The Irish Humanities Alliance (IHA), in collaboration with University College Cork, presents “EXCITING NEWS! Event, Narration and Impact from Past to Present,” bringing together a broad range of current research in Ireland and abroad, regarding an issue of crucial importance for the understanding of past cultures and our own.
The conference is organised in collaboration with the EURONEWS project, an IRC-funded effort to trace the concept and use of news back to the early modern origins, as Ireland became integrated within a European network of shared experiences.
Given the current situation with COVID-19, the conference will take place, virtually, on 15-16 March 2021.

Call for Papers

Papers will discuss the many ramifications of media-induced anxiety and anxiety-induced mediality, engaging the humanities, including history, film studies, literature, folklore, creative writing and adjacent fields intersected by sociology, politology, psychology, anthropology. News Media here include all means of mass communication impinging on daily experience, from books to music, from the social web to films, on multiple platforms and in multiple languages across municipal, state, regional boundaries. Irish humanities have a key role to play in understanding the wider ramifications of traumatised media space that are fresh as today’s news reporting about BREXIT or COVID19 and as serious as the recurring nightmares about catastrophic events which have occurred on these and other shores from time to time.

Panels will be oriented around the basic themes of production (form and narration), distribution (reproduction and exchange), translation (cultural and linguistic), vocabularies (narrative representations), iconographies (visual representations), consumption (usage, redistribution), response (appropriation, agency), control (institutions, individuals), pathologies (biological, psychological and social), etc., including such specific analytical categories as disasters, scapegoating, traumatic memory, and the like, as well as methodological insights regarding text analysis and data mining.
The two-day conference will close with a round table drawing together and updating the perspectives studied, with suggestions for further research. Publication of proceedings is envisioned in an opensource framework.

We invite proposals for:
• 20 minute papers, from local, International and conceptual perspectives (abstracts 250 words);
• three person panels (abstracts 500 words).

Proposals should be emailed to Prof. Brendan Dooley b.dooley@ucc.ie by 5pm on Friday 27 November 2020.