NPPSH Conference

NPPSH Conference
NPPSH Conference Podcast

This is a podcast of the proceedings of the NPPSH Conference 2018.

  1. 03/12/2018

    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.

    20 min
  2. 03/12/2018

    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.

    22 min
  3. 03/12/2018

    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.

    30 min
  4. 03/12/2018

    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.

    23 min
  5. 03/12/2018

    Ep. 22 - Panel 5B - Representation of Irish Nationalist Women - Maelle Le Roux (UL)

    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.

    31 min
  6. 03/12/2018

    Ep. 21 - Panel 5A - Part 3 - Voices of the Referendum - Rebecca Boast (Univ of Liverpool)

    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.

    8 min
  7. 03/12/2018

    Ep. 20 - Panel 5A - Part 2 - Finding balance - Nur Nadiah Binte Zailai (MU)

    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.

    22 min

About

This is a podcast of the proceedings of the NPPSH Conference 2018.

To listen to explicit episodes, sign in.

Stay up to date with this show

Sign-in or sign-up to follow shows, save episodes and get the latest updates.

Select a country or region

Africa, Middle East, and India

Asia Pacific

Europe

Latin America and the Caribbean

The United States and Canada