This book grew out of my PhD research on Bloody Sunday memory. Bloody Sunday seemed to me to represent a fascinating case study for investigating the relationship between official and non-official memory, the linkage between inscribed and embodied forms of remembrance, the connection between local and global contexts in shaping commemoration, how social groups struggle for symbolic power to define the meaning of the past, and how interpretations of the past undergo change over time.
Thus, this book provides an in-depth consideration of these different live issues in contemporary memory studies, across a wide variety of sites of memory (that is, memorials, marches, murals, museums, and the like) concerning the tragic events in Derry in 1972. Empirically, the book relies on interviews, participant observation, and archival data.
More broadly, I attempt to show how meaning-making in relation to the past is quite transient and disrupted as it responds to evolving socio-political settings, memory agents, and temporal shifts.