Irish Centre for Transnational Studies

LIMBO – A  Performance on Families Living under Direct Provision

31 March 2015, 9 am, Lime Tree Theatre, Mary Immaculate College

There is a building nearby, it might be close to where you live. We have all heard rumours about what is happening there but somehow we never talk about it. Somehow it stays invisible. And the people inside are invisible too, waiting endlessly, stuck in Limbo. With dancer Angie Smalis and musician Rory Grubb, director Maeve Stone sets out to ask questions, starting at the beginning with: What is direct provision and how do we start to talk about it? In a short piece that fuses movement, the voices of asylum seekers and live music, we begin to trace the snakes and ladders of a story so close, it is nearly impossible to see.

LIMBO is a collaboration of the Associate Director of the PAN PAN Theatre, Dublin, Maeve Stone, with dancer/choreographer Angie Smalis and musician Rory Grubb. It is a gripping 45-minutes piece that responds to the controversial direct provision system. In conversation with Limerick based advocacy group , Trinity sociology academic Katie Sheehan and human rights lawyer Shauna Gillan, the director undertook a period of research in advance of the week’s work in which she gathered material on the subject; interviews with refugees and their children, footage, recordings, media responses and official reports. One of the challenges was to look for the best frame to create a human, non-didactic, engaging way of presenting this difficult material. Games are a great leveller, they engage us, disarm us and connect us. The idea was to create a massive snakes and ladders ‘Game of Life’ board that fills the space and corresponds to certain events relating to the journey of a refugee. The cruelty of the system can be in how arbitrary decisions and circumstances feel, from children and adult perspectives; representing this through a game of chance, and giving it life through dance, may highlight the real frustration and damage to real people and families in such a vulnerable position. The play is a work-in-progress, a stimulant for conversation and the beginning of a larger process.

How to see the Other? If someone is at risk of being persecuted in their own country, s/he may go abroad and ask for asylum in another country. Granting ‘asylum’ means giving someone permission to remain in another country because of that risk of persecution. What is everyday life like for adult and children asylum seekers who are living for an indefinite period of time in direct provision –  accommodation provided by the State whilst they await the decision about their future? How can they and their everyday lives become visible? For whom and for what am I responsible? How can I empathize with others struggling to make a home in constant transit?  The performance will provide a stimulant for discussion about questions of care, duty, dignity, responsibility and children’s rights with first year BED students as part of the Ethics Strand of ERB and E.

The project has been led by Dr. Aislinn O’Donnell (Philosophy of Education) and Dr. Sabine Egger (Irish Centre for Transnational Studies, ICTS). Funding has been provided by the Faculty of Education and DICE.  We wish to thank the Lime Tree Theatre and Dr. Michael Finneran for their support.

The  Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (ICTS) will be hosting a round-table workshop on different, (inter)disciplinary perspectives on “Transnational Studies” at Mary Immaculate College on Monday, 16 March, 2015.

Participants in the workshop will discuss in particular the ideas of “translation” and “similarity” between different disciplinary approaches, how this might inform interdisciplinary discussion on aspects of transnationalism, and highlight/cross possible boundaries with regard to disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches in the area. What is meant by “Transnational Studies” in disciplines such as History, Philosophy, Cultural and Literary Studies, Media Studies, Geography or Education? We would like to focus on the texts by Morawska and Bhatti in our discussion, but participants may find the text by Bachmann-Medick of further interest. We are particularly interested in the exchange of ideas by colleagues and postgraduates from various disciplines, those who localise their work in the – broad – area of Transnational Studies and those who would see themselves outside this area, or are simply curious about how to define and approach it.

In his influential work on The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (1959), Erving Goffman highlighted the importance of routine actions and social relationships in the articulation of the self through daily performance. This interdisciplinary conference seeks to analyse performative constructions of the self by interrogating the concepts of performance, identity and embodiment in their broadest sense.

Please click here for more information and the Call for Papers.

From 29 May -1 June, 2014, the Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (ICTS) will host the International Conference of the Gesellschaft für interkulturelle Germanistik (GiG). The conference theme is “Begegnungen in Transiträumen/ Transitorische Begegnungen”. Papers will explore movement and encounters in “transit spaces” in German-language literary and digital texts, film and other media as well as in the German language classroom from various theoretical angles. Encounters between different areas of expertise, from linguistics and German as a Foreign Language to literary, cultural, film and media studies, comparative literature, visual art and music are desirable.

Please click here for more information.

The  Irish Centre for Transnational Studies will be hosting a workshop on the German-American political theorist and philosopher Hannah Arendt on 6^th March (MIC, G10).

We will start with a screening of M. von Trotta’s  Hannah Arendt (2012) film at 1 pm.

We will then discuss two of Arendt’s texts: ‘Truth and Politics’ and ‘The Crisis in Culture’ from 3 pm.

If you are interested in participating, we will be glad to supply you with the texts. Please contact us at christiane.schonfeld[at]mic.ul.ie or niall.keane[at]mic.ul.ie.

Feel free to pass this on to anyone who might be interested.

Do join us!

November 7th, 2013 will mark the hundredth anniversary of the birth of Algerian-born French author, philosopher, and journalist, Albert Camus. To celebrate this centenary, the Camus and Beyond symposium brings together scholars from a variety of disciplines who will present papers on various aspects of Camus’s œuvre.

Workshop Programme

For information on the texts to be discussed during the round table, please email niall.keane@mic.ul.ie

Workshop Description & Report (English)

Workshop Programme (Deutsch / English)

Die interkulturelle Literatur entstand in Europa hauptsächlich aufgrund der postkolonialen Einwanderung und der Arbeitsmigration ab der Mitte des zwanzigsten Jahrhunderts, aufgrund von Exilerfahrung verschiedener Autoren und Autorinnen sowie als Konsequenz der Auflösung von politischen Regimes und Sozialutopien. Sie erweist sich als eine nicht geplante Erweiterung der inhaltlichen und ästhetischen Blickwinkel der nationalen Identitätsdiskurse muttersprachlich verfasster Literatur nach dem zweiten Weltkrieg. Dabei ist zu beobachten, dass die interkulturellen Werke heikle Themen aufwerfen und die Frage nach gesellschaftlicher, sprachlicher, rechtlicher und kultureller Emanzipation neu stellen.

Für die Forschung, die bis vor einigen Jahrzehnten davon ausging, dass eine von Muttersprachler/innen verfasste Literatur die Norm sei, stellen sich angesichts der zahlreichen Veröffentlichungen vielfältige Fragen: Muss eine Autorin, ein Autor, mehrsprachig sein und in der Zweitsprache publizieren, damit das Werk interkulturell wird, bzw. ab wann ist ein literarisches Werk interkulturell zu nennen? Sind Sprachen intrinsisch als interkulturell aufzufassen? Welche Auswirkungen hat die Globalisierung auf das literarische Schaffen von Schriftsteller/innen? Zeichnet sich interkulturelles Schreiben durch eine besondere Nähe zu Autobiografie aus? Spielen räumliche Prozesse hier eine besondere Rolle? Wie ist zwischen dem an sich gegebenen interkulturellen Charakter von Literatur und den Prozessen der letzten Jahrzehnte zu unterscheiden? Wie verhält es sich mit Stereotypenbildung und Trivialisierung in interkulturellen Texten? Warum entscheidet sich eine Schriftstellerin/ein Schriftsteller die Sprache zu wechseln und welche Konsequenz hat diese Entscheidung auf ihr/sein literarisches Schaffen? Gibt es Unterschiede zwischen den interkulturellen Literaturen der verschiedenen europäischen Sprachen und wenn ja, welche?

Ziel des Workshops ist es, einigen dieser Fragen mithilfe von literarischen und poetischen Texten der letzten Jahrzehnte auf den Grund zu gehen.

Workshop Programme

Friday 21 September 2012 saw the official launch of the Irish Centre for Transnational Studies (ICTS) with a workshop dedicated to the theme of Transnational Homes: Identities in Displacement. In her opening address Minister Jan O’Sullivan commended the aims of ICTS and the value of research on the themes of home and identity, particularly in the multi-cultural Ireland of today. The keynote lecture, Walter Benjamin and the City, was given by Professor Stéphane Symons (Catholic University of Louvain), and facilitated by the organiser of the event, Dr. Niall Keane. In a number of sessions, an international group of academics from across disciplines explored issues pertaining to the impacts of transnationalism on images of the home, oriented by various theoretical texts (Benjamin, Foucault, Améry).

The discussion pursued questions relating to transnational spatialities, manifest in their visual, linguistic, corporeal and cultural dimensions. A particular focus was placed on the notion of sites invested in the creation and dismantling of borders, mobilities and multivalent trajectories of identification. Engaging with the emerging literature on transnationalism, one of the aims of the one-day-event was to call into question the ideological appropriation of notions of transnational homes within differing, and often overlapping, discourses of neo-liberalism, cosmopolitanism, multi-culturalism and globalism.