Monthly Archives: September 2021

Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: PhD Flashtalks

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On the 25th of June, six candidates from the current PhD cohort at Queen’s University Belfast shared a session entitled ‘PhD Flashtalks’ during the Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021. Dr Ricki O’Rawe participated as the chair.

Image credit: Markus Spiske on Unsplash

Margaret Cunningham, who is a second year PhD candidate in French, began the session with a synopsis of her thesis project, which carries the working title ‘Narratives of Disaster in the French Caribbean’. Margaret believes that in the Caribbean context, the French departments of Guadeloupe and Martinique have been largely overlooked in studies of catastrophe. Thus, Margaret has made this silence the focus of her thesis, examining disaster narratives against the backdrop of a colonial and specifically slave past.

Next, Annie Jowett, a first-year Ph.D. student in Irish, discussed her thesis on ‘The Irish Dialect of South Leinster: The Onomastic Evidence’. Through her research, Annie aspires to address and contribute to the gap in linguistic knowledge about the Irish language and discover where the Irish spoken in South Leinster fits into the dialect continuum of the Irish language in Ireland. The Irish language has been obsolete in South Leinster since the turn of the twentieth century. In addition, the linguistic history of the region is complex in terms of language contact; Annie gave the example of the survival of an Old English dialect named Yola which survived in the South-East of the province until the late nineteenth century. Annie is employing placenames in the region as her primary source of dialect evidence, intending to focus on the distribution of stress patterning in local pronunciations. 

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Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: Critical Interactions panel

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On the 25th of June 2021, Dr Dominique Jeannerod (PhD supervisor in French at Queen’s University), Dr Ashley Harris (former PhD student and departmental colleague until end of June 2021) and Ciara Gorman (current PhD supervisee) delivered a session entitled ‘Critical Interactions’ at the Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021. The trio of speakers aimed to highlight how their different respective research objects share structural and methodological affinities translating into common lines of enquiries. The overarching title for their collaborative paper, a preview of a joint panel at the (then) upcoming Society for French Studies conference 2021, was ‘Crime on the Margins: Peripheries, Alienation and Criminalisation of Women’. Whilst each of the three researchers is investigating different time periods and corpuses of French crime fiction, film and media, their papers incorporate many cross-cutting themes. These parallels include marginalization as well as space, place and liminality.

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Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: Child-centred Art at the Mexico-U.S. Border: Ethical Questions and Imaginative Possibilities

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

On the 25th of June, as keynote speaker of the Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group Research Showcase of 2021, Professor Nuala Finnegan of University College Cork gave a plenary lecture entitled ‘Child-centred Art at the Mexico-U.S. Border: Ethical Questions and Imaginative Possibilities’.

Professor Finnegan began her lecture by showing an image of Donald Trump on the cover of Time magazine in June 2018, in which Trump is depicted looking down on a distressed child crying. This is a reconfiguration of a now infamous image, wherein this child is watching her mother being searched at the U.S.-Mexico border. This brought us to the child separation process of April 2018 during the Trump administration, and the inhumanity of this.

Professor Finnegan identified three primary tropes of representation of children at the border: children as dead, distressed, or imprisoned. She criticised the lack of integrity shown within the fields of journalism and politics regarding such representations, as the migrant child and their trauma has often been used for political photo opportunities, or as disaster pornography in humanitarian campaigns. Professor Finnegan therefore covered the faces of children and migrants in the images she used throughout the lecture to respect their privacy and agency. She considered what happens when other representations of children enter the fray, asking: how does this disrupt the narrative?

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Modern Languages CDRG Research Showcase 2021: Lived Experiences Roundtable

This post is part of our Research Initiation Scheme for 2020-2021.

While the importance of research has been placed centre stage during the current Coronavirus crisis, it is often still valorised solely based on quantifiable impact. The Modern Languages Research Showcase, held on Friday 25 June 2021, emphasized how research undertaken in the Modern Languages Core Disciplinary Research Group goes beyond this reductive ideal to be informed by and interrogate real lived experiences, both that of researchers themselves and those of others. The Lived Experiences roundtable, chaired by Dr Rosalind Silvester and Dr. Steven Wilson, foregrounded this multi-directional focus through two PhD students’ work.

Kathryn Nelson defies research’s perceived narrow focus in her trans-disciplinary project examining the role of cultural intermediaries in distributing environmental artwork in Northern Ireland. A practising artist, informed by her MSc in Ecological Management and Conservation and by her childhood connection to nature in South Devon, she articulated her lived experience of its woods and coastline through video, an experience she fears will not be shared by children today. Her own installations have tackled what she called ‘regime shifts’ (Scheffer et. al. 2009), where the smallest details accumulate to form tipping points of irreversible damage, narrating the linear past, present and future life of our oceans, underlining how solutions to these problems are cultural. We must reimagine our culture/nature divide to forge a new eco-culture where all of us understand our unique place in the biome. This was brought to the forefront in the Tate Modern’s exposition of Damien Hirst’s In and Out of Love where curators culturally sanctioned the consumption of the lived experience of dying butterflies for aesthetic pleasure as ‘good art’ and led to our misunderstanding of the vital role these animals play. Far from art being for art’s sake, we depend on cultural intermediaries to influence our understanding of this new world through revaluations of the relationship between consumer and art.

Fig. 1 (left): Current Inshore Marine Life with Taxonomic Labels
Fig. 2 (right): Possible Future – Simplified Marine Life with No Labels… (Artwork by Kathryn and Roy Nelson)

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