The project team convened two panels on ‘Apologies and the Past’ at this year’s Socio-Legal Studies Association conference at Bristol University.
In the first, Dr Lauren Dempster presented on ‘Apology, Acknowledgement and the ‘Disappeared’ of Northern Ireland.’ Lauren was joined on the panel by QUB colleague Dr Kevin Hearty, who presented his paper: ‘Moral emotions, dealing with the past and recalibrating the relationship between victim and victimiser,’ and by Dr Sarah Sargent of the University of Buckingham who gave a paper entitled, ‘Sorry Not Sorry: The Indian Child Welfare Act at 40 and the Plight of Indigenous Children in the US.’ A blog post based on Lauren’s paper can be found on the SlSA website.
In the second of the two panels, Prof Anne-Marie McAlinden, Prof Kieran McEvoy and Dr Anna Bryson gave papers incorporating some of the project’s preliminary findings. Anne-Marie presented on ‘Apologies and Institutional Child Abuse in Ireland.’ Kieran’s paper – ‘Apologies, Acknowledgement and the National Imagination’ – focused on apologies and the Northern Ireland conflict. In the final paper of the panel, Anna incorporated data collected from the team’s focus groups with the general public into her paper, ‘Hearing, Seeing, Believing: Public Perceptions of Apologies for Past Harms in Ireland.’