Description
2023 has seen global attention drawn to Northern Ireland on the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement and more modest recognition, largely contained to the Northern Irish veteran community, of the 50th anniversary of women joining the Ulster Defence Regiment as ‘Greenfinches’. This moment of memorialisation has enabled a revisiting of servicewomen’s forgotten stories but what is their critical potential in shaping a feminist retelling of the conflict and how does the critical researcher negotiate this? This conversational-style article explores what it means to pursue a collaborative project using the archives of the Ulster Defence Regiment to produce a digital exhibit marking this moment. Co-authored with the archives’ Heritage Officer, this paper asks what it means to be critical in the context of the sectarian legacies of the Northern Ireland conflict through exploring the boundary between marking and memorialising this anniversary. We explore the different perspectives of collaborators on this project, how our critical judgement was affected by our perceived association with a particular ‘side’ - our own veteran/local/Brit status – and what this means for our participants. As Critical Military Studies debates its relationship with and proximity to the military, this paper exposes the very real everyday challenges of interacting with the veteran community in critical research and what it means for feminist retellings of conflict.
