Home » For and about students » Techne Community » Techne Students list » Techne Students 2021-22 » Karen Hanrahan
AHRC Techne funded doctoral student
Narrative navigatio of former nuns: Exploring stories of transgression, reflexivity and transcendence through life history
Year of enrolment: 2021
Email: k.a.hanrahan@brighton.ac.uk
This interdisciplinary project will adopt a life history approach to explore the lives of former Irish women religious (nuns), one of whom is my mother. It will consider the plurality of individual and social factors leading to their entry into a religious order in 1950s Ireland and shine a light on their hidden lives as religious prior to, and following, Vatican II (1962-1965). The study will show how they subsequently came to re-imagine an alternative self and navigated the transgressive process of leaving convent life decades later to re-enter the secular world they renounced as teenagers. I draw on the allegory of the ‘navigatio’ as a metaphor to interrogate dispossession/repossession. Little scholarship based on oral evidence exists on how a relocation to life outside the congregation was experienced by former women religious. I will address this gap by exploring how being a former nun shaped the overall configuration of the women’s narrative identity, given that they are now in their eighties.