Dr Lisa White’s work on state violence experienced by political detainees in Northern Ireland lies in the field of transitional justice at the intersection between criminology and politics. White’s work and original postgraduate paper, available here will be adapted and published as a sole-authored book by Routledge in early 2014. The abstract below is taken from White’s postgraduate paper:
Using a synthesis of documentary analysis and interviews involving former
detainees, this article explores the sociology of denial in relation to
narratives of state violence which emerged from the conflict in and around
Northern Ireland. It argues that three interrelated levels of denial
described by Cohen (2001) – literal, interpretive and implicatory – can be
observed within the ‘official discourse’ surrounding the conflict, and that
these denials are experienced by former detainees in diverse and different
ways. The article contributes to the literature on state violence within the
discipline of criminology through its exploration of the lived consequences
of state denial narratives alongside former detainees who have made their
private experiences of victimhood part of a contested public history
– White, Lisa (2010) Discourse, denial and dehumanisation: former detainees’ experiences of narrating state violence in Northern Ireland. Papers from the British Criminology Conference, 10 . pp. 3-18. ISSN 1759-0043