Louise Gerbier
My PhD on the Northern Irish conflict and the subsequent widening of its scope to counterinsurgency policies and practices led me to interview torture survivors, former detainees – not all having had the right to a (fair) trial – as well as victims and survivors of police brutality and terrorism. Indeed, I was interested in the rawness of their experience – my qualitative methodology was precisely looking for situated accounts of embodied experiences of violence, and how they were perceived and recalled both individually and collectively. I hoped that conducting a new series of semi-structured interviews in post-conflict Northern Ireland would offer different insights into the interplay of subjectivities that builds communities, while deepening our understanding of sensory experiences of political violence.
Each interviewee came to our discussion with a developed sense of self and a clear idea of the labels they wanted me to use to describe them: decades of mediatisation and community-work had made seasoned communicators of a lot of them. More often than not, though, they had some doubts on whether they’d be telling me all or part of their story.
Their distrust was informed by collective experience: not only were they recounting criminalised activities, they were also aware of the dangers posed by my potential relation to power. Indeed, both the Boston College tape scandal, in which interview recordings had been used in the court of law, and the ongoing Legacy Act debates, which considered changing amnesty policies for individuals coming forward with Troubles-related stories, threatened the very possibility of memory work and ethical research. What made my PhD relevant in social sciences rooms where research methods, elections or identity politics were discussed also made the work at its core more difficult.
Beyond that tension of public and private, personal and collective, I was expecting the sensitive matters at the heart of the interviews to challenge the “neutrality” I had been trained to strive for, wondering what room would be left for empathy in a semi-structured interview with a recorder set on the table.
That was without taking into account who I was, and how I came across. A 5’2” woman, with an accent aiming for Received Pronunciation but often lost in a French melody, I am severely visually impaired and often use a white cane to move about. Though my disability can become “invisible” if I sit down and don’t have to read something in front of my interlocutor, I was thus visibly disabled, at the very least when I arrived for a discussion or followed my interviewee around the neighbourhood for a walking interview. I could not see the bullet holes of a shoot-out from afar, so Martin* took me directly to the wall he was describing; I got lost in the community centre where we were supposed to meet, so Seamus* came and fetched me; Patrick’s* wife enquired about my health after I had to reschedule an interview.
I learned quickly that what is off the record matters greatly, and that my body, just like my interviewees’, escaped the record – I stumbled as Tom* guided me through a cemetery and he caught my arm; John* hugged me when he realised I could not see him properly, and asked many questions in the hushed tones of a (self-declared) worried grandfather.
The distance I had been told was expected of the researcher disappeared beneath the warmth of strangers offering their arms to guide me, or the lilt of their accent describing their hometown, which I would only discover through their eyes, their voices. The blur and sometimes chaos of my senses was overridden by their readiness to lend their own senses. While Martin’s voice shook, my hands touched the cold stones as I struggled to imagine the bullets that had wrecked the stone, having never even heard a gunshot. The walking interview with Tom* took on unexpected gravitas as he stopped pointing from afar and decided to bring me to each grave, urging me to get closer, as I tried to picture the gunbattle he was describing, adding another layer to his vivid visual storytelling.
Senses were coming to the fore, and I had not even started writing about them.
More strikingly perhaps, Liam* decided to call me back after his first interview, having realised during our off-the-record conversation that I knew what spending weeks in the hospital felt like. He wanted to tell me about his own hospital visits after having undergone torture, and just like Sammy*, who’d experienced a severe beating as a teenager, would later, he dived into the description of his pain and its intertwining with his political perspective like he had not before. I’ve never been beaten, but I do know how physical pain can reorganise every instant of a life and strip you down, exposing your self as it does your bare body.
Without it being ever planned, sometimes before the interview had even begun, the imbalance of vulnerability seemed thus partly taken care of: I might receive my interviewees’ raw grief, potent trauma and deep-rooted anger ; I might get a glimpse of who they had been, at sixteen or forty-two, in a prison cell or facing a police baton – I might even receive what I was looking for, their situated perspective on their engagement in violent political activity… but they had seen my raw vulnerability first. They had been given evidence that I was putting myself in a complex physical situation – meeting with unknown men in areas I’d never been, their faces forever a blur, just like the pavement I would have to navigate – in order to listen to their stories. That counted for something. My physiological experience, and my openness in discussing it, served as grounds for belief that they could work with me.
That’s why the talks and the walks we shared have always been multifaceted in my eyes: my blurry apprehension of noisy, colourful 21st c. Belfast, just like its anchoring in the warmth of the cups of teas each interviewee has always insisted to offer me, is interwoven with senses of the past – the spectrum of state and paramilitary abuse brought to life by shaking hands and tearful eyes has always made me feel like decades of political violence were in the room with us. From the re-enactment of torture, as brutal as it always is, to the tears of grief, as fresh as the day a brother died, my interviewees opened the door to what McDonald calls an “archive of sensation”. Beyond the years, I could sense the way violence had felt, still felt, for them; in that, we shared, for a moment, a community of senses.
My own private, intimate relationship with my body and the way it moved around the world has always been a public matter, like it is the case for most disabled people, something the disabled poet and academic Molly McCully Brown conveys brilliantly in her collection Places I’ve Taken My Body (2021). Strangers and colleagues alike have never stopped themselves from commenting on my disability. Regardless, disability, constructed politically, was not something I had had in mind when presenting my PhD project. When I began researching terrorism, civil conflict and carcerality before I wrote my first masters’ dissertation, which ended up discussing the socio-political experience of the 1981 hunger strike through a study of its bodily and sensory reality, I did know that I wanted to foreground the senses, as I was myself deeply aware of how “the personal is political”. Regardless, my positionality within academia came with too many constraints, and the shadows of ableism were too stark for me to do anything but hide my disability up until it was no longer possible, refusing to acknowledge it in cover letters and applications… That these constraints meant that white, abled men were most likely to access both fieldwork and funding – as well as networking events, nonchalant coffee breaks in inaccessible rooms and suggestions made in fine print documents – was a fact of life in the ivory tower in which I had the privilege to work, still, as a white woman from an educated, upper-middle class background.
The reworking of boundaries described above contributed to transform my experience of research and, I wager, my interviewees’ experience of it as well; the reciprocity of our vulnerabilities challenged the dominant position a researcher is too often in when conducting interviews. My marginalised positionality was enough to put a foot inside the door, and to stay there to listen. Concurrently, this exchange of perspectives and the trade of very intimate, embodied knowledge contributed to demonstrate how critical approaches of social sciences, and criminology in particular, can benefit from the co-construction of knowledge, questioning not only the monopoly of legal and historical interpretation, but its anchoring in an extremely narrow array of sensory perspectives as well.
It has been the greatest learning experience of my first years as a researcher, then, to discover that my own experience was facilitating what I wanted my research to do: acknowledging marginality, giving a voice to embodied political anger and despair, interrogating the stories we tell about ourselves, as private individuals and as citizens. Stripping myself of what contributes to the power asymmetry of social sciences, or at the very least attempting to do so, has led me to have vivid, hopeful, emotional discussions, often with people I had not much in common with, always fuelling a shared belief that political identities and criminological labels cannot be understood properly without our senses.
References
Black, Lynsey, Louise Brangan and Deirdre Healy. Histories of Punishment and Social Control in Ireland. Leeds: Emerald Publishing Limited, 2022.
Kooistra, Alison. “Speaking into Sight: Articulating the Body Personal with the Body Politic”, vis-à-vis: Explorations in Anthropology, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1-17.
McDonald, Dave. “Sensory afterlives of child institutionalisation: Oral history, carcerality and social memory”, Incarceration, vol.6, 2025, pp. 1-17.
McCully Brown, Molly. Places I’ve Taken My Body. London: Faber and Faber, 2021.
O’Donnell, Ruan. “Oral History and the Politics of the Troubles: The Boston College Tapes.” History Ireland, vol. 20, no. 2, 2012, pp. 10–13.
