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 extensi…

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. Th…

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 extra…

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 t…

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 La…

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…

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 prevale…

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 a…

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 wive…

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 d…

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 remembere…

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 g…

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 bee…

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…

#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…

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 t…

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. More…

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 sin…

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 sin…

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 sin…

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 …

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 wo…

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 minori…

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 u…

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 perio…

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…