Tag Archives: ireland

An ode to illustrating academic work

Part-time PhD student, Sarah Golding shares her thoughts on how to make academic work more engaging and accessible through illustrations.

 

How to make research interesting, relevant, funny, useful, or just understandable is a problem many academics struggle with. Researchers are passionate about their projects and want to tell the world, but are they explaining it in a way that the world can understand?

Trying things differently 

I am a part-time PhD student who works full-time as an Engagement Specialist and I have been determined to find a way to communicate my academic project to the widest possible audience, especially to the people that are the heart of my work. I noticed that I spent so long explaining the ‘why’ of my project that I lost my audience before I got to the exciting part.  I wanted to practice what I preached, so rather than providing just academic text to my work, I thought, would a visual aid help?  

Below are two options for communicating my work. Option 1 is the academic summary and Option 2 is an illustrated version. I know which one I prefer, please let me know your thoughts! 

Option 1:  

The paradox of women’s activism in the Republic of Ireland 1970 – 1989 is a thesis that will highlight the problems that currently exist in the historiography around women and their experiences in Ireland. As it stands, the historiography charts a clear progress towards equality only through the lens of political success. This does not take into consideration the role external factors, such as the EU, played and credits the women’s movement entirely with its own successes. However, scholars who examine these political achievements fail to explore the cultural and social expectations of women in this period. They do not take into consideration the stagnation of gender roles, limited opportunities for women and the rural – urban divide. What might be seen by the women’s movements as ‘liberalization’ tended to affect only the metropolitan lives of the middle-class women organisers within the women’s movements. 

This thesis explores whether there were other types of activism happening in Ireland during this time, that has either been overlooked or ignored. It will focus on four groups of women: the women’s movement, the lesbian liberation movement, the Legion of Mary, and the women of the Magdalene Laundry. It will apply a new theoretical lens that integrates Collective Memory Theory, Social Movement Theory, and the Theory of Everyday Resistance to highlight the ways in which individual actions could be seen as acts of resistance. By looking at these groups of women, the thesis explores women that are grounded in the social framework of the country, it will decentralize the narrative from Dublin and provide a rural voice to the narrative of women’s lives in Ireland.

Did you skip any of that? I would be impressed if you didn’t. 

Large sections of text are not that engaging; people used to skim reading for the most useful sections will not see the nuances of the work.  

Let’s try again with illustrations… 

Option 2: 

What is the paradox of women’s activism? The accepted history of women in the Republic of Ireland has been one of progression since the 1960s. But this considers only one group of women, the women’s movement, because of their success of moving into politics.  It does not consider the rural-urban divide, traditional gender roles or the subversion of other groups.  

To understand more about the activism happening during this period, this thesis will focus on four groups of women.  

 

It seeks to understand if the women’s movement, in a bid to be deemed successful, unintentionally excluded other groups of women from the historical narrative and to bring all four groups under the same umbrella term of ‘women’s activist’. 

 

Better? I think so. 

Speaking across the academic divide

One might argue that the same level of detail is not given in the second option compared to the first. This is the point; Option 1 provides no space for natural interest or for your audience to want to ask questions. Option 2 on the other hand, is eye capturing and the audience are likely going to want to know more about how I think I can bring the women mentioned under one umbrella.   

Illustrations are a useful tool that have better enabled me to communicate my work. They speak across the academic divide and create opportunities to start a dialog on your work that is interesting to all parties and not just to people who feel the same passion as you.  

Commissioning the artwork 

Finding an artist whose work I liked was the hardest part of the process. I found Lesley Imgart through the Wellcome Collection. It was her ability to add emotion into her art that enticed me. I reached out via email and briefly told her my idea. We agreed on the commission price and the expected outcomes. The process was fascinating to a non-artist like myself: the work she put into understanding the clothing and colours of the period was unexpected but very beneficial. She also provided me with two colour options, as seen below. If you would like to know more about Lesley, you can find her website here. Alternatively, she has a specific blog about the creation of my artwork here 

 

Written by Sarah Golding, PhD Student in the History at Birkbeck, University of London.
Twitter: @sarahgolding923 

Illustrations done by Lesley Imgart
Twitter: @imgart, Instagram: @lesleyimgart
 

Further information:  

 

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Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes in Law and Literature

Professor Adam Gearey from Birkbeck’s School of Law writes about the horrific scandal of Ireland’s Mother and Baby Homes, and how its representation in literature may play an important role in the recently opened Commission of Investigation.

A conference this weekend in Dublin City University is dedicated to ‘law and literature’ in Ireland. What is law and literature; and how can this kind of scholarship shed light on matters of public concern? Literature compels us to think about matters that are left unresolved when courts have ruled. In particular, the poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s book Bloodroot asks its readers to think about the lives ruined by the abusive regime of the Mother and Baby Homes. Mother and Baby Homes operated throughout Ireland from the early 1900s to more or less the present day. They were institutions run by the Catholic Church for women “who became pregnant.” Women who survived Mother and Baby Homes describe them differently—there are many stories of duplicity, exploitation abuse and forced separations. As Emer O’Toole has written: “women were incarcerated in state-funded, church-run institutions called mother and baby homes or Magdalene asylums, where they worked to atone for their sins.” Mother and Baby Homes were thus part of a system of institutions that served to discipline women and girls; enforcing codes of sexual morality and social conformity. Although not unique to Ireland, recent events have forced a confrontation with the traumatic legacy of Mother and Baby Homes- themes that animate Ní Churreáin’s poems.

Survivors of Mother and Baby Homes have long maintained that church and state presided over the systematic abuse of mothers and babies. However, only recently have Mother and Baby Homes become the subject of a Commission of Investigation. In 2014 Cathleen Corless published research suggesting that there was a mass grave in the grounds of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home in Taum containing the remains of over 800 babies and young children. A Commission of Investigation was charged with gathering evidence on conditions in Mother and Baby Homes, mortality rates and adoption practices. Excavations carried out by the Commission established that there had indeed been a mass burial of human remains in a sewage tanks in the grounds of the Bon Secours Mother and Baby Home.

Although the Commission is yet to publish its final report, the “hospital empire” has been denounced in the Dáil, and Taoiseach Enda Kenny came under pressure to make a public apology. The Commission is seen as an important way of establishing the truth. But it is only a partial victory for survivors. The Commission has no power to consider those mothers and adopted children who were subject to forced adoptions. As Tanya Gold, has put it: the possibility of ‘restorative justice’ seems remote to those whose histories have been effectively erased, and who remain outside the scope of the commission.

The poet Annemarie Ní Churreáin’s addresses the lived realities of this history. She has described herself as a “daughter” of the Mother and Baby Homes. Her grandmother gave birth to her father in Castlepollard Mother and Baby Home in the early 1950s. As a single mother, she had to give the baby up for adoption.

How can the horror, the systematic ruin of so many families and so many lives be understood? As an introduction to Bloodroot, Ní Churreáin’s has written:

“If I remain wary today of State care systems and policies, it’s because they disappeared from my life, without explanation or proper support, many of the people I have loved. It is at least in part the State that has taught me what I know in my poetry about space, power structures and the unsaid.”

Ni Churreáin talks of her ‘wariness’ towards the state. ‘Wariness’ stems from words that mean being attentive, heedful or watchful. As a poet, Ní Churreáin is invoking an attentive heeding of those who have disappeared. Heedfulness is linked to an old Irish word which describes weeping and lamentation. Bloodroot is an elegy, a lamentation for loved ones and for what remains ‘unsaid’. The power of law and the state may be able to silence, and to compel speech, but Ní Churreáin remains attentive to those who cannot speak. When the Commission publishes its final report, Bloodroot will be read as its essential supplement. If the Commission cannot recover evidence relating to the trauma of survivors, then perhaps poetry can remain heedful. If the suffering of many survivors is absent from official record,  Bloodroot affirms: “[w]hat comes from desire cannot be erased”.

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