Cathrin Ruppe

MIGRATION, MEMORY, AND BELONGING

Memory plays an important role in how people understand their families, communities, and relationships to places they may know through both personal experience and inherited narratives. These connections are not transmitted as a single, coherent cultural inheritance. They develop through stories and silences, everyday routines, family relationships, objects, music, religion, visits, and other practices that may acquire different meanings over time.

My research focuses on the relationship between migration, intergenerational memory, and identity, particularly among the descendants of migrants. I am interested in how individuals encounter and interpret a family background across different areas of life: within the home, at school, among friends, in community and cultural spaces, and through wider social and political discourses. Rather than treating identity as something fixed that is either preserved or lost, I examine how identifications and feelings of belonging are negotiated in particular situations and at different stages of life.

My current research explores these questions through the experiences of second-generation Irish people who grew up in London during the 1970s and 1980s. It considers how Irishness was communicated - or sometimes left unspoken - within families, and when an Irish background became meaningful, visible, uncomfortable, or irrelevant beyond the home. The political context of the Troubles forms an important part of this history because it could affect public representations of Irishness in Britain. However, it did not determine every individual experience. Irishness could also be associated with family intimacy, cultural participation, humour, religion, travel, community life, or ordinary habits that were not understood as explicitly political.

A central concern of my work is the relationship between self-identification and categorisation by others. People may feel connected to several places and communities without experiencing these attachments as contradictory. At the same time, their claims to belonging may be recognised, questioned, or rejected by others. I am therefore interested not only in whether individuals describe themselves as Irish, English, British, Londoners, or some combination of these, but also in when such descriptions become important and what social encounters give them meaning.

Methodologically, my research draws particularly on oral history. Retrospective interviews provide access both to remembered experiences and to the ways in which people interpret those experiences later in life. Memories are not treated simply as imperfect records of the past. Changes in emphasis, hesitation, humour, silence, and later reinterpretation can reveal how family histories and cultural affiliations are continually reassessed across the life course.

My research is guided by questions such as: How are memories and cultural meanings communicated across generations? How do family narratives and everyday practices shape relationships to an ancestral country? Under what circumstances does migrant heritage become socially significant? How do individuals negotiate belonging across family, community, and wider society? And how do later experiences change the ways in which people understand and narrate their earlier lives?

RESEARCH AREAS

Photo taken by Peter Marlow