Irish Centre for Transnational Studies

The Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (ICTS) is delighted to invite you to our next webinar, taking place on Thursday, May 6^th 2021 @ 6pm.

In a country that is still reluctant to fully address its colonial past, as well as the forms of structural racism that still persist, the recent literary production of Portuguese writers of African descent has emerged as an important forum for the representation of racialized, migrant, and transnational experiences in an increasingly multicultural Lisbon. Focusing in particular on the works of two writers of African descent, Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida’s Esse cabelo [That Hair] and Kalaf Epalanga’s Os brancos também sabem dançar [The Whites Know How to Dance Too], this paper will examine how these literary works are redefining what constitutes being simultaneously Portuguese, Afro-Portuguese, and European in the XXI Century, while exposing the specific forms of post-imperial melancholia and racism that have contributed and continue to shape lives in postcolonial Portugal.

Fernando Beleza is a Lecturer in Portuguese Studies at Newcastle University. His research focuses on modern and contemporary literatures and cinemas of Portugal and Portuguese-speaking Africa. He has published articles and book chapters on: race, gender, and sexuality in Lusophone literatures; migration, transnational imaginaries and cosmopolitanism; the environmental humanities. Fernando Beleza is the co-editor of Mário de Sá-Carneiro, a Cosmopolitan Modernist (2018) and he is the Book Review Editor for the journal Portuguese Literary and Cultural Studies.

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Fáilte Roimh Chách 

The Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (ICTS) is delighted to invite you to our next webinar, taking place on Thursday April 22th, 2021 @ 6pm.

Within the framework of the normative ethical theory known as Ethic of Care this paper seeks to explore the problem of motivation as it arises in Migration Ethics and the role of affective pedagogies in this context. The paper will first set out the key tenets of the Ethics of Care approach with an emphasis on how it characterises the role of emotion in ethical decision making. Turning to the applied ethical issues which arise in Migration Ethics the paper concentrates on the problem of motivation. This problem exposes the gap between the principles we may accept in relation to what is morally required of us and the actions that reflect those principles in our everyday life. Drawing on Care Ethics characterisation of the epistemic role of emotion the paper proceeds to explore the viability of deploying a form of affective pedagogy within Global Citizenship Education in an effort to mitigate to some extent the motivation problem.  

Dr Campbell is a Lecturer in the Philosophy of Education in the Faculty of Education at Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, Ireland. Her PhD addressed the difficulties surrounding the use of empirical facts in normative epistemic reasoning and was completed with the support of an IRCHSS Doctoral Scholarship. In 2014 she was awarded an International Fellowship at the New Europe College (NEC) in Bucharest to complete post-doctoral research on the extent to which Aesthetic preferences play a role in epistemic belief formation. Treasa was appointed to the Council of CORU (the Irish regulator for health and social care professionals) by the Minister for Health in 2014 and also sits on the CORU Education Committee. In addition to teaching numerous modules in Philosophy she has also developed and delivered Modules in Nursing Ethics, Ethics in Social Care management and Modules for Adults with intellectual disabilities delivered in an inclusive third level setting. Her research interests include Contemporary Epistemology, Philosophy of Education and applied ethics, and her publications span normative issues in both Epistemology and Ethics of Care.  

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Fáilte Roimh Chách 

 
The Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (ICTS) is delighted to invite you to our next webinar, taking place on Thursday April 15th, 2021 @ 6pm.

In the early 1970s, the American dance critic Marcia Siegel famously observed that ‘Dance exists at a perpetual vanishing point’ and is ‘an event that disappears in the very act of materializing’. Despite its undeniable impermanent quality, the practice of dance is subject to regulatory systems, such as, verbal or written instructions and movement techniques, which ultimately function as a means to codify the motile body. This paper explores the 4-minute film Sol (Lacuesta 2008) performed by the Barcelona-based dancer and choreographer Sol Picó. The short was produced for the exhibition ‘Chaplin in images’, the first large exposition in Spain to explore this iconic figure through visual documentation. In Sol, Picó dances in and out of Chaplin’s archive, traversing temporal, cultural and material boundaries, embodying and disembodying the actor’s renowned posture and gestures to recover and assert, eventually, her own signature dancing style. Attentive to notions of authorship, document and trace, I suggest that Sol is not only a bodily and textual intervention in the archive of classical cinema, but it also engages with the history and ontology of dance.

Eva Bru-Domínguez is a Visiting Lecturer at Bangor University. Her main research interests are the representation and construction of the body in visual culture, performance art and dance with a particular focus on Catalan cultural production. She is the co-editor, with Helena Buffery, of the special issue ‘Contaminated and dislocated bodies in Catalan visual and performance cultures’ in Journal of Romance Studies (2019) and co-editor of the artist booklet Olga Diego. Transgressive Architecture (2014) with the architect and poet Gaspar Jaén Urban. Eva is the author of Beyond Containment. Corporeality in Mercè Rodoreda’s literature (2013). She has also published articles and book chapters about cinema, photography, performance art and dance.

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Fáilte Roimh Chách 

For the full programme of the ICTS Webinar Series for Spring 2021, including the zoom link, please click here.

The Irish Centre for Transnational Studies is delighted to welcome you to our first webinar in the Spring Semester 2021.

Dr Whelehan’s talk is entitled “Changing land: emigrants and visions of radical reform in nineteenth-century Ireland” and will take place online on 18 March 2021 @ 18:00 GMT.

Abstract: The Irish Land War (1879-1882) was a turning point in modern Irish history, a social revolution that was part of a broader ideological moment when established ideas of property and land ownership were fundamentally challenged. A striking aspect of the land movement was its internationalism, spurred by links between Ireland and different emigrant locations, return migration, and an awareness of how the Land League’s demands to abolish ‘landlordism’ connected with wider radical and reform causes. This talk traces the lives of three emigrant activists and how their land activism intersected with a range of radical and reform causes, including trade unionism, feminism and anarchism. It also considers how perceptions of emigration and settlement could foster contradictory attitudes towards land and colonisation in different contexts. 

Niall Whelehan teaches history at the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow. He is the author of The Dynamiters: Irish Nationalism and Political Violence in the Wider World, 1867-1900 (CUP, 2012). His new monograph on emigrant activism and the Irish land question will be published later this year with New York University Press. 

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Meeting ID: 952 7726 1661

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Fáilte Roimh Chách

The greatest challenges of our time – from climate crisis, global migrations, income inequality to the recent COVID-19 pandemic – can be regarded as spatial issues. The geographies of globalization – the settlements, landscapes, infrastructures, networks, supply chains, markets, and factories which make up our world – are produced unevenly in a fashion which entrenches poverty and exacerbates planetary pollution (Harvey 2000). As a result of geopolitical interventions, a great number of people have been deprived of their rights to both public and private spaces, whereas increased mobility in the developed world has undermined the established concepts of dwelling and spatial rootedness. 

Addressing the overlapping issues of social oppression and spatial injustice (Soja 2010) – such as exploitation of natural resources, unsustainable urbanisation, aggressive agriculture – demands a radical transformation of local, national and global spaces. Energy transitions, investments in public infrastructures and services, provisioning of safe and affordable housing, and restoration of green and blue spaces are just some of the changes we need to see. Emergency governmental responses to COVID-19 initiated rapid and radical societal changes that would have previously been unimaginable to many. 

Taking the pandemic response as one of the examples of a possible paradigm shift in terms of the kind of political action that can be imagined, this workshop emphasises the vital role of speculative fiction, film and visual art in shaping the physical world. Amid the global pandemic, and at the doorstep of climate breakdown, how can imaginative practices address and rectify spatial injustice? 

Speculative literature and art – understood broadly here as a category encompassing science fiction, fantasy, eco-fiction, utopia and dystopia – have long been concerned with imagining space differently. In depicting future or alternative worlds, artists can explore the spatial dynamics of oppression, exploitation and despoliation under today’s global capitalism. Yet, is it possible to go from cultural representation to societal transformation? Can our “reflection upon the virtual guide our understanding of the real (or actual)”, as Henri Lefebvre suggested in his seminal work The Production of Space (1974)? How can we see the spaces of speculative art as potential shapers of healthier and fairer environments? Conversely, how do these artworks deny visions and narratives which erase the spatial abuses of our past, present and future? 

This workshop invites papers from the fields of science fiction, utopian studies, ecocriticism, cultural geography, environmental humanities, environmental history, and any other related, new or interdisciplinary fields. Topics may include, but are not limited to, the following: 

-Spatial justice 
-Gender and space 
-Eco-fiction and nature writing 
-Utopian and dystopian narratives 
-Commodification and enclosures 
-Architecture and the built environment 
-Spatial dichotomies: urban-rural, centre-periphery, North-South, East-West 
-Place-making, dwelling, belonging, and identity 
-Corporeality and the human body in/as space 
-Environmental destruction, pollution, and erasure 
-Borders and migration 
-Legacies of colonialism 
-Global tourism and spatial fetishism 

Please submit a proposal including the title and the short abstract (250 words) for your presentation (10-15min) to sasj2021@gmail.com not later than December 30, 2020. Panels of 3-4 presentations will be followed by 30-45-minute discussions where all participants are invited to join. The workshop will take place on April 16-17, 2021 in an online format. Participants will be notified of the acceptance of their proposals by January 30, 2021. 

The event is organised by Ashley Cahillane (School of English and Creative Arts) and Maša Uzelac (School of Languages, Literatures & Cultures), under guidance of Dr Tina-Karen Pusse (Head of School, LLC) and hosted by the School of English and Creative Arts and the School of Languages, Literatures & Cultures.

Webpage: https://bcla.org/online-workshop-speculative-art-and-spatial-justice-national-university-of-ireland-galway-april-16-17-2021-deadline-december-30-2020/

The Irish Centre for Transnational Studies is delighted to announce Dr Ailbhe Kenny as the inaugural guest speaker in its ICTS Webinar Series.

Dr Kenny’s talk is entitled “Shaping Night Spaces: Insights from African Migrant ‘Musical Pathways'” and will take place online on 15 Dec 2020 @ 13:00 GMT.

Please register via Eventbrite to gain access.

The Department of German Studies, MIC, in association with the Institute for Irish Studies and the Irish Centre for Transnational Studies, invites you to the following event to celebrate the publication of Sandra Wagner’s book, Monströse Romanzen und romantische Monster: Zum Zeitgeist der Millenial-Generation in deutschsprachigen Mash-up-Romanen (Königshausen & Neumann, 2019).

Where: Mary Immaculate College, Foundation Building, Room G10

When: Thursday, 13th February 2020, 6 pm

All welcome!

With the support of the Department of French Studies, ICTS welcomes:

Professor Michael Kelly (University of Southampton)

Lecture title:

Transnational paradigms in research:
Understanding languages and humanities between the national and the global

Thursday 10th October 2019

6-8 pm in Room T116, Mary Immaculate College

Book your place on Eventbrite.
All welcome – Fáilte Roimh Cách.

Irish Centre for Transnational Studies, in cooperation with the Departments of French Studies, German Studies and English Language and Literature, MIC

MIC, Foundation Building, G08A

Programme

4.00 pm: Dr. Andrea Rummel (English Studies, Justus Liebig University of Giessen)

Rewriting War: History, Memory and the Function of the Literary in Ford Madox Ford and Keith Douglas

Chair: Dr. Kathryn Laing

4.30 pm: Dr. Clíona Hensey (French Studies, NUI Galway)

Transgenerational Memory, Trauma and Testimony in Writing by Descendants of Harkis

Chair: Dr. Richard McMahon

5.00 pm: Questions and Round Table Discussion

Organised by Dr. Sabine Egger, Dr. Mairéad Ní Bhriain, and Dr. Kathryn Laing