Coming soon

Hello, and welcome to my blog. My name is Jakki, and I have lived in Northern Ireland for 20+ years. For anyone who is unaware, Northern Ireland is a post-conflict society, working through a peace process which has become like swimming through treacle. There are those, including the Westminster Government, who would like to treat the past like another country, but they are at odds with the vast majority of people who want, somehow, to deal with the past. 

When I moved to Northern Ireland, I was. coming with a sense of optimism that I was entering a society that was starting to move forwards after the Good Friday Agreement. I overlooked that I was leaving my reproductive rights at the door, not realising that the judgement of the midwife who was giving me the morning after pill was more related to the posters on the wall warning that the pills were pretty much an abortion than tutting over only using one form of contraception. It only clicked with me when my GP was visibly relieved that my unexpected pregnancy was not unwanted.

'Thank goodness' he sighed, he didn't have to tell me I would have to get on a boat to Liverpool. He was clearly used to breaking it to young women he would have to export them as some kind of collective shame. 

Eventually, I took the step of going back to university, studying for an LLM in Gender, Conflict and Human Rights. A chance discussion with Monica McWilliams, who told me that starting education again with a second undergrad was 'nonsense' gave me the confidence to switch from humanities to law. Along the way I worked with disabled students across the social sciences, giving me a lot of learning by osmosis. There was also a little dabble into Peace and Conflict Studies, where I began to see the importance of film and literature as a way of dealing with the legacy of conflict and oppression. 

So, here I am, having spent the last year reading books which ask questions about human rights, of collective memory and the legacy of conflict and political oppression, ready to put these thoughts into writing.