Shows
NPPSH ConferenceEp. 27 - Keynote Lecture - Ailbhe Smyth - ‘We call this edge our home'Ailbhe Smyth is an activist and former academic who has been involved in feminist, LGBT, and radical politics since the 1970s. The founding director of the Women’s Education, Research and Resource Centre (WERRC), she was head of Women’s Studies at UCD from 1990 until 2006 when she left UCD to work independently. She has lectured and written extensively on feminist issues. She is Convenor of the Coalition to Repeal the Eighth Amendment and a founding member of Marriage Equality.
2018-12-031h 09NPPSH ConferenceEp. 26 - Panel 6B - Part 2 - Digital literary criticism and the end of history - Chris Beausang (MU)The aim of this paper will be to present a sequence of results obtained from i) a network-based analysis created through the 'Stylo' package (a library developed within the statistical programming language R for the quantitative analysis of literary data), and ii) a network-based visualisation generated in the open-source software package Gephi. This analysis reflects an attempt to develop a definition of literary style by the comparison of word frequencies embedded in two corpora, the first of which will be composed of just over 250 modernist novels, novellas and short story collections, and the second, which will contain 250 works written and...
2018-12-0320 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 25 - Panel 6B - Part 1 - Neglected interwar domestic romance - Pimpawan Chaipanit (U Aberdeen)Despite her being dubbed as ‘Jane Austen of the 20th century’ by JB Priestly, Dorothy Whipple’s fame for her popular interwar domestic romance, ironically, did not last like her literary precursor until the recent republication by Persephone Books. Whipple wrote not only the courtship and the romance tale, but the post-matrimony story such as extramarital affair, divorce, and domestic violence with a profound understanding of the importance of women’s education and profession. Studying her novels as the cultural products of the middle-class and from the interwar period, a topoanalytical reading of Whipple’s domestic images finds that they represent...
2018-12-0322 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 24 - Panel 6A - Part 2 - A genocide by any other means - Gerard Maguire (MU)This paper will highlight the atrocity that is cultural genocide. It will offer two case studies to highlight the destruction caused by cultural genocide in varying forms by detailing acts perpetrated by the State in both Guatemala and Canada. Cultural genocide is especially applicable to the indigenous peoples of the world, who continuously face treats to their cultural survival. A topical study with the evolving nature of the indigenous identity in the contemporary world, a people, transitioning from weak and vulnerable subsections of the population to a self-actualizing entity demanding the rights and protections they deserve. This paper examines the...
2018-12-0330 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 23 - Panel 6A - Part 1 - Regarding Testimony and multidirectional memory - Westley Barnes (U EA)This paper makes a pedagogical argument for applying studies of what Michael Rothberg terms “multidirectional memory”, a practice which stresses relation between the effects of the Holocaust and Postcolonial studies on contemporary research of trauma and historiography. By examining Rothberg’s theory alongside the documentary films Shoah (Claude Lanzmann, 1985) and States of Fear (Mary Rafferty, 1999), I intend to examine how visual testimonies of genocide, religious suppression and the psychological affects attributable to transitioning postcolonial states affect the ways in which historians discuss trauma. By bridging the major concerns of Holocaust Studies with studies of Church related suppression in postcolonial Ireland this p...
2018-12-0322 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 22 - Panel 5B - Representation of Irish Nationalist Women - Maelle Le Roux (UL)The Capuchin Annual was a periodical published between 1930 and 1977 by Irish Franciscan Capuchins, a Roman Catholic order. Over 44 issues it contains various articles written by members of various Catholic orders and by authors who were not members of the Catholic Church. It is known to have held nationalist views, even at a time when the Catholic Church and the Irish state were opposed to nationalist movements. It was digitized and made available online for scholarly use in 2016. Even prior to digitization it was widely used in scholarly studies, especially its 1966 issue, but so far, no work has focused exclusively on...
2018-12-0330 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 21 - Panel 5A - Part 3 - Voices of the Referendum - Rebecca Boast (Univ of Liverpool)The voices of the female Irish citizen have long gone unheard and ignored. The call for comprehensive bodily autonomy for the Irish woman has, for example, been marginalised and buried beneath the ‘traditional’ roles of motherhood and childbearing. Now with the upcoming referendum on repealing the 8th amendment to the Irish constitution and prevalence of the #Repealthe8th campaign, we as a society have seen Irish women (and men) come together to canvas support for the liberalisation of Irish abortion law. The referendum results will be a strong indicator of the societal standpoint on the liberalisation of abortion law in Irel...
2018-12-0307 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 20 - Panel 5A - Part 2 - Finding balance - Nur Nadiah Binte Zailai (MU)This innovative multi-method study addresses a significant gap in the literature by examining how the health and socio-economic conditions of working couple parents affect children’s development (Perry-Jenkins and MacDermid 2017). Irish parents’ experiences of constraints on time (McGinnity, Russell, Williams and Blackwell, 2005) and stress (Puff and Renk, 2014; Harold, 2016; Jabakhanji, 2016) have been reported. Where parents may no longer depend on previous models of behaviour with increasing experiences of family life as an act of balancing and co-ordinating (Beck-Gernshiem, 1998), it is imperative to discover what work-life balance means for dual-earner Irish families and its influences on both children and parents. This study will...
2018-12-0322 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 19 - Panel 5A - Part 1 - The forgotten mothers of the Cillín - Sheena Graham-George (GSchArt)Over the last thirty years communities throughout Ireland have actively been engaged in reclaiming part of their past. The legacy of the cilliní, the un-baptised infant burial grounds, have over the generations cast a long shadow across the lives of many Irish families whose children lie buried in these plots. But what of the families who lost wives and mothers ‘who died in childbirth but haven’t been churched’ (Dixon 2012)? Oral history sources tell us they were also buried there along with suicides, strangers, shipwrecked sailors, murderers and their unfortunate victims, criminals, famine victims, the mentally disabled. All considered unsuitable for bur...
2018-12-0317 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 17 - Panel 4B - Institutionalisation in Ireland - Aoife Kelly-Wixted (MU)This paper will examine institutionalisation in Ireland and its role in the attempt to silence marginalised groups. Drawing on policy, media sources and academic literature the presentation will examine ‘othering’ practices at play which serve to deliberately attempt to silence vulnerable groups and individuals. The paper will be divided into two distinct categories in an examination of the treatment of women and refugees in Ireland. It will provide contextual analysis of historic and contemporary institutionalisation in light of feminist and critical theory. The role of the church, health services and educational facilities will be analysed with respect to their role in s...
2018-12-0324 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 18 - Panel 4A - An evaluation of child protection mediation programs - Rebecca Murphy (Ind.)Children often find themselves at the centre of a variety of legal disputes and, as a result, they may enter the court system through a number of possible doors. Some of these disputes involve disagreements between parents, while others involve the possibility of state intervention due to child protection and safety concerns. What must be remembered is that children's futures are significantly impacted by the door through which their family enters the legal system. In Ireland, there are many instances where parents recognise that they are unable to care for their children and these children are received into care through...
2018-12-0317 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 16 - Panel 3B - Part 3 - Irish poetry and elusive audience (as Gaeilge) - Shane Grant (MIC)Fiosraíonn an páipéar seo an idirghabháil atá idir filí na gceantar Gaeltachta seo i gCiarraí agus an pobal léitheoireachta. Is gníomh imeallach é an fhilíocht in aon teanga – gan trácht ar mhionteanga a bhfuil dúshláin éagsúla roimpi. I measc an chomhthéacs dúshlánach seo, tá líon suntasach filí ag cumadh na filíochta i ndá cheantar Gaeltachta i gCiarraí. Léiríonn na filí amhras ar leith go bhfuil aon phobal léitheoireachta acu agus deir cuid acu nach mbíonn siad ag cuimhneamh ar an bpobal léitheoireachta ina gcleachtas c...
2018-11-3023 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 15 - Panel 3B - Part 2 - ‘An island at the centre of the world?' - Ellen Howley (DCU)Kristin Morrison, lamenting the amnesia surrounding Ireland’s “ancient nautical heritage” (111), asks, “how does the fact that Ireland is surrounded by water manifest itself in contemporary fiction? […] how does that fiction conceive of a ‘mainland’?” (111). Critical attention towards the representation of Ireland as an island in literature has been lacking until relatively recently. Scholars from many disciplines have begun to redress this through a consideration of Irish coasts in projects such as UCC’s Deep Maps and UCD’s Cultural Value of Coastlines. This paper continues some of these conversations by turning specifically to contemporary Irish poetry and interrogating how Ireland figures as a...
2018-11-3021 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 14 - Panel 3B - Part 1 - Digging up specters - Ian Hickey (MIC, Limerick)This paper seeks to examine the haunting function of the bog in the poetry of Seamus Heaney through the theoretical lens of Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. The paper argues that the present and future are influenced by spectres of the past through what Derrida would term hauntology with Derrida himself noting that ‘a ghost never dies, it always remains to come and to come-back’ (Derrida 2006, p.123). In the bog poems Heaney uses the bog as a way of viewing contemporary violence from a wider, older, Northern European perspective. Similarities are drawn between contemporary Northern Ireland and that of Scandi...
2018-11-3019 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 13 - Panel 2B - Part 3 - Black Butterfly: Maternal mutation narratives - Ciaran Gorman (MU)#MeToo and #IBelieveHer vocalised personal traumas within the frame of a global conversation about sexual violence, and a movement to carve out space for the most disenfranchised under capitalist patriarchy. However, not every story of trauma, marginalisation and repression is suitable for a hashtag; there are some stories that society still denies mainstream attention and acceptability because of an unwillingness to engage with the difficult and complex issues they bring to the fore. The surge in writing about the complicated maternal experience in the last decade has not been paralleled by mainstream visual representation precisely because of this fact. The...
2018-11-3018 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 12 - Panel 2B - Part 2 - Breandán Ó hEithir's Lead us into Temptation - Chris McCann (NUIG)This paper analyses Breandán Ó hEithir's use of music in constructing and reconstructing community throughout his novel Lead Us Into Temptation (Lig Sinn I gCathú, 1976/1978). It also explores the role that music plays in memory, political affiliation and expression, and communitas within both the text and wider Irish society during the middle of the twentieth century. Musical participation is an important aspect of collectivity and communitas. It is a public articulation of adherence to community values, and carries with it culturally encoded understandings of cultural and political (dis)affiliation. While music is a kind of social mortar, as Ó Laoire (2005) observes it a...
2018-11-3019 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 11 - Panel 2B - Part 1 - The unseen cinema - Davide Abbatescianni (UCC)Film students know how challenging it is to distribute their independent works in the absence of financial or other supports. At the moment too little attention is paid to the problem of distribution in film schools and universities, and it is very rare to find curricula offering distribution courses or even providing useful distribution tips. Moreover, many young artists fear screening their student works and consider them mere shooting exercises. This is not always the case, and notable films may have been kept unreleased or had extremely limited distribution.
Therefore, this topic opens these questions:
· Why are young Italian and I...
2018-11-3022 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 10 - Panel 2A - Part 3 - Praxis bold as love: 'Professing' community work - Dave Donovan (MU)Questions of voice, agency, participation and empowerment are central to the practice of community development, and for this reason it has been has been described as a subversive occupation (Ife 2013). Its way of working is to challenge and question the done thing, the taken-for-granted. Yet, funding cuts and structural changes within the field since 2008 have seen the spaces for community work increasingly narrowed and squeezed (Harvey 2015; Community Work Ireland 2017). This situation places community workers in a dilemma: do they cease telling uncomfortable stories and cease being true to the values of community work; do they step away from long term...
2018-11-3023 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 9 - Panel 2A - Part 2 - Invisible men: 'Is there a way back to me, for me?' - Tommy Coombes (MU)Questions of voice, agency, participation and empowerment are central to the practice of community development, and for this reason it has been has been described as a subversive occupation (Ife 2013). Its way of working is to challenge and question the done thing, the taken-for-granted. Yet, funding cuts and structural changes within the field since 2008 have seen the spaces for community work increasingly narrowed and squeezed (Harvey 2015; Community Work Ireland 2017). This situation places community workers in a dilemma: do they cease telling uncomfortable stories and cease being true to the values of community work; do they step away from long term...
2018-11-3019 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 8 - Panel 2A - Part 1 - 'We've got to get to Dublin!' - Jamie Gorman (MU)Questions of voice, agency, participation and empowerment are central to the practice of community development, and for this reason it has been has been described as a subversive occupation (Ife 2013). Its way of working is to challenge and question the done thing, the taken-for-granted. Yet, funding cuts and structural changes within the field since 2008 have seen the spaces for community work increasingly narrowed and squeezed (Harvey 2015; Community Work Ireland 2017). This situation places community workers in a dilemma: do they cease telling uncomfortable stories and cease being true to the values of community work; do they step away from long term...
2018-11-3018 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 7 - Panel 1B - Part 3 - Preservation, reconstruction and web data - Michael Kurzmeier (MU)As more and more of daily communication happens through a digital medium, so are “unseen voices” often spoken and sometimes heard within the digital sphere. Especially marginalized and counter-public groups have often used the new media to overcome real-world limitations. This phenomenon can be traced back to the early days of the Web, as projects such as the Transgender Usenet Archive show. Archives like this allow the reconstruction of a community and enable users to experience this part of history. At the same time, an archive of any community’s past helps against misrepresentations. With the growth of data output and th...
2018-11-3014 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 6 - Panel 1B - Part 2 - Mapping invisible cities - Phil J. Ryan (UCD)This paper explores the insights provided by the old media of novels, to informatic strategies implementable through AR technologies, using Invisible Cities (2010) by Italo Calvino. The social systems that must be traversed in basic everyday life can be labyrinthine and opaque to all but the most indoctrinated. The individual’s experience of the world is guided our by memories and communications with others. Society attempts to create collective actions strategies through which to communicate information, but all too often systems are set up for a normative level of intellect and ability. Managed subjectivity is a vital aspect of literature, as bo...
2018-11-3012 minNPPSH ConferenceEp. 5 - Panel 1B - Part 1 - The lived experience of social interaction - Jessica Douglas (WIT)The digital divide has been discussed as a limiting factor in social cohesion, since the early 2000s (Korupp & Szydlik, 2005). Authors suggested that the digital divide was a new form of social inequality, and therefore the term digital exclusion would better reflect the unequal access to digital resources among low socio-economic and ethnic minority groups (Cushman & Klecun, 2006). With the emergence of the smartphone as a relatively cheap and ubiquitous gateway to the digital world, access has somewhat widened for many people. However, a recent study (2018) by OFCOM in the UK reveals that there still is a distinct digital divide: non-users of...
2018-11-3018 min
NPPSH ConferenceEp. 4 - Panel 1A - Part 3 - The 'buoyant and quixotic' Fanny Bellingham - Marion Rogan (MU)Nineteenth-century Ireland saw the spread of Protestant evangelical missionary activism and the establishment of societies determined to bring the good news of salvation to the Roman Catholic population.
Many women immersed themselves in the work. One such activist was Fanny Bellingham. ‘This remarkable woman, whose powers of organisation were as uncommon as her energy and quickness of judgement’ is unseen except through the lives of her male relatives and co-workers. Born in 1808, she was granddaughter of Sir Alan Castlebellingham, a substantial landowner in County Louth and the city of Dublin, William Stewart, merchant, and member of a prominent linen family from...
2018-11-3019 min
NPPSH ConferenceEp. 3 - Panel 1A - Part 2 - Breastfeeding in nineteenth century Irish workhouses - Judy Bolger (TCD)The State’s attempt to alleviate poverty during the nineteenth century culminated into the creation of the Irish Poor Law in 1838, which saw over 150 workhouses erected across the Irish landscape. A particularly vulnerable cohort of impoverished paupers were mothers and infants. This paper will outline the provisions put into place during the period by the State for the nourishment of pauper infants within in the workhouses. By law, deserted infants were entitled to a wet-nurse. This wet-nursing arrangement often took place within the workhouses, but it was also outsourced to country wet-nurses. This paper, using surviving material from the Poor La...
2018-11-3019 min
NPPSH ConferenceEp. 2 - Panel 1A - Part 1 - Speaking sex in Mrs Browns' Boys - Sarah Anne Dunne (UCD)The proposed presentation aims to review the critically acclaimed television series Mrs Browns Boys and its representations of sex, sexual repression and pleasure, and even marital rape. The series relies on a bawdy a coarse humour which heavily incorporates the use of sexual innuendo and slapstick comedy to convey and address serious social issues which, historically and presently, are often silenced, such as that of marital rape – in a brief sketch, Mrs Brown describes her late husband ‘taking advantage of [her] whenever he likes’. Mrs Brown’s Boys further develops on themes of sexual desire and female pleasure and its repressi...
2018-11-3013 min