Séminaire "Construction des idéologies" : "Negotiating Sectarianism in Northern Ireland"

Construction des idéologies - Séminaire interdisciplinaire

Séance 1 - « Negotiating Sectarianism in Northern Ireland »

Laboratoires CREA (EA 370) et IDEA (EA 2338)
14 octobre 2022, 17h-19h, CLSH (Nancy) et par Teams
 

• Introduction : Stéphane Guy (IDEA, Université de Lorraine)

• Jan Carson
  "The Right to Bear Arts"

In this short, illustrated talk, Belfast based writer and community arts facilitator, Jan Carson will talk about her two decades of community arts engagement in Belfast. She’ll discuss the benefits and difficulties of using the arts as a means of bringing people together within a divided post-conflict society and give practical examples of how the community arts sector has helped to heal and educate in the wake of the Good Friday Agreement.

• Hélène Alfaro-Hamayon (LISAA, Université Gustave Eiffel)
  "Conflict-Transformation and the Arts in Northern Ireland"

Once marginalized and underfunded, community arts initiatives gradually enjoyed greater recognition from the mid-1990s onwards as a couple of community arts projects addressing contentious issues proved highly successful.
In the wake of the Good Friday Agreement, the setting-up of the Department of Culture, Arts and Leisure (DCAL) was evidence that policy-makers were keener to open up the arts and embrace creative approaches championing greater participation in the arts. In line with the recommendations made by peace-building practitioners, more money was allocated to participatory arts projects offering participants a safe space where they could tackle sensitive issues.
This talk will look at a number of programmes and initiatives that have been developed in Northern Ireland over the past 15 years and explore how they sought to address the legacy of the past and help further constructive change.


Jan Carson is a writer and community arts facilitator based in Belfast. She specialises in engagement with older people. She has published three novels, two micro-fiction collections, and two short story collections. Her novel The Fire Starters won the EU Prize for Literature for Ireland 2019. Jan also won the Harper’s Bazaar Short Story Competition (2016) and was shortlisted for the BBC National Short Story Award (2020) and An Post Irish Short Story of the Year (2021). Her work has been translated into multiple languages. Jan’s latest novel, The Raptures was published by Doubleday in early 2022.

Hélène Alfaro-Hamayon is a senior lecturer at Gustave Eiffel University as well as a member of the SOFEIR (the French Society of Irish Studies) and EFACIS (The European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies). Her research focuses on Northern Ireland and more specifically Belfast in relation to community arts, cultural policy-making, peacebuilding and conflict-transformation. Her publications focus on participatory and collaborative art practices in a post-conflict context, grassroots involvement, the role of the arts in society and how artists engage with communities. Recently, she has more specifically examined the growth of community arts projects in PUL estates and the challenges faced by the unionist community in a post-Brexit context.