Fantastic opening remarks to seminar on commemorating partition from @chebhocine which locates partition in the logics and structures of Empire, and challenges what is meant by 'narrative hospitality'.

@PeterLeary questions whether detaching memory from emotion is possible or desirable.

Brian Hanley examines positives of 2016 commemorations, but also how a fear that '1966 caused 1969' shaped approaches to centenary, and how difficult convos, including about Empire, were therefore avoided.

The North is too often excluded from analyses of post-partition violence in the South - new scholarship increasingly challenging this.

@PoliScIrish Emphasises that commemoration is always, always political - neutrality is never neutral.

Commemoration is an assertion of epistemological certainty about 'the past'. @BorderIrish defies such certainty however.

'The Union' is also contingent, provisional, defying certainty.

@LMcAtackney urges that we move beyond empiricism and the archive and for disciplinary diversity in engaging with and interrogating the past in Ireland.