What do the novel Trespasses, a play called Tactics for Time Travel in a Toilet, and the Booker prize winning novel Milkman have to do with one another? Dr Stefanie Lehner can tell you.
A senior lecturer at Queen’s, Lehner conducts interdisciplinary research around post-conflict literary and cultural work, and is fascinated by the ways in which these three works look back to the Troubles. Yet, despite the trauma and tragedies that they deal with, they also foreground small glimmers of “utopian potentials” for the future.
The period of violent conflict known as the Troubles took place in Northern Ireland from the late 1960s until 1998. It centred primarily around political clashes between Protestant unionists, who wanted Northern Ireland to remain part of the UK, and Catholic nationalists, who favoured joining the Republic of Ireland. It is estimated that more than 3,500 people lost their lives in the conflict, and tens of thousands more were injured.
“Milkman and Trespasses … they’re both set during the Troubles,” Lehner explains. “Even though they’re narratives that deal very much with the conflict and the trauma involved with the conflict, they evoke these small utopian possibilities. And that’s what a lot of recent queer productions have been doing as well.” Namely Tactics for Time Travel in a Toilet, a play produced by Belfast-based gay theatre company TheatreofplucK in 2017.
“Utopian” outcomes sound enticing, particularly given the number of global conflicts, which is at its highest since the end of the second world war, according to the Global Peace Index 2025. If we can better understand how societies deal with and heal from conflict, through an analysis of the arts or other disciplines, this is welcome indeed. Researchers at Queen’s are at the forefront of this interrogation.
Tactics for Time Travel in a Toilet was part of a research project called LGBTQ Visions of Peace in a Society Emerging from Conflict, for which Lehner was a co-investigator. “The toilet is here not only a space for a countercultural critique of Northern Ireland’s peace politics, which have excluded LGBT people, but also a space from which to imagine alternative visions of Northern Ireland in the future,” she said about the play in a piece for the Irish Times. It’s a lot to fit into a cubicle.
More expansive perhaps, but just as relevant has been Lehner’s work on Sounding Conflict – a project investigating how sound (including sonic arts, participatory music-making and storytelling in theatre) can realise narratives of conflict, resistance and reconciliation across cultures. Comparative case studies with projects in the Middle East, Brazil and Northern Ireland serve as a basis for evaluating how sound is used to articulate experiences of violence, support narratives of resistance and promote peace building. This work was documented and published as a co-authored monograph in 2023, titled Sounding Conflict: From Resistance to Reconciliation.
“I worked with three local theatre companies, including Tinderbox and Kabosh, to investigate the role of sounds in selected theatre performances dealing with conflict,” says Lehner. “What was notable was that intrusive, war-like noises in these plays attained a transformative power that enabled new perspectives to emerge, which helped to open new pathways to approach reconciliation.”
It’s all very discursive, as interdisciplinary research tends to be, and Lehner is clearly passionate about her subject. Being part of the academic community at Queen’s, specifically the Senator George J Mitchell Institute for Global Peace, Security and Justice, has been a great privilege and honour, she says, adding: “It’s really developed my research.”
Founded in 2016, the institute aims to respond to the global challenge of building a peaceful, secure and inclusive world by bringing together experts from a multitude of disciplines, such as the arts, education and gender studies.
Dr Laura Dunne, a fellow Queen’s researcher affiliated with the institute, studies conflict resolution and peacebuilding through a different lens. She’s a developmental psychologist and focuses on how to improve outcomes for disadvantaged children, particularly in societies emerging from conflict. Her research journey at Queen’s began in 2003 and over time it’s become increasingly interdisciplinary. “If you want to figure out the many influences that affect children’s lives and development on their trajectory through life, you can’t just view the world as a psychologist,” she says.
One of the projects Dunne has been heavily involved with is LINKS. Supported by the National Institute for Health Research and UNICEF, it’s a global network of researchers and practitioners who work in low- and middle-income countries that have been affected by conflict. The group looks at early childhood development programmes and how they can contribute to sustainable development and peacebuilding. But how exactly do these topics connect?
“It doesn’t seem obvious from the outside,” says Dunne, “but if we invest in high quality programmes that work – such as looking after young mothers in low- and middle-income countries, providing safe and clean food and drinking water, and early education experiences for children – we see improvements in terms of early childhood development. And if you wrap these programmes around families and communities, social cohesion, which is part of peacebuilding, improves as well.”
Dunne gives an example of work that she was a part of in Timor-Leste, a country that went through a period of political violence, repression and conflict following Indonesia’s invasion in 1975. With only very rudimentary education systems in place, UNICEF set up community-based alternative preschools around which families and communities began to coalesce, thus building social cohesion, says Dunne. “In fragile contexts that are affected by conflict, what you find is that trust has been broken in relation to figures of authority, in ministries and governments, so when we start to build vertical cohesion – when things begin to work on the ground – that trust starts to build again.”
In terms of Northern Ireland and its peacebuilding process, Dunne mentions the Media Initiative for Children project, which was developed by Early Years to promote positive attitudes to physical, social and cultural differences among young children, and introduced in educational settings more than 20 years ago. It has since been replicated in countries around the world such as Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan. In an effort to respect difference and build empathy for different members of a community, persona dolls that resembled diverse groups were rolled out in educational settings across the country.
“In Northern Ireland, there was a persona doll with an eye patch, a persona doll from the Traveller community, and there were dolls who were from different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. There were all sorts of vignettes and stories, as well as a cartoon series that ran alongside it,” says Dunne. “The outcome was that children were able to see that they could be friends with their neighbours. They could say: ‘I can understand them. I can understand they’re different, but I respect that,’” she says.
Recent research – carried out by Dunne’s colleagues at Queen’s – that was wrapped around the project demonstrated the positive impacts of the programme, she says, and has since been rolled out around the world. “At the moment we’re talking to colleagues in Ukraine about possibly adapting the programme there. Children are not born hating or fearing each other, that’s something that’s learned.”
Dunne’s and Lehner’s research is complex and multifaceted, which speaks to the rich academic environment that it comes out of. Both emphasise the deeply collaborative environment that the university provides, which ultimately makes their work possible.
“We have a fantastic group who are all working on very similar, interrelated themes: the larger role of the arts [and other subjects] in peacebuilding and conflict resolution,” says Lehner. “We’re lucky, we have PhD students working on similar topics, so that creates very stimulating debates and discussion. It’s a beautiful environment.”
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