Coming to London has been a surprising culture shock.

When I’m living in Northern Ireland, everything seems pretty normal. I mean, I know on a cognitive level that some things are weird, but that’s just how it is. That’s how life is and I’m not going to change it in the three months that I’m there so it doesn’t affect it and I just continue with life. But, coming to London has been a crazy.

I knew as Josh and I were flying out that it would feel different, but I didn’t think about it too much. But then we landed and there were Union Jacks everywhere. And suddenly I found myself explaining that I live next to a peace wall. Then I’m trying to explain why calling the city “Derry” or “Londonderry” is political and contentious. And I’m casually mentioning the bombs in Derry/Londonderry and on the Antrim Road. And I’m talking about the giant murals of men in ski masks holding machine guns. And I’m realizing I don’t have to amend the statement “republican” to “American Republican.” And I’m explaining the Dissident Republicans. And I’m talking about how cool it is that the Free Derry Museum has clothes with gun shots and blood stains. I’m laughing about how you don’t have to worry about “normal” crime in Belfast, just teenagers throwing rocks or worse over the wall. And I find myself thinking about how I was told by a Northern Irish classmate that basically everyone in Northern Ireland can make a bomb, or at least a petrol bomb. I start explaining how British, Irish, Israeli, and Palestinian flags are all really political.

And suddenly I find myself shocked. Belfast and London, though technically under the same government, are completely different worlds. I don’t need to pay attention to the sound of fireworks to make sure they are only fireworks, not gun shots. I don’t need to be concerned with coming off as sectarian when I’m not. I realize why my friends and parents worry about me.

When I’m in Belfast I don’t feel like I’m tense, or like I’m watching my back. I mean it all sounds really bad and very scary. And know what, sometimes it is. Some days I can’t handle seeing some of the murals. Some days I worry when I hear about near by bombs. But most the time I am fine. Most the time I just note my surroundings and continue on my way. I make sure to avoid Northern Irish politics or religion when I’m outside of class. I worry that my claddagh ring will say something to someone other than relationship status. But, it doesn’t seem bad. It feels normal.

Honestly, living there, it’s not that bad. Compared to what it has the potential to spiral into if something goes wrong, compared to what it was 10 years ago, it’s going really well. But when you are outside of it, it doesn’t look that way. It looks really bad, and dangerous, and scary.

I guess I’m saying that compared to life in a peaceful country Northern Ireland looks really bad, but it’s just life as usual and it’s getting better.

Honestly, I’m still sitting here feeling like my mind is blown. I know I’ve called Northern Ireland a post conflict society before, but I never really had the moment of understanding that some of the situations I’m now finding normal really aren’t. It makes me really proud of how far the country has come. It gives me a new awareness of how precarious the whole socio-political situation is. And it gives me a more serious drive to work for more change in Northern Ireland.

I have hope that within my life time Northern Ireland will stop feeling like a post conflict society, and just feel like a normal society.

Written on 6 November 2011 by Hannah Kurtz ’13

 This past week, I headed out to one of my community organization’s centers for the first time. That was an adventure in and of itself, since I had absolutely no clue where I was going. One of the staff members ended up picking me up, because I was given bad directions and ended up somewhere that I really couldn’t walk to the center.

In the car though, I was told about community I would be in. It’s very Protestant Loyalist. Because of that at center you don’t really talk about religion. But, the center is also the one that produced really neat fliers about not judging people based on their religion- so obviously they’ve had lots of lessons on not judging people, but somehow there still isn’t a enough of a culture shift amongst the young people to make religion not taboo.

Later in that evening, there was supposed project with the young people, but only one showed up. She complained that the projects are always the same, and that they aren’t what the young people want to do. One of her complaints was that they have good relations shoved down their throats all the time, and that she, at the very least, was sick of it.

That conversation showed me that good relations work doesn’t seem practical to the young people in that community. They get taught by school and organizations all the time that they shouldn’t stereotype, but they go home and their families stereotype, and they do not have all that much interaction with Catholics or Nationalists, so it doesn’t mean all that much to them. This points me to the legitimacy of Contact Theory, the idea that if there is regulated contact between conflicting groups they will begin to humanize each other. I think this community shows how necessary it is for groups to not just get lectured about how they need to have good relations, but they really do need to interact, otherwise there is no point to the lecture.

by Hannah Kurtz

At a workshop on good relations that I was helping to facilitate, we talked about Northern Ireland’s anti-discrimination laws. The introduction to this was an activity called “Not Up My Street.” The premise is that there are going to be new people moving into your neighborhood and you get to chose which of the families/people get to move in. You are given very little information, for example a Hospital Doctor, a Member of the Orange Order, a Sinn Fein Counselor, a Gay Nurse, an Unemployed Youth, a Community Worker, etc. You personally, and then in small groups, have to rank the people in order of who you would most like to who you would least like to live in your neighborhood. Basically, you are supposed to talk about your assumptions about the person because of their job or whatever information you are given.

After that, everyone is given more information about each person, including their name and age. For example, you learn that Doctor you find out that he is Pakistani, and his wife wears a Niqab, and the gay nurse is a female who’s sexuality has been reject by her family, and the unemployed youth wants to move into the community so that he can get local jobs as a plumber. At this point you are asked to rank the potential neighbors again. This is to see if any of your initial reactions prove false and to see if any other perceptions or issues come up.

It was interesting listening to the teenagers, because though sometimes it was really hard to get out why they thought something, other times they were very upfront with what they thought. The whole group didn’t want a member of a specific association living in their neighborhood, even after hearing that he was disenchanted with it and not really participating in it anymore, just because he was associated with the association And the more male dominate groups admitted to not liking the gay nurse when they assumed it was a male, but as soon as they discovered it was a woman they did not care. They were very fun, and very willing to admit that they have biases and stereotypes, which was the goal of exercise; it’s a good step towards good relations.

by Hannah Kurtz

Prof. Lee Smithey’s new book, Unionists, Loyalists, and Conflict Transformation in Northern Ireland, is now available from Oxford University Press. Lee is a faculty advisor for the Northern Ireland Semester and conducts much of his research in the region.

Drawing on almost twenty years of studying and traveling to Northern Ireland, including sustained periods of intensive fieldwork, Smithey focuses on the importance of collective identity change that is central to conflict transformation. He argues that it is important for ethnopolitical division to be addressed from within ideologically committed quarters of divided societies. In this case, he finds that many unionists and loyalists are modifying symbolic and often ritualistic expressions of collective identity that have often been considered divisive, such as parades, bonfires, and murals, and are making them less polarizing. The development and modification of these activities provide opportunities for the incremental reframing of fundamental ethnopolitical ideas and narratives. If you are interested in studying peace processes from grassroots psychocultural angles, this book might appeal to you.

This past Thursday, we (Hannah and Josh) travelled to Londonderry/Derry for a residential with our community placement organization, the Bytes project. At this, Bytes staff did some Forum Theatre exercises.  Forum Theatre is a kind of Community Theatre, where theatre exercises are used to create a short play that presents a problem but no solutions.  The play is performed twice in a row, the first time straight, the second time any member of the audience can stop the play and replace one of the characters to try out a solution to the problem presented.  Thursday night we stayed in the City Hotel, which is right next to the City of Culture offices.  For those of you who don’t know, the City of Culture offices were bombed on Wednesday.  (Insert joke about our safety, but don’t tell our parents.)  The bomb only busted a few windows, and luckily no one was injured.