His book on Bloody Sunday is being published later this year.

A great deal has been said and written about Bloody Sunday. The Saville Inquiry alone generated a massive volume of material. Hardly a book exists now on recent Northern Irish politics, history and society that does not mention the event. Journalists, psychologists, historians, geographers, lawyers, and literary critics have all turned their attention to it.
For all this, the event has received meagre attention from sociologists and we know little about how Bloody Sunday as a collective political symbol has changed over time and why. This book engages with this question in an explicit way. It looks at this important event from a new angle by examining how it has been interpreted and made sense of in different ways in different times and for different audiences. I'm particularly interested in how the event was initially talked about it in global terms, how this symbolism was closed down in the 1970s and 1980s, and how it made a comeback in the 1990s.

I open the book with a short story. Bloody Sunday was a deeply-contested and emotionally-charged event. In the first few days after the event different people worked hard to put forward their definition of what happened. The British state used the idiom of 'gunmen and bombers' to describe the dead. From the Bogside and wider nationalist community a very different story got told. Very soon after the event nationalists linked it to the Holocaust.

When I looked at how Bloody Sunday was talked about as time passed in the mid-1970s and 1980s I noticed that this early global story was hardly mentioned and all but disappeared. In its place emerged a story about Bloody Sunday as an example of British injustice and another event in a longer history of colonialism.

A gear change took place again the 1990s when the global storyline re-emerged with frequent parallel-drawing between Bloody Sunday and other peoples experiencing injustice and oppression in other times and other places. In the book I try to explain why this storytelling about the event changed over time and I link the change to the work of people who cared enough about the event not to allow it to be forgotten.

Many innocent people were killed in Northern Ireland during 'the Troubles' and many were forgotten and subsumed into the over three thousand deaths of the period. One of the factors that helped to prevent Bloody Sunday falling victim to oblivion was that enough people existed who wanted to keep it in the public consciousness and who knew that this required resources and time and effort over the long haul.

These people are the focus of my book.

Frequently they had to struggle against other rival groups who understood and made sense of the event in different and often conflicting ways. But I also realize that the people who worked to keep the event alive in other people's memories did not work within a vacuum. They were embedded in a society that underwent change and for this reason I also draw attention to the important role of wider political, cultural, economic and demographic changes at a national and global level in shaping how the event got remembered and commemorated.