Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, comparative research, and over 110 hours of face-to-face interviews with a diverse range of political, academic, civil society, and community actors across Northern Ireland, A Troubled Sleep: Risk and resilience in Contemporary Norther Ireland revisits one fo the world's most deeply divided societies to analyze Northern Ireland's current vulnerabilities, and points of resilience, as an allegedly "post-conflict" society. With a forward by Senator George Mitchell, A Troubled Sleep presents deep insight into what happens when identity politics prevail over democracy, when a paralysis in governance leads to a political vacuum for extremist voices to exploit, when de facto social segregation becomes normalized, when acclimatization to violence becomes a generational legacy, and when questions of who we are become secondary to who we are not.
Join us on Tuesday, Nov. 16, 12:00-1:30 p.m. EST (5:00-6:30 p.m. Northern Ireland/Ireland/UK)
This event is being recorded and may be posted to our YouTube channel. If you choose to participate in discussion, you are presumed to consent to the use of your comments and potentially your image in these recordings. If you do not wish to be recorded, please contact Kelly Whitaker (whitaker.285@osu.edu).
If you require an accommodation such as live captioning or interpretation to participate in this event, please contact Kyle McCray (mccray.44@osu.edu). Requests made two weeks before the event will generally allow us to provide seamless access, but the university will make every effort to meet requests made after this date.
Speaker
Dr. James Waller is the Cohen Professor of Holocaust and Genocide Studies, and chair of that same department, at Keene State College (NH-US). In addition, he serves as Director of Academic Programs for the Auschwitz Institute for the Prevention of Genocide and Mass Atrocities, an international NGO devoted to atrocity prevention. He is the author of six books, most notably his award-winning Becoming Evil: How Ordinary People Commit Genocide and Mass Killing (Oxford University Press, 2nd ed., 2007), Confronting Evil: Engaging Our Responsibility to Prevent Genocide (Oxford University Press, 2016), and A Troubled Sleep: Risk and Resilience in Contemporary Northern Ireland (Oxford University Press, 2021). Waller has held numerous visiting professorships, most recently as an honorary visiting research professor at in the George J. Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Justice and Security at Queen’s University in Belfast, Northern Ireland (2017). In 2017, he was the inaugural recipient of the Engaged Scholarship Prize from the International Association of Genocide Scholars in recognition of his exemplary engagement in advancing genocide awareness and prevention.
Event Host
Event Host
This event is hosted by The Recovering from Violence research cluster, an initiative of the Mershon Center for International Security Studies at The Ohio State University. The cluster seeks to contribute to research and practice geared toward addressing genocide, crimes against humanity, widespread human rights violations, and other forms of collective violence. The cluster engages with conflict stabilization, transitional justice, human rights, development, collective memory, displacement, psychosocial wellbeing, peacebuilding, and reconciliation—guided by the firm belief that the impacts of violence are multigenerational and interconnected. Research is conducted in collaboration with local stakeholders in communities affected by violence and, as such, continually assess research ethics and best practices for decolonizing scholarship.
