Rachael Louise Healy

ABSTRACT SUBMITTED: This project examines how teenage girls in post-conflict Belfast inherit, navigate, and reshape the enduring legacies of political violence, foregrounding girlhood as a critical yet overlooked site of social and political life. Drawing on 24 months of ethnographic fieldwork in a historically working-class Irish Republican neighbourhood, it shows how gender is a key axis through which violence is both reproduced and contested in the years since formal peace. Challenging dominant masculinist framings of youth and conflict, the project highlights how girls encounter distinct vulnerabilities within patriarchal and paramilitary structures – ranging from gender-based violence to coercive forms of “protection” – whilst also acting as central agents in negotiating, interpreting, and interrupting cycles of harm. It traces how girls’ everyday practices of care, friendship, and survival unfold within landscapes marked by ongoing physical violence, as well as poverty, segregation, and state neglect. It also examines how vernacular narratives of intergenerational trauma shape their understandings of distress, belonging, and futurity. By placing gender, class, and care at the centre of post-conflict analysis, this project argues that teen girls constitute vital, though under-recognised, actors in both sustaining social cohesion and reworking the conditions through which violence persists in ostensibly peaceful societies.