Ep. 27 - Keynote Lecture - Ailbhe Smyth - ‘We call this edge our home'
1h 9m
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NPPSH Conference
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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.
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Ep. 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.
Ep. 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 published during the victorian era. In addition to outlining the process by which this analysis was arrived at, this paper will consider some of the methodological tensions surrounding computational methods operationalised within the context of literary studies. As a discipline, the study of literature has become increasingly indebted to analyses of broader cultural and historical trends at the expense of an attention to generic developments inculcated by particular authors or works. This has resulted in an ambivalence with regard to the sorts of categorical reasoning required in order for computational analyses such as this one to function. This paper will therefore suggest a means of productively fusing the dialectical materialism of contemporary literary studies with stylometry without doing a disservice to experimental design or seeking to re-animate a retrograde formalism. Chris Beausang is a second year doctoral student in An Foras Feasa in Maynooth University under the supervision of Professor Susan Schreibman. He completed his undergraduate degree in English Studies and his MPhil in Digital Humanities & Culture in Trinity College Dublin, and has written dissertations on Roddy Doyle's historical fiction and quantitative approaches to the prose style of Samuel Beckett. His research investigates the development of modernist literary style through computational methods.
Ep. 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 home as a contested site to the women’s heterosexual identity, desire, and economic conundrum, and reveals the history of heterosexual femininity not as a steady and voiceless conformity to the patriarchal hegemony, but a constantly reforming effort to improve and undermine the traditional heterosexual structure in the patriarchal design of suppressive spatial division, in which home is considered as a socially and economically rightful realm for women to reside and to identify their gender with. By reading her novels following the proposed method, the researcher aims to show how Whipple’s domestic romance about the quiet disquiet from the middle ground and the mid-century deserves to be reinstalled in the feminist literary canon and protected from oblivion and neglect. Pimpawan holds an MA in English Language & Literature from Thammasat University Thailand and an MA in Contemporary Literature from the University of Liverpool. She started her PhD in English in 2016 at the School of Language, Literature, Music and Visual Culture, University of Aberdeen. Her current research interests include spatial turn in literary theory, women’s literary history, women and romance writing, gendered space, and domesticity in women’s novel.
Ep. 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 history and continued plight of the indigenous peoples of Guatemala in the pursuit of their collective cultural survival. The measures, actions and inaction taken by the Guatemalan government through acts of both physical and cultural genocide. Secondly this piece will analyse the Canadian residential school system. The State and Church sponsored campaign ran with the slogan ‘don’t kill the child, kill the Indian in the child’. Over the course of more than one hundred years the central goals of Canada’s Aboriginal policy were to eliminate aboriginal lifestyle and custom by forcibly weakening the traditional and cultural links that bind them as a people. This piece will then assess the lack of prosecution of the cultural element to acts of genocide at present and question the validity of this crime in the indigenous context. A shared history of violence and oppression that has scared the face of two different nations. Gerard Maguire is a second year PhD student in the Department of Law, Maynooth University. His field of research is in the area of the rights of minorities and indigenous peoples with a focus on the dangers posed by cultural genocide to vulnerable populations.
Ep. 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 paper investigates the similar aspects of how memory and trauma are represented. Debates concerning the methodology and historical impact of documentary approaches have resonated throughout trauma studies, and this paper demonstrates how filmed research that has generated mass public debate have simultaneously attracted significant controversies. Considering the debate established by Susan Sontag that visual evidence of trauma are a means of “making real (“or more real”) matters that the privileged or merely safe would prefer to ignore” questions surrounding documentary’s aim at producing an authentic reading of trauma, and how this relates to intellectual discourse that exists outside of historical locations of traumatic memory, frame the narrative of how postcolonial trauma and memory studies are taught in classrooms. Westley Barnes is a 3rd year PhD candidate in the Department of Art, Media and American Studies at the University of East Anglia (UEA), where he is currently completing his thesis which is entitled ‘American dream, American disillusionment: Forms as ideology and the discontent of cultural assimilation in Michael Chabon’s Post-2000 Fiction’. He obtained an MA in American Literature at UCD in 2012. His interests include postwar/contemporary American, British and Irish fiction, the influence of continental philosophy on contemporary fiction, trauma studies and contemporary film and documentary.