Building, Bolstering and Bridging Boundaries: Teenagers’ Negotiations of Interface Areas in Belfast

Abstract

This article examines how teenagers recount narratives that maintain, reinforce and at times challenge sectarian boundaries in interface areas. The research draws on focus-group interviews with eighty 14–15-year-old teenagers from four schools located in North Belfast, an area characterised by segregation on the basis of religion and ethnic identity. The Catholic and Protestant areas in which the teenagers live are in some cases marked by physical boundaries such as peace walls and in other cases by symbolic boundaries that may appear invisible to those without local knowledge. Within such a highly contested space, it is unsurprising that teenagers produce narratives concerning in-group and out-group formations. However, they also produce messier constructions of space reflecting contradictory relationships to the surrounding environment. The study challenges simplistic accounts of sectarian attitudes as pre-determined and static. As active agents, teenagers are not empty vessels into which existing adult prejudices are poured. Rather they may accept, resist and transform the dominant messages they receive throughout their transition from childhood to adulthood.

Keywords:

• Ethnicity
• Religion
• Sectarianism
• Teenagers
• Northern Ireland

Acknowledgements

I am very grateful for the extremely helpful comments of two JEMS referees.

Notes

1. While overall, 80 pupils aged 14–15 years of age participated in the research, this number varied according to school attendance on the days the research was carried out. The pupils attended schools segregated on the basis of religion. Four schools participated in the research: a Catholic boys’ school, a Catholic girls’ school, a Protestant boys’ school and a Protestant mixed school (but only girls were interviewed in this school).

2. The Holy Cross dispute took place over an eleven-week period in 2001 and involved residents from a loyalist area in North Belfast picketing children and their parents at a local Catholic primary school. Incidents of verbal abuse and violence occurred at the pickets and there was widespread associated disorder throughout North Belfast for the duration of the dispute.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Madeleine Leonard

Madeleine Leonard is Professor of Sociology at Queen's University Belfast