A psychosocial analysis of cultural public landscapes and their unconscious role in conflict transformation and identity navigation in Northern Ireland

Abstract

This thesis offers a psychosocial exploration of mural art in the North/Northern Ireland, conceptualising murals not as containers of communal affect but as porous holding spaces in which unresolved memories, identities, and anxieties circulate. While situated at the intersection of psychoanalytic studies and psychosocial studies, it also remains grounded in questions of visual culture. The thesis draws on Donald Winnicott’s concept of holding and Wilfred Bion’s concept of containment to argue that the psychic work of containment is provided not by the murals themselves, nor by method alone, but by the research encounter. It is shaped through the researcher’s subjective and reflexive facilitation of the Visual Matrix and follow-up socioanalytic interviews, which together create a temporary collective container for processing what the murals evoke. Findings show that murals simultaneously re-inscribe territorial and gendered boundaries, archive unprocessed trauma, and can offer the possibility of shared reflection across communities. Emotional responses preceded cognition: the body registered tightness and laughter before meaning emerged, suggesting that murals function less as texts to be decoded than as intense emotional triggers. When a containing frame was in place, participants articulated uncertain attachments, oscillating between pride and shame, nostalgia and exhaustion, revealing murals’ role in sustaining, but also troubling, identities in a society marked by conflict. Methodologically, the thesis contributes an innovative adaptation of the Visual Matrix for conflict research, showing how a carefully held group procedure can render culturally saturated images thinkable without stripping them of complexity. Substantively, it reframes murals in this region as dynamic affective events and while this research does not take a definitive stance on the future of specific murals, the findings suggest that these images continue to hold psychic and social functions for many viewers. Any policies of removal or aesthetic sanitisation may therefore risk disrupting spaces where collective anxieties are registered or held. This is not to romanticise the murals, but to emphasise their ongoing role in mediating complex emotional landscapes.

Thesis is embargoed until 30th June 2028

Date of Award	Jun 2026
Original language	English
Supervisor	Noreen Giffney (Supervisor) & Clare Gallagher (Supervisor)