Rachael Healy

Current Research and Scholarly Interests

Research interests: youth, working-class life, colonialism, urban landscapes, intergenerational trauma, (contentious) commemoration, collective memory, time and space/place-making, narrative and storytelling, borderlands, post-conflict space, Northern Ireland/Ireland, political identity, precarity, hope(lessness).

Broadly, my PhD research focuses on youth culture and teenage life in post-conflict Belfast. I am interested in discourses of intergenerational trauma and community spaces and how these are seen as points of relation in a larger communal making-sense of a growing youth mental health crisis in a West Belfast neighbourhood. My research contributed to new understandings about how vernaculars of political violence shift according to new and ever-expanding pressures and priorities in community life and cultural cultivation.

Prior to joining Stanford, I received a First Class Honours degree in Global Health and Social Medicine from King’s College London. I also received a Master of Arts in Anthropology and Sociology from the Graduate Institute Geneva. Before attending university, I worked for four years in various public health and youth work roles in Palestine, South Africa and Scotland.