NPPSH Conference

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 Church and the Irish state were opposed to nationalist movements. It was digitized and made available online for scholarly use in 2016. Even prior to digitization it was widely used in scholarly studies, especially its 1966 issue, but so far, no work has focused exclusively on the periodical itself and its links to nationalism. This study will use ‘history of representations’ methods, a cultural history method which analyses social representations in cultural objects and often draws on sociolinguistics. As this research draws on digitized materials, this study is also linked to digital humanities methods. As women’s participation in the revolutionary events was not always recognized, and in keeping with the conference theme, this paper will examine their representation, or lack of, in the Capuchin Annual. It will determine if their under recognition also affected their representations. Through the textual analysis of their mentions in the periodical, it will determine which criteria are used to describe nationalist women. The data will then be compared to men’s representations to see how the patterns differ. Maelle Le Roux started studying for her PhD in January 2018 at University of Limerick, in the Department of History and School of Modern Languages and Applied Linguistics. Her research focuses on the representations of Irish nationalist figures in the Capuchin Annual. She has a Research MA in History from Université Paris-Sorbonne (June 2016), for which she wrote two dissertations, the first on Masculinity in youth literature in France (1960s and 1980s), in 2015, and the second on the representations of the 1916 Easter Rising for children in Ireland (1923-2016), in 2016. Both used cultural history methods.

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 prevalence of the #Repealthe8th campaign, we as a society have seen Irish women (and men) come together to canvas support for the liberalisation of Irish abortion law. The referendum results will be a strong indicator of the societal standpoint on the liberalisation of abortion law in Ireland. However, by analysing the coverage of the upcoming referendum and the Oireachtas debates it has become clear that are bilateral exchanges of stigma, in the form of reactive discourse, between ‘pro-life’ and ‘pro-choice’ proponents. Encompassing the themes of gender and tradition vs modernity, the paper will therefore explore the long standing ‘traditional’ views of female bodily autonomy; and consider if they have remained firm or if a new-found tolerance has taken hold as Irish society faces of a new chapter of bodily autonomy for female citizens. Rebecca Boast is currently an MRes student at the University of Liverpool, studying with the Institute of Irish Studies. Her research is focused on stigma and shame within the abortion debate in Ireland; with a particular focus on the recent referendum. This research will be continued at PhD level, commencing in October 2018 and will introduce a comparative analysis with Malta.

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 and Renk, 2014; Harold, 2016; Jabakhanji, 2016) have been reported. Where parents may no longer depend on previous models of behaviour with increasing experiences of family life as an act of balancing and co-ordinating (Beck-Gernshiem, 1998), it is imperative to discover what work-life balance means for dual-earner Irish families and its influences on both children and parents. This study will focus on how children development is connected to work, socio-economic environment, parental health, parental stress, couple relationship and parent-child relationship conditions. First, employing both 9-months-old and 9 years-old cohort datasets from the GUI study, “longitudinal methods utilizing multilevel modelling techniques and panel designs that address both change over time and dependent data among family members” (Perry Jenkins and MacDermid, 2017) from all waves (years 2008, 2011, 2013) will be conducted. Second, an online qualitative data collection platform informed by the experience sampling method (ESM) – a unique time diary method in collecting information on participants’ activities, thoughts, and emotional states as they occur in natural settings for a week (Hektner, Schmidt, and Csikszentmihalyi 2007), will be constructed to facilitate interview processes. It is hoped that upon interpretation of the two phases can mechanisms and any potential causation effects to be clearly established. Nadiah is a first year postgraduate student who is interested in the research field of children, families, work-life, mental health and socioeconomic well-being, technology use and methodologies. She has previously worked with children and families in a childcare setting.

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 wives and mothers ‘who died in childbirth but haven’t been churched’ (Dixon 2012)? Oral history sources tell us they were also buried there along with suicides, strangers, shipwrecked sailors, murderers and their unfortunate victims, criminals, famine victims, the mentally disabled. All considered unsuitable for burial within consecrated ground. Why would a Catholic ‘woman who had died in or shortly after childbirth’ (Donnelly & Murphy 2008:213) be denied burial in consecrated ground? Apart from mention in oral history little information appears to be available regarding these women who have all but become invisible which makes one question if this invisibility is a reflection of their status in society in rural Ireland during the late 19th and mid twentieth century or is it as a result of Canon laws pertaining to women and childbirth in relation to the traditional Christian ceremony of The Churching of Women mixed with local superstitions and folk-belief concerning post-parturient women? Or possibly it is a potent concoction of all the above elements, society, church and superstition colluding to obscure the memory of these many wives and mothers. Sheena Graham-George is an Orkney based visual artist and is currently half way through her practice-based PhD at Glasgow School of Art. Her research is concerned with memory, place and community in relation to the Irish cillíní, the un-baptised infant burial grounds and disenfranchised grief. Her work as an artist looks at the role of memorializing the marginalized dead through art as a conceivable way for communities to make peace with a past which differs in attitude from the present and the ways that art might communicate universal loss and compassion whilst becoming an integral part of the healing process.

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 distinct categories in an examination of the treatment of women and refugees in Ireland. It will provide contextual analysis of historic and contemporary institutionalisation in light of feminist and critical theory. The role of the church, health services and educational facilities will be analysed with respect to their role in silencing marginalised people. A number of key questions will be central to the paper including: • What are the foundations of institutional practices in Ireland? • Who can speak for whom? Who attempts to do so? • Who is silenced or unheard? • What impact has deliberately silencing women and refugees had on society as a whole? The main argument of the paper will be that institutionalisation in Ireland has and continues to be detrimental to an ethics of sexual and racial difference (Ingram, 2008) through deliberately silencing women and refugees. Aoife is a doctoral student in the Education Department at Maynooth University. She is undertaking research on the education of refugees in Ireland who have fled war and conflict. She is conducting her research through a decolonial lens using Arts-Based Research methods. She has worked as a teacher for over eleven years, including four in Australia where She returned from last July to begin my PhD. She completed her primary degree and post-graduate teacher qualification in Maynooth, while she graduated with a Master of Education from Notre Dame University Australia.