CCS Director Emeritus and Senior Fellow Ron Eyerman recently published, “Making Memory: Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland” in Cultural Sociology.
Abstract: This is a study of how collective memory forms out of traumatic experience. It addresses questions about the formation of collective identity out of individual trauma, and, in turn, how individual and collective trauma intertwine. This process of memory formation is illustrated through the example of an incident that took place in Northern Ireland on 30 January 1972, an event that came to be known as Bloody Sunday. A lawyer representing the families of the victims once succinctly described it as a ‘mass murder perpetrated before the world’s media [… which] took place over a period of ten to twelve minutes, within a geographical space not much bigger than two football pitches’.