‘The violence is continuing’: scholars examine embodied memory of conflict
by Allan LEONARD
6 May 2026
The International Conflict Research Institute (INCORE) at Ulster University hosted a seminar to mark the exhibition “Aftershocks: The Sensory Afterlives of Violence”, on display at the university’s Belfast campus until 13 May. The seminar brought together Professor Roísín Higgins (Maynooth University), who organised the event and chaired proceedings, in conversation with Professor Élise Féron (Director of INCORE); Dr Lisa Fitzpatrick (Senior Lecturer in Drama at Ulster); and Dr Adrian Grant (Lecturer in History at Ulster). The discussion focused on their research and its relationship to embodied memory — how conflict and violence leave lasting traces in bodies, spaces, and collective consciousness.
The exhibition itself emerged from an AHRC-funded research network, “Towards a Socio-somatic History of the Troubles”, led by Higgins, Graham Dawson, and Cahal McLaughlin. Curated by James Craig of Newcastle University, it brings together drawing, film, sculpture, textiles, and installation by artists including Saud Baloch, Mairéad McClean, Killian O’Dochartaigh, Gail Ritchie, Louise Purbrick, and the Conflict Textiles collective, among others.
Higgins opened by reflecting on the spirit in which the project came together, describing its interest in “the stories, experiences, and sensations that get settled in our bodies — held there, sometimes beyond our reach, until a certain point”. She noted that the network events had consistently revealed a “shared vulnerability” in how participants engaged with the material, posing a challenge for academics: to connect with their own vulnerability while protecting themselves when engaging with difficult, embodied work.
Professor Élise Féron: Bodies, disappearance, and post-war processes
Féron opened with a challenge to conventional reconciliation research, which she said focuses almost entirely on dialogue, institutional agreements, and power-sharing while ignoring what happens to bodies during war. She described this omission as “completely flabbergasting”. Her own work centres on what she calls the “four Ds” — the dead, the damaged, the disappeared, and the displaced — and how these categories of bodily experience reshape post-war processes.
Centering bodies, she argued, shifts understanding in three important ways: it disrupts linear narratives of transition and closure; it collapses conventional distinctions between past, present, and future through intergenerational trauma and epigenetics; and it exposes the ethical contradictions at the heart of transitional justice frameworks — frameworks that assume repair, reconciliation, and normality are achievable.
Her case study was the Western Front of the First World War, a stretch of land still yielding up to one hundred bodies a year from farmers’ fields and construction sites. “Families are still searching,” she said. “A Belgian highway had to stop construction because they were discovering too many bodies.” The violence, she argued, has not ended: “Somebody who has disappeared and whose body hasn’t been found today — the violence is continuing. It’s not like it happened 20 or 40 years ago.” She called for multidisciplinary collaboration between medical sciences, social sciences, and the arts to address these issues, noting that art has a particular role in representing absence — something words alone often cannot do.
Dr Adrian Grant: Architecture, control, and embodied memory in Belfast
Grant presented research on how the built environment was used as a tool of conflict management in Belfast and Derry/Londonderry, and how its afterlife continues to shape how people move through the city today. Working with Dr David Coyles and Professor Brandon Hamber, he examined how security-informed design — the deliberate modification of streets, layouts, and infrastructure — was used to “control people’s bodies” during the Troubles.
His inner east Belfast case study showed how Victorian terraced streets, once permeable and open, were redeveloped in the late 1970s and early 1980s into networks of cul-de-sacs and courtyards. The design was intentional: residents could identify and disorient outsiders through their body language, while also defending the area more easily. Archival research confirmed army and police involvement in planning meetings. However, Grant was careful to note the “mundane aspect” — this design trend was simultaneously fashionable across the UK as a way of improving pedestrian safety. The security goals were met through a recognised architectural movement, making the interventions less visible.
The long-term legacy is striking. Grant described meeting a woman who had lived in the area her entire life but became immediately disoriented when venturing beyond her immediate three or four streets. In north Belfast, a traffic island at Ligoniel acts as an unrecognised interface barrier with roots going back to the 1920s. In the loyalist Suffolk estate in west Belfast, residents described a “siege mentality”, with some avoiding public transport altogether because the bus route runs down the Falls Road. “Movement is conditioned by personal experience of what happened during the conflict,” Grant said, “and by stories of what happened to others.”
Dr Lisa Fitzpatrick: Theatre, visibility, and the inexpressible
Fitzpatrick’s research examines how theatre can represent forms of violence — particularly gender-based violence — that resist straightforward expression. Her interest was triggered by a 2013 Theatre of Witness production in Derry/Londonderry, I Once Knew a Girl, in which a former IRA combatant spoke publicly about sexual violence at the hands of her commanding officer. “I had never heard anybody in Northern Ireland talk about this kind of violence,” she said, “even though everything we know about conflict tells us these forms of violence against women are more common in conflict zones.”
Drawing on theorist Peggy Phelan, Fitzpatrick questioned the assumption that visibility equals power. Visibility can be dangerous, she argued; it can reveal survival strategies that operate best out of sight, or impose normative structures on lives and experiences that are better left unmarked. Theatre, she suggested, offers a space to explore what theorists like Judith Butler and Sara Ahmed call “inexpressible” experiences — those that can be intuited but not easily spoken.
Her key example was The Shedding of Skin, a Kabosh Theatre Company production from 2020–21, which explored sexual violence across the 20th and 21st centuries. The play rejected realism in favour of classical tragedy: supernatural Furies outside human time avenge the women. A rhythmic wind-turbine soundscape evoked heartbeat and threat without depicting violence directly. Most strikingly, ordinary gestures of affection were “flipped” to create an embodied sense of danger. In one scene, an actor playing a male RUC officer stands behind his wife and places his arm across her throat — a gesture that in another context might be loving, but which the audience reads as profoundly threatening. “The threat doesn’t have to be physically represented,” Fitzpatrick said. “What you are often looking for is the evocation of danger, which the audience experiences in their own body.”
Questions and Discussion
The discussion that followed was lively and at times challenging, drawing in audience members with direct experience of the conflict.
A former republican prisoner raised concerns about dominant narratives. He noted that between 7,500 and 8,000 women had been imprisoned for opposing the British state during the conflict, and questioned whether the lens applied by the panellists risked marginalising other perspectives. He highlighted the hunger strike as “the body’s ultimate statement”, and asked whether the arts risked becoming an “influencer” consistently pointing in one direction. The panellists acknowledged the concern, with Kabosh creative director Paula McFetridge noting that The Shedding of Skin had involved ex-combatants, veterans, and policing and prison service personnel in a significant collaborative process. The presentations, the organisers suggested, had begun “not with politics, but with the impact of politics on bodies”.
An audience member asked whether art and research could respond to events that were still ongoing — legacy issues, or violence against women still appearing in headlines. Fitzpatrick replied that art is “most powerful when it responds to something beyond an immediate set of circumstances”, carrying multiple meanings that allow different people to engage with it in different ways. Grant added that academics dealing with living memory have a “responsibility to explore and detail with those people what the purpose of our research is”, moving away from the idea that research is justified by academic curiosity alone.
This author remarked on a distinction between photojournalism as descriptive and art using photography as reflective, drawing a parallel with journalistic ethics. I cited photojournalist Liam McBurney, who had worked closely with families of the disappeared in Northern Ireland, building trust over time to tell more complete and truthful stories — in contrast to the “parachute journalist” who documents and leaves.
Another audience member offered an anecdote that Gabriel García Márquez’s brother had once said of his sibling’s work: “Magic realism doesn’t exist. Everything in Gao’s work is real.” The comment prompted reflection on the varying cultural meanings of “real,” and on how different aesthetics — realism, magical realism, the supernatural — serve different communities’ needs.
An exchange about 1970s planning decisions prompted Grant to clarify his position. One attendee, recalling community work at the time, suggested the military’s involvement in planning meetings was more about the challenges the new street layouts posed to security forces than an opportunity to control communities. Grant acknowledged this, but pointed to evidence of opportunism — road movements, for example — and maintained that “regardless of what the military or security forces’ intention was, the after-effects remain the same”.
Féron closed by describing her co-edited Journal of Disappearance Studies, which publishes academic research alongside art and the testimonies of family members, in an effort to foreground lived experience and avoid what she called the academic “hijacking” of topics. Higgins drew proceedings to a close by emphasising the importance of listening: “All of the work that people have talked about today is about learning to listen as openly as possible — and sometimes the response in the room is not something you can account for, because everybody brings their own experience. It all matters.”