Participants
Merav Amir is a lecturer in the School of Natural and Built Environment and Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice at Queen’s University Belfast. She is a cultural and political geographer with particular interest in critical perspectives on security, processes of border making, geographies of embodiment, critical cultural analysis and feminist and queer theory. Her research examines the use of border making technologies in the Israeli control over the occupied Palestinian territory. Recent publications include: ‘Revisiting politicide: state annihilation in Israel/Palestine,’ Territory, Politics, Governance early online (2016); ‘Limits of Dissent, Perils of Activism: Spaces of Resistance and the New Security Logic,’ Antipode 47:3 (2015) 671-688 (with Hagar Kotef); and ‘Women Speaking of National Security: The Case of Checkpoint Watch,’ International Political Sociology 8:4 (2014) 363-378.
Michael Cronin is a Lecturer in English at Maynooth University, specialising in twentieth-century and contemporary Irish literature and in sexuality studies. His publications include: Impure Thoughts: Sexuality, Catholicism and Literature in Twentieth-Century Ireland (Manchester University Press, 2012); ‘Kate OBrien and the Erotics of Liberal Catholic Dissent,’ Field Day Review 6 (2010); and ‘Clubs, closets and catwalks: GAA stars and the politics of contemporary Irish masculinity,’ in Conn Holohan and Tony Tracy (eds), Tiger Tales: Irish Masculinity and Culture 1990-2010 (Palgrave, 2014).
Teresa Degenhardt is a Lecturer in Criminology in the School of Social Sciences, Education and Social Work at Queen’s University Belfast. She is interested in theoretical debates at the intersection of criminological theory, sociology and political theory, and has an interest in investigating issues of crime and governance and punishment and governance, as these relate to wider social changes in cultural practices and norms. She draws on the work of Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben on power, sovereignty, governmentality and forms of exclusion in general, but is also influenced by some post-structuralist feminist writings. Recent publications include: ‘The overlap between war and crime: unpacking Foucault and Agamben’s studies within the context of the war on terror,’ Journal of Theoretical and Philosophical Criminology 5:2 (2013) 29-58; and ‘An analysis of the war police assemblage: the case of Iraq (2003-2015),’ in S. Walklatem and R. McGarry (eds), The Handbook of Criminology and War (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
Stuart Elden is Professor of Political Theory and Geography at the University of Warwick and Monash Warwick Professor in the Faculty of Arts, Monash University. He is the author of Foucault: The Birth of Power (Polity, 2017) and of Foucault’s Last Decade (Polity, 2016); on which see. He blogs at Progressive Geographies. His recent book, The Birth of Territory (University of Chicago Press, 2013) won the Meridian Book Award from the Association of American Geographers and it has been the subject of extensive commentary helpfully collected here. In addition to taking part in the Foucault in Ireland day at the Royal Irish Academy, Stuart Elden is also giving a lecture on his current project, Terrain, at the Geography Department, Maynooth University, 23 March 2017, 4pm, Rhetoric Building, all welcome.
Lisa Godson is a Lecturer and Co-Director of the MA Design History and Material Culture at the National College of Art and Design. She studies the history of design and material culture, and also researches and writes about contemporary design. Current research includes the Irish Research Council-funded Making Memory: the Material and Visual Culture of Commemoration in Ireland since 1800 and a project on gender and the design of medical instruments. Lisa is research collaborator with artists Jesse Jones and Sarah Browne on their major Artangel/Create/Arts Council 2016 national commission In the Shadow of the State (2016). Recent publications include the co-edited volumes Making 1916: Material and Visual Culture of the Easter Rising (Liverpool University Press: 2015); Design Learning in an Age of Austerity (Cumulus: 2015); the co-authored 10,000-word essay ‘Design in Twentieth Century Ireland’ in volume 5 of the History of Art and Architecture of Ireland (Yale/RIA: 2014).
Gerry Kearns is Professor of Human Geography at Maynooth University. He researches at the intersection of historical, medical and political themes in Geography. Recent publications include essays on Primo Levi and memory, on Judith Butler and the BDS movement, and on Stuart Elden’s genealogy of territory. Books include Geopolitics and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2009) and (eds with David Meredith and John Morrissey), Spatial Justice and the Irish Crisis (Royal Irish Academy, 2014).
Kevin Lougheed is a Teaching Fellow in King’s College London. He researches the emergence of state institutions as technologies of government in Ireland throughout the eighteenth- and nineteenth-centuries. He completed his doctoral thesis, National Education and the State: an historical geography of the national school system in nineteenth-century Ireland (Geography, Trinity College, Dublin), in 2013 and related publications include ‘“Not So Much for Their Sake as for Its Own”: The State and the Geography of National Education in Pre-Famine Ireland,’ Historical Geography 42 (2014) 72-92. He is also Ka research associate to the ERC funded project ‘NorFish – North Atlantic Fisheries: An Environmental History, 1400-1700’ based at the School of Histories and Humanities in TCD.
Caroline McGregor, of NUI Galway, is Professor at the School of Political Science and Sociology with lead responsibility for the discipline of social work. She is Director of the Masters in Social Work Programme and teaches a range of subjects including social work with vulnerable children and families, childhood and Children’s rights, Law and Human rights and cultural competence in social work. She is also a Senior Research Fellow at the UNESCO Child and Family Research Centre. Caroline McGregor (formerly Skehill) is author of History of the Present of Child Protection and Welfare Social Work in Ireland (Edwin Mellen Press, 2004) and has an ongoing interest in the application of Foucault’s ‘history of the present’ to social work and child welfare. Recent publications include: (with Mirja Eila Satka), ‘Michel Foucault and Dorothy Smith in Case File research: Strange Bed-Fellows or Complimentary Thinkers,’ Qualitative Social Work, 11:2 (2011) 191-205; and (with Suzanne Quin), ‘Revisiting our History post-‘Celtic Tiger’: So, What’s New?,’ in Alastair Christie, Brid Featherstone, Suzanne Quin, and Trish Walsh (eds), Social Work in Ireland: Changes and Continuities (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Deirdre McGowan is Head of Law and Assistant Head of School of Languages Law and Social Science at Dublin Institute of Technology. With an interest in Post-Structuralist Legal Theory, she completed a PhD in Law, “The Normalising Power of Marriage Law: An Irish Genealogy 1945 – 2010″ (Maynooth University, 2015). Related publications include: ‘Governed by Marriage Law: An Irish Genealogy,’ Social and Legal Studies 25:3 (2016) 311–331; and ‘Impeding Free Movement with Marriage Law: The Civil Registration (Amendment) Act 2014,’ Irish Journal of Family Law 19:2 (2016).
John Morison is Professor of Jurisprudence at Queen’s University Belfast. His research interests encompass constitutional law and theory as well as e-government, e-democracy and algorithmic government. Recent publications include: ‘Algorithmic Governmentality: Techo-optimism and the Move towards the Dark Side,’ Computers and Law 27:3 (2016); ‘The Democratic Dynamics of Government Consultations. Speaking Freely and Listening Properly,’ in Marie Edstrom, Andrew T. Kenyon and Eva-Marie Svensson (eds), Blurring the Lines: Market-Driven and Democracy-Driven Freedom of Expression (NORDICOM, 2016); and ‘What Makes An Important Case? An Agenda for Research,’ Legal Information Management 12:4 (2012) 251–261.
Anne Mulhall is a lecturer in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin, where she directs the Centre for Gender, Culture and Identities and the MA in Gender, Sexuality and Culture. She teaches and writes in the areas of Gender, Feminist and Queer Studies, Critical Theory, and contemporary Irish writing and culture. She co-edited Irish Postmodernisms and Popular Culture with Wanda Balzano and Moynagh Sullivan (2007), and ‘Queering the Issue’, a special issue of the Irish University Review on Queer Irish Studies (2013). Recent publications include: ‘A cure for melancholia? Queer sons, dead mothers and the fantasy of multiculturalism in McCabe’s and Jordan’s Breakfast on Pluto(s),’ in Margrit Shildrick and Noreen Giffney (ends), Theory on the Edge: Irish Studies and the Politics of Sexual Difference (essays in honour of Ailbhe Smyth) (Palgrave, 2013) and ‘”Now the blood is in the room“: The spectral feminine in the work of Anne Enright,’ in Claire Bracken and Susan Cahill (eds), Anne Enright (Irish Academic Press, 2011).
Tim Stott is an art historian and critic of contemporary art, Lecturer in Art History and Theory at Dublin Institute of Technology and Associate Researcher at the Graduate School of Creative Arts and Media. His research interests concern the history and criticism of contemporary art, in particular the organisational turn, systems aesthetics, artistic uses of play and games, and convergences of art and design through ornamentation and information design. In 2016, he was Visiting Research Fellow at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds. Recent publications include: Play and Participation in Contemporary Arts Practices (Routledge, 2015); and ‘Lessons in Playing: Robert Morris’ Bodyspacemotionthings as a Biopolitical Environment,’ in Malcolm MacLean, Wendy Russell, and Emily Ryall (eds), Philosophical Perspectives on Play (Routledge, 2015).
Karen E. Till is Professor of Cultural Geography at Maynooth University. Her geo-ethnographic research examines the significance of place in personal and social memory, and the ongoing legacies of state-perpetrated violence. Karen’s curatorial work invites local experts, artists, scholars and publics to explore how creative practices might enable more responsible and sustainable approaches to caring for places, shared environments and cities. She is Director of the MA in Geography, the Space&Place Research Collaborative, and founding co-Convener of the Mapping Spectral Traces international network of artists, practitioners and scholars. Most recently, she convened MST8: The Place of the Wound. Publications include The New Berlin: Place, Politics, Memory (2005), Mapping Spectral Traces (2010), Textures of Place (2001) and Walls, Borders and Boundaries (2012). Karen’s book in progress, Wounded Cities, highlights the significance of place-based memory-work and ethical forms of care at multiple scales that may contribute to creating more socially just futures.
Steve Wilmer is Professor Emeritus at Trinity College Dublin, where he has been Head of the School of Drama, Film and Music. He is the author of Theatre, Society and the Nation: Staging American Identities (Cambridge University Press, 2002), and has edited and co-edited numerous books, including (with Audronė Žukauskaitė) Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism (Oxford University Press, 2010), Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies (Routledge 2016).
Mick Wilson is Head of the Valand Academy of Arts, Gothenburg University (2012-); member of European Artistic Research Network (2005-); formerly chair of SHARE (2010-13); founder Dean of the GradCAM, Ireland (2008-2012); and first Head of Research, NCAD, Ireland (2005-7). Edited volumes include Curating and the Educational Turn (Open Editions, 2010), SHARE Handbook (2013), and Curating Research (Open Books, 2014). Ongoing projects include “the food thing” (2011-); and “dead public” (2009-).
Audronė Žukauskaitė is Head of Research at the Lithuanian Culture Research Institute. Her recent publications include the monograph Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s Philosophy: The Logic of Multiplicity (2011, in Lithuanian), and an edited volume titled Intensities and Flows: Gilles Deleuze’s Philosophy in the Context of Contemporary Art and Politics (2011, in Lithuanian). She also co-edited (with S. E. Wilmer) Interrogating Antigone in Postmodern Philosophy and Criticism (Oxford University Press, 2010), Deleuze and Beckett (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and Resisting Biopolitics: Philosophical, Political and Performative Strategies (Routledge, 2016).