The Bucknell Northern Ireland Video Archive is based on lectures given as part of courses that were part of the Bucknell in Northern Ireland, three-week May term courses between 2002 and 2008. Some of the lectures were meant to provide students with a background in history, politics, and social science concepts related to the Northern Ireland Troubles that occurred roughly from 1968 to 2000. Other lectures bring important actors in Northern Ireland from that period to class and their comments provide vivid, first person accounts.

On several occasions we have used tapes from the Archive as “readings” for courses on Northern Ireland. Others may want to organize courses around these materials. However, viewers with little knowledge of conflict in Northern Ireland may also want to “take the course”. That is, one may want to view tapes in the order we recommend so that you can build up enough background to understand the complexity and detail you will encounter in more topical tapes. Even a popular topic like the Bloody Sunday march and shootings are hard to understand without having a background in the history and politics related to The Troubles.

The materials that make up the course in this section of the archive has three parts.

First, we have selected several tapes that provide an introduction and background of The Troubles. We recommend watching them in order, and a brief summary of each lecture and the way it fits into the progression of the narrative is given below. It is important to know that for most of the lecture we provide a detailed transcript. It is helpful to open and read the transcript as you are viewing the tape both to maintain the focus of your attention and to help overcome difficulties in understanding accents or technical problems we had in recording sound.

Second, we provide analytic notes and discussion questions for each of these lectures. The analytic notes provide a short synopsis both of the content of the lecture and of points of particular importance discussed in the lecture. These analytic points often are interpretive, giving some of the background meaning authors were conveying but that first-time viewers might miss. Discussion questions, while particularly useful as class exercises, help give a sense of what the main ideas are in a lecture. Whether or not one formally answers the questions, thinking about them carefully can help give structure to the lectures.

Third, we provide videotapes made by Bucknell students using the Northern Ireland Archive. Two of these tapes were products of class assignments where the film was the “paper” submitted by students to integrate their understanding of course materials. One tape is a student’s effort to consolidate and organize materials created over a period of several years by the Bogside Artists. Without this sort of consolidation it would be hard for most viewers to understand and assimilate the work of this important mural-painting group. The last tape is similar in that it integrates and assimilates material from a variety of tapes. In this case, however, the student sought to develop a theme, that of conflict at community boundaries and the use of public art as a way of expressing community identity. The student over a summer sought to develop a broad understand of the contents of the archive, develop conceptual themes, and then use materials from the archives and from other sources to express his ideas.