Keynote speaker

We are honoured to have Professor Marjory Harper as our guest speaker this year.

She is Professor of History at the University of Aberdeen and Visiting Professor at the Centre for History, University of the Highlands and Islands. Her research focuses on British (particularly Scottish) emigration since 1800. Two of her monographs have won international prizes, and she has published around 100 articles and book chapters. She edited Migration and Mental Health: Past and Present (2016). Her latest monograph, Testimonies of Transition (an oral history of twentieth-century Scottish emigration) was published in 2018, and a revised version was published as an audio book in 2020. She directs an award-winning online Master’s Programme in Scottish Heritage and is currently preparing a book on emigration from the Northern Isles. She contributes regularly to radio and television programmes such as Digging Up Your Roots and Who Do You Think You Are?

https://www.abdn.ac.uk/sdhp/history/profiles/m.harper#publications

Testimonies of Transition: Voices from the ‘Celtic Diaspora’

At the heart of any diaspora lie stories of human adventure, achievement and adversity. Personal testimony, written and verbal, provides a powerful lens through which to view the complex and often contradictory saga of emigration. Not only does it offer multiple narratives of the motives, expectations and experiences of successive generations of individuals and families: it can also be used to explore broader issues about the cultural and political spirit of the age, as well as the socio-economic context that triggered tidal waves and trickles of emigration.

The story of emigration is most meaningfully told in the participants’ own words. By adding their writings and voices to top-down, policy-based studies, personal testimony infuses the migrants’ experiences with popular appeal, by demonstrating the practical impact of policies and procedures on the lives of real people, with whose emotions listeners can readily identify.

Professor Harper's paper explores the motives and experiences of migrants, settlers and returners from Britain’s ‘Celtic fringe’ in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Within a comparative framework it analyses the exodus from Highland Scotland, Ireland, Wales and Cornwall with reference to the emigrants’ motives; the mechanisms through which they implemented their relocation; their experiences of settlement, sojourning and returning; and – most particularly – the ways in which they transferred, reconfigured or jettisoned their ethnic identities and activities.

The main focus is on Scotland and draws on a sample from over 100 interviews with emigrants conducted by Professor Harper during the last two decades. Scottish attitudes and practices are compared with narratives from Ireland, Wales and Cornwall in order to evaluate the whole notion of a ‘Celtic diaspora’. Is it meaningful to highlight similarities in the experience of emigrants from these locations, based on a shared Celtic economy, society or culture that in turn infused the emigrants’ attitudes and experiences with recognisable features of a diaspora? Alternatively, is the ‘Celtic diaspora’ an invented, spurious concept that we construct simply because emigrants from these regions tend to be visible, because of language, poverty, identification with particular types of work, or distinctive markers of cultural identity?