Border Heritage
The Irish Humanities Alliance (IHA), in collaboration with Ulster University, are pleased to announce a multi-disciplinary conference on the theme of border heritages. The conference will take place on 24-25 October 2019. What do we mean when we talk about borders? In the context of Brexit and the approaching centenary of partition, the political border on the island comes to mind, but the term is ultimately expansive and allows us to consider multiple aspects of how we live and interact with our neighbours and our landscape.
This event will offer opportunities to build links for collaboration between researchers, and organisations working in this area and will allow for an expansive discussion on the theme of border heritages from a multi-disciplinary perspective. The conference theme allows for a wide-ranging exploration of how we can understand division and integration through the prism of heritage.
The conference will take place on the Magee Campus of Ulster University, which is only a few miles from the border with Donegal.
Mads Daugbjerg and Bryonie Reid will each deliver a keynote lecture. The full programme is available here To register go to Eventbrite
Mads Daugbjerg is associate professor and Head of Department at Aarhus University’s Department of Anthropology. His primary research concerns the intersections of cultural and natural heritage, experiential tourism and (national and transnational) identity and memory practices, with a particular focus on historical battlegrounds and the commemoration practices around them. He has lectured and published widely on these subjects, including in his monograph Borders of Belonging: Experiencing History, War and Nation at a Danish Heritage Site (Berghahn Books, 2014), and as co-editor of a number of special issues of journals such as History and Anthropology, The International Journal of Heritage Studies, and Critical Military Studies. Recently, he was part of the EU-financed Horizon 2020 project Critical Heritages (CoHERE): performing and representing identities in Europe, resulting, among other things, in a freshly published volume from Routledge (2019) entitled Dimensions of Heritage and Memory: Multiple Europes and the Politics of Crisis (co-edited with Chris Whitehead, Susannah Eckersley and Gönül Bozoğlu).
Bryonie Reid is a writer and artist whose work explores identity and belonging in relation to place. She works independently and as a member of Quarto (link) in the field of community engagement with place and the past. She carried out oral history research with border dwellers between 2005 and 2008 and co-authored Partitioned Lives: the Irish Borderlands with Catherine Nash and Brian Graham. Artwork arising from this research, '(re)writing', was exhibited in The Dock in Carrick-on-Shannon in 2012. Her recent publications include ‘The Elephant in the Room: Colonialism and Postcolonialism in Northern Ireland’ in Historical Geography (2014) and ‘Trying Identities: Roger Casement and Erskine Childers’ in The Irish Review (2017). Collaborative artwork 'Holding Together', looking at memory, family histories and archives, will be shown in the Public Records Office in Belfast in December 2019.