Our students and their instructor, Dr. Sally Hunter, safely arrived in Belfast, Northern Ireland yesterday! Belfast is a beautiful, vibrant city, divided into four quarters. For the Belfast portion of this summer course, students will stay in “Queens Quarter,” and their classes will be held at the gorgeous, historic Queens University!
In this experience, our students will be studying ways in which children and families experienced a period of political conflict known as The Troubles (a conflict between the Protestants/ Unionists and the Catholics/ Loyalists). The primary objective for the course will be for students to begin to understand the influence of context on a young person’s development.
In the particular case of The Troubles, students will explore how children and youth experienced growing up in a society in which there was a large “out-group” with whom they were not supposed to associate. Students will seek to answer the questions:
- How did children make meaning of the reality that there were people who outwardly looked just like them, but with whom they were prohibited from associating?
- At what age did children notice that Protestants and Catholics attended separate schools and lived in separate areas of the city?
- And what happened in 1998, when, with the Good Friday Agreement, the conflict “officially” ended? How did relations between the two groups change?