Early Career Researcher Poster Showcase
Each year, the Trinity Long Room Hub hosts up to 50 of Trinity’s PhD students and early career researchers from across the Arts and Humanities. We are committed to showing how their research provides unique perspectives on societal challenges.
Early Career Researcher Poster Showcase 2026
Arushi Sharma | Law | Fortifying Financial Frontiers: Data Protection, Governance and AI in Banking and Finance | arsharma@tcd.ie
The digital transformation of financial services has fundamentally altered the way personal data is collected, processed, shared, and used in decision-making. From online banking and digital payments to algorithmic profiling and artificial intelligence-driven financial services, financial institutions increasingly rely on vast quantities of personal data to assess risk, deliver services, and make decisions that can significantly affect individuals. While these developments offer opportunities for innovation and efficiency, they also raise important questions about privacy, accountability, transparency, and the protection of fundamental rights.
This thesis examines the regulation of personal data within the banking and financial services sector through the lens of data protection law, governance theory, and emerging AI regulation. It explores how contemporary legal frameworks seek to balance technological innovation with the protection of individuals’ rights and interests, focusing particularly on the operation of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in Ireland and the Digital Personal Data Protection Act (DPDPA) in India.
The research adopts a comparative approach, analysing the legal, regulatory, and institutional structures that govern financial data in both jurisdictions. It investigates how key concepts such as accountability, transparency, consent, risk-based regulation, and automated decision-making operate in practice, and evaluates whether existing frameworks are capable of responding to increasingly complex forms of data processing within financial services.
A central argument of the thesis is that traditional data protection frameworks are being challenged by the growing use of artificial intelligence and automated decision-making systems. As financial institutions increasingly rely on predictive analytics, algorithmic profiling, and AI-driven assessments, new regulatory questions emerge concerning explainability, fairness, governance, and oversight. The thesis therefore considers whether existing data protection mechanisms remain adequate in the AI era or whether new approaches to governance are required.
By bringing together data protection law, regulatory theory, financial services regulation, and AI governance, this research contributes to ongoing debates about how legal systems can safeguard individual rights while supporting innovation in increasingly data-driven financial environments. Ultimately, the thesis seeks to identify both the strengths and limitations of current regulatory models and to propose pathways for more effective governance of financial data in an age of rapid technological change.
The thesis also considers how different regulatory traditions approach the governance of financial data. By comparing Ireland, operating within the broader European Union data protection framework, with India’s emerging digital data protection regime, the research highlights both convergences and divergences in approaches to accountability, enforcement, data subject rights, and regulatory oversight. This comparative perspective provides insight into how jurisdictions at different stages of regulatory development are responding to common challenges posed by digital finance and artificial intelligence.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dora Leu | Creative Arts | Memory Lost / Memory Gained: Videotape, Personal History and Failing Media in Contemporary Fiction Filmmaking | Funded by the Trinity Research Doctorate Award | leut@tcd.ie
When you think of your childhood, what kind of images have you learned to remember?
An ongoing and multiplying trend in contemporary cinema has seen filmmakers return to obsolete video technologies and early digital aesthetics, despite the discontinuation of formats such as the VHS or MiniDV cassettes in the 2000s. My research explores how this trend is reflected within contemporary fiction filmmaking, focusing on the use of video for fictional purposes and on the role played by videotape and cassette technologies in representing identity, personal history and personal stories on screen. I argue that, despite a current era of retromania (Reynolds, 2011) and retrospectacle (Rosenkrantz, 2016), this return to video technologies is not fuelled by mere nostalgia as much as it responds to a series of shifts in visual culture and capitalises on the intrinsic capacity of cassette-based video, as a volatile and direct medium, for portraying and imagining processes of memory. In other words, the return of filmmakers to cassette-based and cassette-reminiscent media reflects a new visual language for thinking up the recent past.
As a secondary focus, my research is interested in how this trend of deteriorated, low-fidelity and pixelated images challenges the common high-clarity and high-fidelity standard of contemporary film language, and seeks to position the return to disused, cassette-based technologies as a form of yearning for unstable and failing media in the face of the current cultural crises affecting physical media. Additionally, it seeks to position this return to “old” video in relation to the new screen anxieties generated by the online, ephemeral media, and artificial intelligence.
This poster is based on one of my main case studies for this research, Charlotte Wells’ Aftersun (2022), in which a daughter (Celia Rowlson-Hall) rewinds through a series of video cassettes reminiscing about one childhood summer holiday with her father (Paul Mescal). The multiple superimposed and interlaced images of Calum (Mescal) and 11 year-old Sophie (Frankie Coorio) are intended to convey my interest in the unstable nature of video cassettes and the degradation and desynchronisation that they experience over time, as well as the aesthetics of deterioration as a recurrent formal feature of videographic cinema. This instability of the medium is what is often capitalised upon as an ideal visualiser for processes of memory, and for the instability and failability of human memory itself. As such, the “memory lost/memory gained” binary also present in the title of my research reflects the interplay and substitution between two concepts sharing the same name of “memory”: a video cassette’s capacity for storage and the human ability for retention and recollection, both volatile and susceptible to change and decay.
Image Credit
Stills from Aftersun (2022, dir. Charlotte Wells, prod. Unified Theory, Pastel, Tango, Screen Scotland, BFI, BBC Film)
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Dr Bronwen Gulkis | Visiting Research Fellow | University of St Andrews | Persian-language Manuscripts in the Collections of Trinity College Library
| gulkisb@tcd.ie
I am an art historian of South Asia and the Islamic world, and my research considers the Islamic “arts of the book” in their global and material contexts.
Few scholars and visitors who come to see Trinity’s renowned library are aware of the scope of its global collections. One major collecting area that remains overlooked is the library’s holdings of Persian-language materials from Iran, Central Asia, and India. These comprise more than fifty works, often catalogued only by their title and the name of their donor. Documenting this collection both provides a key resource to researchers and highlights the long history of Irish connections in the region.
Until the nineteenth century, Persian was spoken across a wide swath of Asia, a cultural sphere sometimes defined by Islam, but which was religiously and ethnically diverse. Shahab Ahmed described this phenomenon as the “Balkans-to-Bengal Complex,” a vast region sharing a common understanding of scholarship, literature, and visual culture. Persian manuscripts in Western collections such as Trinity’s offer only a fraction of the canon that would be known to an educated citizen of Tehran or Bombay. Yet this fragmentary picture reveals key concepts about early modern collecting, attitudes towards Iran and India, and the role of Irish figures in this process.
I emphasize these concepts in my poster, which is a collaged “exquisite corpse” of notable Indian and Irish figures, superimposed over an eighteenth-century map of Iran and the Persian Gulf. The British East India Company maintained a foothold in this strategically important region, and several Trinity manuscripts from Iran may be traced to George Digges la Touche (1747–1803), the son of a well-known Dublin banking family who joined the Company mission to Basra. Other manuscripts were owned by prominent Anglo-Irish figures, like the famed Orientalist Sir Gore Ouseley or the political philosopher Edmund Burke, whose statue stands at the gates of the College today; this is the lowermost figure in the collage.
Meanwhile, many manuscripts from the Indian subcontinent were direct spoils of war, casting light on the outsize role of Irish people in the British imperial project. The other figures in the collage are two rulers who rose to prominence during this turbulent period: renowned aesthete Shuja ad-Daula of Awadh, and Tipu Sultan of Mysore. When the latter was defeated after a prolonged conflict in 1799, his art collection was dispersed as trophies across the British empire, including examples at Trinity. This event was one of many which effected a shift in East India Company perceptions of South Asia and Iran, and increasingly imperialist approaches towards cultural heritage. One manuscript in the Trinity collection bears a note saying it was seized during the looting of Delhi in 1857, and others were sold off from the imperial library of the Mughal emperors, whose dwindling power occasioned the British takeover of the Subcontinent. Trinity’s Persian manuscripts bring Ireland into conversation with these complex pathways, and are a reminder of how the “Balkans to Bengal” has impacted global art and culture.
Image Credits:
Tipu Sultan of Mysore, ca. 1790 V&A IS.266-1952
Shuja-ud-daula, Nawab of Awadh, by Tilly Kettle, 1772. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection B1976.7.48
Edmund Burke, statue by J.H. Foley R.A., 1865. Yale Center for British Art, B1997.24.1
Background: Ottens Reinier and Josua, Regnum persicum, Imperium turcicum in Asia, russorum provinciae ad mare Caspium, 1750.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Eirini Polychronaki | Linguistics, Speech and Communication Sciences | Impact of Socially Constructed Self-Regulated Learning on Learning Outcomes in the Case of Students Enrolled in ELE-Provided Courses in Ireland | polychre@tcd.ie
Learning a foreign language involves much more than attending classes and studying assigned course materials. Learners' self-awareness and management of their thoughts, emotions, behaviour, motivation and learning environment are necessary to achieve personally meaningful goals. This strategic capacity is commonly described as self-regulated learning (SRL), a process through which learners plan, monitor, evaluate and adapt their learning over time (Oxford, 2017; Panadero, 2017; Zimmerman, 2000).
Although SRL has been widely associated with positive learning outcomes, limited attention has been given to how adult learners in self-funded English language programmes develop and sustain self-regulatory practices. This context is particularly relevant in Ireland, where many adult learners make significant personal and financial investments in their language education while balancing employment, migration-related challenges and family responsibilities.
My research explores how adult English language learners regulate their learning over time to progress towards their learning objectives. Working with individual students from a private language school in Dublin, I investigate the often-invisible processes that form the core of language learning. By examining learners’ experiences and strategies, my aim is to contribute to a deeper understanding of learner development in self-funded educational settings. Another aim is to inform pedagogical, as well as institutional practices and educational tools that support learner autonomy and well-being.
This poster draws on Plato's allegory of the cave as a metaphor for language learning. The book entitled THE Correct Way symbolises the common misconception that success depends on a single learning method, while the cave represents limiting illusions about the importance of innate ability to learn a language. In contrast, the exit from the cave symbolises self-regulated learning: the strategic capacity to manage one's learning effectively. The central message of the poster is that language learning success is primarily the result of strategic approaches rather than natural aptitude.
References
Oxford, R. L. (2017). Teaching and researching language learning strategies: Self-regulation in context (2nd ed.). Routledge. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315719146
Panadero, E. (2017). A Review of Self-Regulated Learning: Six Models and Four Directions for Research. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 422. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00422
Zimmerman, B. J. (2000). Attaining self-regulation: A social cognitive perspective. In M. Boekaerts, P. R. Pintrich, & M. Zeidner (Eds.), Handbook of self-regulation (pp. 13–39). Academic Press. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-012109890-2/50031-7
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Emily Cunniffe | Law | A Just Transition for Whom? Migrant Workers' Labour Rights in the Context of Climate Change | ecunniff@tcd.ie
Migrant workers are employed across all sectors of most economies. In the EU, approximately 6% of the workforce is made up of non-EU nationals. Migrant workers are more likely than national workers to be employed in low-pay sectors as well as in sectors likely to face significant consequences as a result of climate change. These sectors include farming and fishing. These two sectors have long been shaped by the climate, but climate change is exacerbating these effects and are making working conditions more dangerous, from heatwaves raising temperatures in glasshouses, to storms at sea making fishing expeditions increasingly unpredictable.
Today, in the face of climate change and environmental degradation, discussions have emerged about a transition to a greener economy. New economic models have been proposed, from solidarity economies to models of degrowth and postgrowth. While there remains disagreement as to the type of economy that should be pursued, it is clear that our understandings of work and the role of labour law will shift. It is in this context that the concept of a just transition has gained prominence, one that ensures that workers and communities are not adversely affected by the transition. A just transition is one that seeks to address current inequalities and prevent future ones.
Although migrant workers make up a significant proportion of the workforce in sectors like fishing and farming in the EU, in most countries, their labour and social rights tend to be more restrictive than those of national workers. Migrant workers are also often understood primarily through the lens of meeting labour demand to address labour shortages, and less so as workers and members of a broader society who can participate in a transition.
The central aim of this PhD thesis is to understand the socio-legal position of migrant workers in the EU in the face of climate change. In other words, it seeks to understand the coverage of social and labour rights for migrants in the context of transitioning to a climate-neutral economy. To what extent are they covered in the face of climate-related redundancies? Do they have access to health insurance? Do they participate in trade unions? Can they raise concerns about unsafe working conditions?
The thesis starts by examining environmental, labour and migration legislation at EU level. It then examines two case studies of Ireland and Spain. It looks at migrant workers employed in farming and fishing in both countries. This entails an analysis of both the legislation in Ireland and Spain, as well as interviews with trade unions, employers and NGOs in both countries to understand how the law works on the ground. The thesis then identifies current gaps in law and in practice that may exclude migrant workers from being protected in the transition to a greener economy.
Image Credit: Nathalia Oliveira
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Gregory Walls | Histories and Humanities | A Continuity of Crime and Violence? Post-Conflict Lives in Independent Ireland | Funded by Research Ireland | wallsg@tcd.ie
This thesis explores how independent Ireland, and its people navigated the adjustment to life in the aftermath of the Irish War of Independence (1919-21) and Irish Civil War (1922-23). How individuals, communities, and the State in post-war Ireland experienced the aftermath of the Irish revolution has often been taken for granted or overlooked. Narratives of how ordinary people overcame disaffection toward the new State and personal doubts about the violence that they witnessed and experienced, can be complicated and better understood by tracing how the nature of violence in Ireland evolved into the interwar years. The methodological approach seeks to complicate rigid theories of violence, challenge dates of official conflict, and reorient the Irish revolutionary years in the context of the criminality and violence that continued into the peacetime that followed. The thesis blends macro-historical state-down approaches to the newly independent Irish state, with micro-historical case studies of place and theme. This blended approach allows for a deeper and more grounded interrogation of how those bigger shifts resonated with and impacted individuals and local communities.
The poster, which mimics a newspaper reporting the killing of a Sinn Féin judge in 1920, during the War of Independence, teases at one strand of the thesis. The targeting of judges, jurors and state agents, like the police, continued in the years after official revolution had ended and provokes consideration of how a society returns to ‘normal’ after a sustained period of conflict.
Questions around the role of firearms in a post-conflict society, are pivotal for understanding the perceived threats and obstacles to restoring order and returning to normality after a decade of upheaval. What constitutes a return to normal behaviour or defining what ‘normal’ conditions looked like, can be considered through analysing recurring acts of violence, criminality and challenges to authority, and assessing how they were dealt with by individuals and the State. Broader concerns of persisting land tensions and older animosities that festered through the revolutionary years help to complicate the narrative that acts of crime and violence in this period were solely about revolutionary politics. How such acts were dealt with by the new State, and why and how certain acts were deemed criminal, or not, reflects the complexity in defining what ‘criminal’ might be construed as in the aftermath of a political revolution.
This research primarily relies on sources held in Irish state archives (National Archives and Military Archives), and the thesis will be among the first to include new source material, like Irish prisoner files and census records, released in 2026. The manner in which these sources are woven together, focusing on the interactions of people, the hopes, fears and expectations they held – at a State, societal and individual level – enables a closer reading of the networks and processes by which people sought to rebuild or get on with their lives. The thesis forms part of a broader Research Ireland-funded project, Witnessing War Making Peace: Testimonies of revolution and restraint in inter-war Ireland.
Image Credit:
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Iseult Ní Chonchúir | Oideachais | Education | Eispéiris Mhúinteoirí agus Scoláirí Gaeilge ar an Oideolaíocht Chruthaitheach ag Leibhéal na Sraithe Sóisearaí | Teachers' and Students' Experiences of Creative Pedagogy in Junior Cycle Irish | Funded by Trinity College Dublin | inchonch@tcd.ie
Peig has become a powerful symbol of Irish language learning and of wider public perceptions of how Irish is taught and learned in schools. Without dismissing the lived experiences associated with the reading of Peig, it is worth noting that the text has not been on the curriculum since 1995.
The teaching and learning of Irish has long been a subject of debate. Having taught Irish at post-primary level and now working with both practising and student teachers, I am often struck by narratives that portray the teaching of Irish in a negative light. These accounts contrast sharply with my own professional experience, where I regularly encounter highly committed teachers employing a wide range of creative and learner-centred approaches.
My research focuses on Lin’s (2011) creative pedagogy in Junior Cycle Irish. I am interested in teachers’ and students’ experiences of creativity, with a particular focus on how teachers foster creativity, how they teach creatively, and how students engage in creative learning as Gaeilge.
My poster represents the contrast between public discourse and my own experience of teaching Irish. The photograph is from my classroom: pastel fairy lights drape the clár bán, Halloween decorations are dotted around the room, a salt lamp glows softly in the corner, and a reed diffuser sits on the table. As a teacher, I was conscious of the learning environment and deliberately incorporated these elements to create a positive and inviting classroom space that fostered wellbeing, playfulness, creativity and a sense of belonging.
Tables were arranged in clusters to encourage group work, collaboration and conversation. Movie props, including clapperboards and Oscars, promoted a playful atmosphere as students took on the roles of scriptwriters, actors, and filmmakers using iMovie. Visable around the room are examples of creative approaches to language learning: a ransom-note collage inspired by the story Díoltas an Mhadra Rua; lyrics from An Cailín Álainn adapted with emojis to provide visual scaffolding and promote active engagement; an artistic interpretation of An Chailleach Bhéara from Pearse’s Mise Éire, which was drawn on the classroom windows; a Labhairt na Gaeilge poster, created on Canva, which encouraged students to reflect on their use of Irish and set goals for the next lesson. Also visible is a colourful Intinní Foghlama poster, where I would write the learning intentions for each lesson. When the original went missing in the summer of 2022, my third-year Irish class replaced it without prompting - printing, colouring and signing a new one.
Pádraig Pearse (1916) encouraged teachers to bring to pupils “so infectious an enthusiasm as shall kindle new enthusiasm” (p.28). There are a myriad of Irish language teachers doing so the length and breadth of the country. It’s time to hear from them and learn from them.
To learn more about Iseult's work, please contact inchonch@tcd.ie or follow @iseultnichonchuir on Instagram.
Tagairtí
Lin, Y.-S. (2011). Fostering creativity through education – A conceptual framework of creative pedagogy. Creative Education, 2(3), 149–155. https://doi.org/10.4236/ce.2011.23021
Pearse, P. (1916). The murder machine. Corpus of Electronic Texts. https://celt.ucc.ie/published/E900007-001/index.html
Image - dúchas.ie
“An Bailiúchán Grianghraf, M001.18.00299” ó Dúchas © Cnuasach Bhéaloideas Éireann, UCD agus faoi cheadúnas CC BY-NC 4.0.
Song Verse - Rann as an amhrán An Cailín Álainn le Tomás Mac Eoin
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Kristen Poli | English | Anorexic Realism: Self-Starvation and its Critics in Contemporary Fiction | polik@tcd.ie
My project examines how a subset of contemporary novels and critical texts work together to legitimize self-starvation as a form of intellectual, political, and existential refusal.
Focusing on recent works by Sally Rooney, Ottessa Moshfegh, and Natasha Brown, I argue that these writers aestheticize the withdrawal of the hungry female body, using a set of formal techniques to conflate refusal with lucidity and agency. In addition to examining these novels, my project analyzes how popular and academic literary critics retroactively interpret self-starvation as feminist refusal, anti-capitalist withdrawal, or ironic statement.
This process–in which critics supply conceptual weight to an already-romanticized aesthetic trend–produces "anorexic realism", a state in which starvation is the most sensical path to political participation on and off the page. My goal is not to pathologize characters nor dismiss critics, but to clarify the popular-scholarly cycle by which symptoms become statements.
As a practice-based PhD, my project is completed by an original novel conceived as a counterexample to "anorexic realism". My creative work uses a different grammar—one that declines to participate in an aesthetic economy that conflates self-determination with starvation.
By naming and historicizing this convention within a broader understanding of neoliberal politics—and by attempting to write against it—my project asks what is at stake when a literature of disappearance is celebrated as a literature of resistance. The aim is to understand the textual process by which hunger becomes argument, and to create a novel alternative.
Image Credit
Intravenous Valium Roche. 1977–1983. British Journal of Anaesthesia. Health Advertisements Database from Ebling Sources (HADES), Ebling Library for the Health Sciences, U of Wisconsin–Madison, digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/IYMRNCQRAF6EC8O. Advertisement.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Lucy McCabe | Creative Arts | 'Writing Lucia Joyce': Performative Biography and Collaborative Film Authorship |Funded by Research Ireland/Government of Ireland Postgraduate Scholarship | mccabelu@tcd.ie
Born from a creative writing project, my PhD asks the question: what would we put in a Lucia Joyce museum?
From fragmentary artworks, illusive dance histories, and recuperative archival work, I propose that any Lucia Joyce museum would have to account for the historical absence of figures like Lucia Joyce, as it is being revisited and reimagined in contemporary arts practice. The result is a form of collaborative authorship that rethinks the role of the solo artist, to instead embrace hybridity and a multiplicity of perspectives on our past.
Well known in Irish literary history as the daughter of modernist writer James Joyce, Lucia Joyce has become the focus of recent artworks in Ireland and abroad that span fiction, theatre, instrumental music, visual art, performance and dance films. Since a 2003 biography by Carol Loeb Schloss, "To Dance in the Wake', which repositioned Lucia as a European dance artist in her own right, these art interventions have joined the work of biography and history in reframing the 20th-century dancer on her own terms. There is a fascination with Lucia's talent and early achievements, as much as with the historical forces that challenged her artistic development in life and resulted in troubling institutionalisations. In the wake of these pressures and silences, the museum I imagine in this poster is an invitation to rethink how we might remember and find purchase in these stories and fragments, celebrating the work of artists lost to history but still present in embodied material forms:
On one side of the poster, we have an illustration by Lucia herself, a dancing figure that is also a puzzle; on the other, a portrait by the American photographer Berenice Abbott, who captured the dancer's unique style.
My practice in the film department starts from this question and therefore examines our attachment to and fascination with the younger Joyce as an ethical and aesthetic problem. I begin with nonfiction writing, and at the end of my four years of research, will offer my own version of a biographical film script - one that allows these questions their own space and makes room for Lucia's authorial signature within the work.
This project is grounded in film studies research, where women filmmakers have often grappled with the problem of tragic female histories. I locate filmmakers who have instead found collaborative and performative ways of coming to terms with histories like Lucia's, often by countering tragic narratives to find their own way. The strategies I've gathered - like the joyful feminism of Belgian filmmaker Agnès Varda, or the ecological narratives of Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher - are chosen strategies, selected for their helpfulness in challenging some of the tragic modes of storytelling that dominate retrospective viewpoints. I invite anyone who looks at the poster to find their own methods of retelling the past, using the imaginary Museum of Forgotten Artists as a starting point.
Image Credits
Illustration: Lucia Joyce/www.abebooks.co.uk
Photograph: Berenice Abbott/Getty
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Mackenzie R.B. Batista | Philosophy | Independence Movements and the Pursuit of Self-Determination | batistam@tcd.ie
Independence Movements are groups that seek to represent a political community in pursuit of self-determination; each with their own particular vision of the future of their community and the type of polity they ought to have. Philosophical literature tends to focus on a community at large, their right to self-determination, and the conditions they must meet to achieve independent statehood, which results in an oversimplified view of the communities themselves and a narrow understanding of self-determination and the kind of political change this right can facilitate. In fact, there are likely to be conflicting opinions among members of a population on what self-determination looks like, whether it is favourable, and what form it should take, resulting in multiple independence movement groups engaged in the same project of attempting to put forward a claim to self-determination on behalf of the community. My project investigates the normative implications of these complex conditions.
I aim to develop accounts of self-determination, legitimacy, and political community and collective decision-making capable of accommodating for independence movements and expressions of self-determination beyond cases of secession for independent statehood. I will investigate the normative status of independence movements, their rights as groups, and what conditions they must meet to be the legitimate representatives of a political community. With these accounts in hand, it becomes possible to answer questions which an independence movement will encounter in their pursuit of their vision of self-determination; such as questions of territory, democracy, human rights, and the impact of oppression and repression. It is my hope that this project will contribute to expanding our political imagination, making more room for communities to decide together what sort of world they want to live in, and how they want to build and shape their collective lives.
This poster reflects that hope in presenting self-determination as the right to change. The political community is the central focus, gathered and organized—but the signs they carry are blank. Added to the foremost sign are the words “our choice:”, the bottom of this sign remains blank to reflect the political possibility self-determination offers. The combined image is meant to convey one of the core commitments of my project: the future of a political community, its self-determination and representatives thereof, is a choice that belongs to the community as a collective.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Michael McCaffrey | Languages, Literatures and Cultural Studies | More than a Reproduction: Queer translation and the Translator's Authority | mccaffmi@tcd.ie
Independence Movements are groups that seek to represent a political community in pursuit of self-determination; each with their own particular vision of the future of their community and the type of polity they ought to have. Philosophical literature tends to focus on a community at large, their right to self-determination, and the conditions they must meet to achieve independent statehood, which results in an oversimplified view of the communities themselves and a narrow understanding of self-determination and the kind of political change this right can facilitate. In fact, there are likely to be conflicting opinions among members of a population on what self-determination looks like, whether it is favourable, and what form it should take, resulting in multiple independence movement groups engaged in the same project of attempting to put forward a claim to self-determination on behalf of the community. My project investigates the normative implications of these complex conditions.
I aim to develop accounts of self-determination, legitimacy, and political community and collective decision-making capable of accommodating for independence movements and expressions of self-determination beyond cases of secession for independent statehood. I will investigate the normative status of independence movements, their rights as groups, and what conditions they must meet to be the legitimate representatives of a political community. With these accounts in hand, it becomes possible to answer questions which an independence movement will encounter in their pursuit of their vision of self-determination; such as questions of territory, democracy, human rights, and the impact of oppression and repression. It is my hope that this project will contribute to expanding our political imagination, making more room for communities to decide together what sort of world they want to live in, and how they want to build and shape their collective lives.
This poster reflects that hope in presenting self-determination as the right to change. The political community is the central focus, gathered and organized—but the signs they carry are blank. Added to the foremost sign are the words “our choice:”, the bottom of this sign remains blank to reflect the political possibility self-determination offers. The combined image is meant to convey one of the core commitments of my project: the future of a political community, its self-determination and representatives thereof, is a choice that belongs to the community as a collective.
Image Credit
Bueno, Wilson. "Mar Paraguayo." Interzona, 2020.
Moure, Erín, translator. "Paraguayan Sea." By Wilson Bueno, NightBoat Books, 2017.
https://www.istockphoto.com/photo/blurred-man-portrait-surreal-identity-concept-gm1210185743-350488976
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Ronan Daly | Histories and Humanities | Insolvent Souls: Catholicity and Change in Modern Ireland | Funded by Research Ireland | dalyr9@tcd.ie
Why was Ireland so Catholic for so long? What can we learn from a religious culture that has been accused of triumphant stagnation? What might the intensive organisation of religious life in pre-1960s Catholic Ireland tell us about the way that modern societies encounter, preserve and destroy ideas about what is sacred and what is profane in our lives?
My research answers these questions armed with unprecedented access to the private Catholic archives. It aims to understand how kindness, cruelty, imagination and hard work came together to let the Catholic Church enclose Ireland’s divine ground so tightly as it once did.
This poster displays 'The Deposition', a work of stained glass by Irish artist Evie Hone (c. 1953). It depicts the moment when Christ was lowered from the cross, cradled by his mother and surrounded by onlookers. As a work of religious art, it both mediates and represents the colourful layers of devotional labour that are the subject of my research project, and which make both Hone's oeuvre and the history of Irish Catholic life, more broadly, replete with images of uncommonly ambiguous vividity.
The topic of this thesis is the social reproduction of Catholicism in Ireland between the late nineteenth and mid-twentieth centuries. It challenges existing accounts of the period, which tend to regard the persistent and intensive authority of the Roman Catholic Church in particular spheres as either a ‘constitutional’ feature of its
relationship to the state and nation; or, otherwise, as the product of suppressed psychological, economic and social functions and/or power relations that, although secured by religious experiences, were essentially independent of them.
In referring to a history of social reproduction, I am suggesting that the distinctive value system represented by the Catholic Church in Ireland was realised in any given context thanks only to the constant and transformative churn of interlocking human activities — involving the appropriation, re-absorption, destruction and reconstitution of productive labour power and material resources – on which a sense of the sacred as both real and forceful depended for survival.
Some sources I am using to excavate the mechanics of Irish Catholic work are outwardly mundane, like the minutes of clubs and confraternities; others, deceptively extraordinary, like the testimonies of witnesses summoned before ecclesiastical beatification tribunals.
This perspective contributes to an already rich historiography of Irish Catholicism during this period by counterbalancing underestimations of (1) the volatility of sacred value, (2) the fractures within and between groupings within Irish Catholicism whose devotional lives were structured around differential estimations of that value, and (3) internal contradictions as a cause of the gradually increasing intensity of work-like and performative-seeming devotion, or moral ‘scrupulosity’ as Louise Fuller has described it, that built to a fever pitch by the mid-1940s. An appropriate assessment of these factors, I contend, is vital if historians wish to understand what enabled Ireland’s Catholicity to persist as and for so long as it did.
Image Credit
Collection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Bequest of Mrs Julian M. Egan through the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland, 1961. © The Estate of Evie Hone.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Shannon Mora | Digital Humanities/Languages Literatures and Cultural Studies | The Intersection of Mourning, Emerging Technologies, and Public Health: A Case Study of Ireland during COVID-19 | moras@tcd.ie
The COVID-19 pandemic brought about unprecedented changes in how we lived and interacted with others, including how we mourned and said goodbye to loved ones. Traditional funeral rituals were disrupted by restrictions on in-person gatherings due to the need for social distancing and to prevent the spread of the virus. The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated a shift towards digital mourning practices, raising important questions about the impact on the grieving process, social connectedness, and the “alone together” paradox, where technology allows us to be simultaneously connected while maintaining the ability to distance from one another (Turkle 2011).
My research investigates how mourning rituals in Ireland evolved during COVID-19, emphasising the complex interaction between cultural practices, emerging technologies, and public health. This study adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining critical digital humanities analysis, historical context, and public health frameworks to offer a nuanced understanding of these transformations. Through this interdisciplinary lens, I am conducting oral history interviews with individuals who experienced a bereavement during COVID-19 alongside stakeholders such as undertakers, funeral celebrants, technologists, and policy to explore questions related to the affordances and constraints of these platforms (e.g., attendance, engagement, functionality), the new spaces they created for condolence, memory, and communal grieving, and what was lost, changed, or minimised. While technological mediation allowed continued community engagement, emotional support, and ritual participation despite physical distancing, challenges regarding emotional authenticity, digital divides, privacy concerns, and altered cultural norms require critical reflection.
This poster challenges the viewer to consider the affordances and constraints associated with the use of technology in mourning rituals.
What is gained?
What is lost, changed, or minimised?
References
Turkle, Sherry. 2011. Alone Together: Why We Expect More from Technology and Less from Each Other. Basic Books.
Image Credit
Archers, Yuri. People Images Stock Photo 2546041: Funeral, coffin, and family mourning death. https://peopleimages.com/image/ID-2546034-funeral-coffin-and-family-mourning-death-of-loved-one-death-and-carrying-wood-casket-in-church-for-faith-wake-eulogy-and-memorial.-pallbearers-spiritual-grief-and-sad-friends-with-a-flower-wreath
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Shasha Tong | Linguistic, Speech and Communication Sciences | L2 Identity Change Over Time: Chinese People who have Studied Abroad and have Lived in English-Speaking Countries | Funded by the Trinity Research Doctorate Award | tongsh@tcd.ie
Have you thought about the relationship between second language learning, identity, and society? When you learn a second language, does your language identity change? Do you feel a sense of belonging when you learn a second language? How do you perceive your position in the L2 community? My PhD project focuses on Chinese international students’ L2 identity development experiences during study abroad. Through an anonymous survey and semi-structured interviews, this study aims to discover how Chinese international students’ L2 identity changes before, during and after their study abroad experience and to explore the potential factors influencing these L2 identity changes in different stages.
Image Credit
The poster is AI-generated and further refined on Canva. The image of traditional Chinese Hanfu for graduation was designed by an online store owner, “柒邑原创汉服”, on the Taobao platform.
__________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________