This interdisciplinary seminar series presents a capacious and provocative vision of intersectional inquiry across the Arts and Humanities. It has been designed to invite audiences both to excavate the intersectional stories that are embedded in our research and to better recognize the intersectional contexts in which we work. Irish history is comprised of the material and cultural legacies of intersectional lives which are often not framed in these terms. If the bodies from Anatolia (now known as Türkiye)that were exhumed from Newgrange could tell us their stories, if the children of the Spanish Armada or child mothers in the Magdalene laundries, who gave birth to children with disabilities that were taken from them, could explain the amalgams of race, class, disability, gender, we would see an intersectional Irish history in no uncertain terms. The ‘dirty’ whiteness of Irish ethnicity as constructed through Colonial rule, and the generations of oppression caused by Colonization: these stories are well documented but not often written about in terms of intersectional identity politics. Irish languages, literatures and cultural industries have been shaped by these intersectional lines. Digital cultures, contemporary literary and creative practices demonstrate the enormous value of cultural diversity in the creative industries. Developing a better understanding of the intersectional nature of Irish histories, literature and contemporary cultural industries will facilitate a voluptuous national imaginary of intersectional Irish presents. It is our hope that such an understanding will strengthen our understanding of the value of diversity in the Arts and Humanities. You are warmly invited to join us in person or online. Listen to our speakers from near and far and enjoy lunchtime refreshments.
Schedule - Thursdays, 1 to 2 pm 1.33 Iontas. All Welcome!
28th September 2023: Thinking Decolonially Through an Intersectional Lens
by Professor Avtar Brah, Professor Emerita, Birkbeck College, University of London
5th October 2023: Intersectionality as Practice: Anger and Eroticism in Feminist Instagram Art
by Dr. Marissa Willcox, Lecturer and Researcher in New Media and Digital Culture, Universiteit van Amsterdam
12th October 2023: Figures of Bearable Life
by Professor Ghassan Hage, Professorial Fellow, Anthropology and Social Theory, University of Melbourne
19th October 2023: Reading Irish Women’s Small Press Publications (1970s-80s)
by Dr. Tapasya Narang, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Intersectional Humanities ,Maynooth University
26th October 2023: Queerness and Intersectional Identities in Contemporary Irish Children’s and Young-Adult Literature
by Dr Patricia Kennon, Associate Professor, School of Education, Maynooth University
9th November 2023: Learning from Community Mapping with Traveller Researchers: Anticolonial Approaches and Intersectional Studies in Ireland
by Professor Karen Till, Department of Geography, Maynooth University and Dr Rachel McArdle, Lecturer, School of Geography, Archaeology and Irish Studies
16th November 2023: Material Memory, the Right to Narration and Disputing the Archive: Centring Lived Experience and Public Memory of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries
by Professor Laura Mc Atackney, Professor in Radical Humanities Laboratory and Archeology, University College Cork
23rd November 2023: Rosaleen McDonagh, Writer, in conversation with Professor Anna-Hickey Moody, Professor of Intersectional Humanities, Maynooth University