generation keen on upending the status quo.
From before Partition to the onset of the Troubles and beyond, Derry Catholics’ community identity – its sensibilities and aspirations – consistently sought nourishment from acts and expressions of memory. Memory animated and articulated a distinct and explicit Irish Catholic nationalism in the city in a variety of ways from a diverse set of Derry voices with striking continuity until and through the period of political conflict we know as the Troubles. This paper examines the ways in which memorial expressions articulated and created space for alternative visions of the present and the future in Derry City and suggests how understanding performances of memory as resistance invites a rethinking of the genesis of civil rights and the Troubles.
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Blog Posts / NCPH by Margo Shea
Massachusetts History Alliance, 2021
At sites of cultural and historical transmission, social media has ushered in a public process of... more At sites of cultural and historical transmission, social media has ushered in a public process of examination and reflection -- animated, intimate, often-anonymous voices contributing stories, venting frustration, seeking solidarity, urging change. In some cases, conversations about workplace practices and cultures have merged with broader discussions about justice and accountability, particularly at historic sites and museums. This process has raised important questions for public historians.
https://masshistoryalliance.org/the-elephant-in-your-instagram-feed-confessionals-call-outs-and-more/
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http://www.theflickeringlamp.org/2017/05/a-nice-public-historian-is-skilled.html
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Book by Margo Shea
https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268107932/derry-city/?fbclid=IwAR1KIA-fnfoDRLZvJzP1J_qf3UCXVSxgPIux5rjHQySSxCM8ZWjXyaC4t-E
20% off code: 14FF20
The book traces the social and cultural history of Catholic and nationalist Derry from the end of the 19th century to the 1960s through the lens of memory and thus explores how engagements with memory can help us better understand history.
When they were producing formal historical accounts & local chronicles, telling ghost stories and transmitting folklore, staging commemorative activities, performing engagements with the past, leaving traces on the cityscape, preserving material culture and more, Derry's residents charted contemporary experiences just as much as they reflected on historical events. This book investigates and contextualizes these dances with the past in order to illuminate little-known aspects of Derry in the years before Partition and during the decades that saw Catholics and nationalists negotiate the challenges of being seen as a "suspicious minority" in Northern Ireland even as they grappled with estrangement with those on the other side of the Irish border.
Articles & Abstracts by Margo Shea
Through its form, composition, location and crowd-sourced construction and interpretation, Temple structured, quite literally, an open-ended process of meaning-making.
KEY WORDS: interpretation, collaboration, community engagement, public history, multiple narratives, National Park Service
“ONCE AGAIN IT HAPPENS:” COLLECTIVE REMEMBRANCE AND IRISH IDENTITY IN CATHOLIC DERRY, NORTHERN IRELAND 1896-2009
MARGARET SHEA, B.A. UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
M.A. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
Directed by Professor David Glassberg
This dissertation explores Catholic nationalist residents of Derry, Northern Ireland’s expressions of memory over the course of the twentieth century. It contributes to histories of the city within the context of Northern Ireland and deepens understandings of memory and historical consciousness by charting memory work – discussions, writings, displays, commemorations, festivals, protests, religious celebrations, memorials, oral histories, personal accounts and community conversations that simultaneously invoke, draw on and construct the past. The uses of memory provide a map of changes as well as consistencies in Catholics’ and nationalists’ construction of their cultural, social and political identities.
Memory has often been credited with deepening divides between Derry’s Protestant unionist and Catholic nationalist communities and exacerbating civil and political conflict. The ways memory work has invented, constructed, justified, continued, or alternately mitigated or collapsed political, religious, economic, social and cultural divides are central to the larger history of the city. Understanding how collective remembrance has changed over time adds to historical interpretations of the conflict. At the same time, the ways key events in the history of the conflict affected memory work lend insight that further memory studies.
The focus here on the memory work of Catholic and nationalist Derry both de-centers Troubles-related memory work and offers new explanations for civil conflict that come out memorial expressions. A demographic majority since 1850, Catholic nationalists in the city constituted a political minority until 1973. As they sought recognition locally, worked to influence broader debates over political, social and economic issues, and endeavored to maintain their Irish identity, they drew on the past both to articulate and to formulate their experiences. By following the ways political, religious and community leaders, journalists and ordinary people participated in the construction of the past, it is possible to ascertain the way they understood the present at different moments in the city’s history. Through battles over Home Rule, responses to establishment of the Northern state, endeavors to obtain civil rights, efforts to maintain community cohesion through the Troubles and initiatives to heal privately and publicly in the post-conflict era, the concerns of Catholics and nationalists in Derry were expressed through their memory work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v
ABSTRACT ix
LIST OF TABLES xii
LIST OF FIGURES xiii
CHAPTER
1. SITUATING THE PAST IN CATHOLIC DERRY 1
2. FROM UNDER THE HEEL OF THE MINORITY: CHALLENGING PROTESTANT
MEMORY AND POWER IN PRE-BORDER DERRY 1896-1921 55
3. AGAINST THE WISHES OF THE INHABITANTS: MEMORY AS MOORING IN
‘CASTAWAY’ DERRY 1922-1945 134
4. TICKLING THE LION’S TAIL 1945-1966 211
5. CHANGE IN THE ‘TREMBLING DERRY AIR’ 1966-1968 287
6. NARRATING RUPTURE: THE TROUBLES, MEMORY AND URBAN RENEWAL
IN CATHOLIC DERRY 1969-1994 337
7. CLAMORING VOICES AND DENSE SILENCES: POST-CONFLICT MEMORY
WORK IN DERRY 1994 -2008 403
8. WHATEVER YOU SAY, SAY SOMETHING: REMEMBERING FOR THE FUTURE IN NORTHERN IRELAND 463
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………....512
LIST OF TABLES
Table Page
1.Housing Allocation by Ward....................................................................................297
Talks by Margo Shea
From before Partition to the onset of the Troubles and beyond, Derry Catholics’ community identity – its sensibilities and aspirations – consistently sought nourishment from acts and expressions of memory. Memory animated and articulated a distinct and explicit Irish Catholic nationalism in the city in a variety of ways from a diverse set of Derry voices with striking continuity until and through the period of political conflict we know as the Troubles. This paper examines the ways in which memorial expressions articulated and created space for alternative visions of the present and the future in Derry City and suggests how understanding performances of memory as resistance invites a rethinking of the genesis of civil rights and the Troubles.
Blog Posts / NCPH by Margo Shea
https://masshistoryalliance.org/the-elephant-in-your-instagram-feed-confessionals-call-outs-and-more/
https://undpress.nd.edu/9780268107932/derry-city/?fbclid=IwAR1KIA-fnfoDRLZvJzP1J_qf3UCXVSxgPIux5rjHQySSxCM8ZWjXyaC4t-E
20% off code: 14FF20
The book traces the social and cultural history of Catholic and nationalist Derry from the end of the 19th century to the 1960s through the lens of memory and thus explores how engagements with memory can help us better understand history.
When they were producing formal historical accounts & local chronicles, telling ghost stories and transmitting folklore, staging commemorative activities, performing engagements with the past, leaving traces on the cityscape, preserving material culture and more, Derry's residents charted contemporary experiences just as much as they reflected on historical events. This book investigates and contextualizes these dances with the past in order to illuminate little-known aspects of Derry in the years before Partition and during the decades that saw Catholics and nationalists negotiate the challenges of being seen as a "suspicious minority" in Northern Ireland even as they grappled with estrangement with those on the other side of the Irish border.
Through its form, composition, location and crowd-sourced construction and interpretation, Temple structured, quite literally, an open-ended process of meaning-making.
KEY WORDS: interpretation, collaboration, community engagement, public history, multiple narratives, National Park Service
“ONCE AGAIN IT HAPPENS:” COLLECTIVE REMEMBRANCE AND IRISH IDENTITY IN CATHOLIC DERRY, NORTHERN IRELAND 1896-2009
MARGARET SHEA, B.A. UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA
M.A. UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
Ph.D., UNIVERSITY OF MASSACHUSETTS AMHERST
Directed by Professor David Glassberg
This dissertation explores Catholic nationalist residents of Derry, Northern Ireland’s expressions of memory over the course of the twentieth century. It contributes to histories of the city within the context of Northern Ireland and deepens understandings of memory and historical consciousness by charting memory work – discussions, writings, displays, commemorations, festivals, protests, religious celebrations, memorials, oral histories, personal accounts and community conversations that simultaneously invoke, draw on and construct the past. The uses of memory provide a map of changes as well as consistencies in Catholics’ and nationalists’ construction of their cultural, social and political identities.
Memory has often been credited with deepening divides between Derry’s Protestant unionist and Catholic nationalist communities and exacerbating civil and political conflict. The ways memory work has invented, constructed, justified, continued, or alternately mitigated or collapsed political, religious, economic, social and cultural divides are central to the larger history of the city. Understanding how collective remembrance has changed over time adds to historical interpretations of the conflict. At the same time, the ways key events in the history of the conflict affected memory work lend insight that further memory studies.
The focus here on the memory work of Catholic and nationalist Derry both de-centers Troubles-related memory work and offers new explanations for civil conflict that come out memorial expressions. A demographic majority since 1850, Catholic nationalists in the city constituted a political minority until 1973. As they sought recognition locally, worked to influence broader debates over political, social and economic issues, and endeavored to maintain their Irish identity, they drew on the past both to articulate and to formulate their experiences. By following the ways political, religious and community leaders, journalists and ordinary people participated in the construction of the past, it is possible to ascertain the way they understood the present at different moments in the city’s history. Through battles over Home Rule, responses to establishment of the Northern state, endeavors to obtain civil rights, efforts to maintain community cohesion through the Troubles and initiatives to heal privately and publicly in the post-conflict era, the concerns of Catholics and nationalists in Derry were expressed through their memory work.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Page
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS v
ABSTRACT ix
LIST OF TABLES xii
LIST OF FIGURES xiii
CHAPTER
1. SITUATING THE PAST IN CATHOLIC DERRY 1
2. FROM UNDER THE HEEL OF THE MINORITY: CHALLENGING PROTESTANT
MEMORY AND POWER IN PRE-BORDER DERRY 1896-1921 55
3. AGAINST THE WISHES OF THE INHABITANTS: MEMORY AS MOORING IN
‘CASTAWAY’ DERRY 1922-1945 134
4. TICKLING THE LION’S TAIL 1945-1966 211
5. CHANGE IN THE ‘TREMBLING DERRY AIR’ 1966-1968 287
6. NARRATING RUPTURE: THE TROUBLES, MEMORY AND URBAN RENEWAL
IN CATHOLIC DERRY 1969-1994 337
7. CLAMORING VOICES AND DENSE SILENCES: POST-CONFLICT MEMORY
WORK IN DERRY 1994 -2008 403
8. WHATEVER YOU SAY, SAY SOMETHING: REMEMBERING FOR THE FUTURE IN NORTHERN IRELAND 463
BIBLIOGRAPHY…………………………………………………………………....512
LIST OF TABLES
Table Page
1.Housing Allocation by Ward....................................................................................297
From before Partition to the onset of the Troubles and beyond, Derry Catholics’ community identity – its sensibilities and aspirations – consistently sought nourishment from acts and expressions of memory. Memory animated and articulated a distinct and explicit Irish Catholic nationalism in the city in a variety of ways from a diverse set of Derry voices with striking continuity until and through the period of political conflict we know as the Troubles. This paper examines the ways in which memorial expressions articulated and created space for alternative visions of the present and the future in Derry City and suggests how understanding performances of memory as resistance invites a rethinking of the genesis of civil rights and the Troubles.
https://masshistoryalliance.org/the-elephant-in-your-instagram-feed-confessionals-call-outs-and-more/