Dr Mullen's recent panel appearance at Liverpool's Wowfest highlighted the contribution that arts and literature can play in championing marginalised voices alongside academic writing and research. We took the opportunity to hear her thoughts on the subject and the role that writing plays in furthering her research aims. See the full conversation below:
"Art can reach places facts and figures cannot..."
Both WowFest and the Breaking Ground Ireland project aim to foreground literature and the arts as mediums to champion marginalised voices and highlight activism. Could you speak a bit about the value you see in artistic engagement with these subjects as distinct from say academic research?
Dr Mullen: Art can reach places facts and figures cannot, as it carries emotion and memory along with resistance in ways that stay with us, not through logic but through feeling. Research asks us to stay detached, but art invites us to come close, to witness and feel the weight of injustice personally.
Your writing has explored your own life story as a means of complicating monolithic notions of Irish identity. Have you found writing in this autobiographic mode rewarding and does it come with any challenges?
Dr Mullen: When I write about my own life, it is not just to tell a story, it is to question the stories we have been told about who belongs here and about what it means to be Irish. That can be uncomfortable, especially when institutions try to turn personal experience into something neat and representative. But in sitting with that discomfort, something more honest can emerge.
Would you have any words of advice for Irish writers from ethnic minority or marginalised backgrounds in terms of confidently adding their voice to the public conversation and perceptions of modern Irish identity?
Dr Mullen: Speak whether you are invited to or not, as your voice matters as it stands, not because it conforms to familiar ideas of Irishness, but because it reveals what we have long chosen not to see. Ireland will not change by forcing people to disappear, it can only change by hearing and seeing those who refuse to be made invisible.