EFACIS 2025:

European Federation of Associations and Centres of Irish Studies Conference

Åbo / Turku, Finland, 8–11 May 2025

Attending to Ireland

In an ever bustling, ever hurrying world, the concept of “attention” has become increasingly important. As Jonathan Crary observed in Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture, the “contemporary experience […] requires that we effectively cancel out or exclude from consciousness much of our immediate environment”. [1] At the same time, the contemporary society, in Ireland and elsewhere, has been shaped by seemingly conflicting forces and paradoxical processes of attention and distraction in various institutional, cultural, and technological contexts. The focus of this conference will be on any of the many ways in which the field of Irish Studies – and disciplinary perspectives from literature, culture, and history to linguistics and education – addresses and is shaped by various aspects of attention. These range from tensions between mediated experience and phenomenal perception to how political and cultural narratives direct our attention to some aspects of society while creating blind spots elsewhere.

Themes for discussion include, but are not limited to, the following:

Attending to Ireland as/and island(s): culture, geography, and the state
Surveillance, control, and the politics of attention
Technology and the media: forms of attention and inattention
Borders, surveys, and mappings and the 100th anniversary of The Irish Boundary Commission
Irish Studies and attention in education
Local, global, and transnational attention – place, mobility, and migration
Hotspots and blind spots: geography and the environment
Attention, crisis, and catastrophe: personal and social perspectives
Attention and the phenomenology of perception
The aesthetics and poetics of attention in literature and the arts; authorship, narrative, perspective
Generational and societal changes in attention
Religion, politics, and social groups
Ageing and attention in Ireland
Attending to language: linguistics, translation, and the multilingual society
Diachronic and/or synchronic approaches and methods

A downloadable version (EFACIS 2025 flyer) of this page can be found here.

Hosted by Åbo Akademi University and the University of Turku, the conference is organized in collaboration with the Nordic Association for English Studies (NAES) whose concurrent annual conference in Åbo / Turku is titled “Attending to the Islands: Archipelagic Perspectives on Anglophonia”.

Åbo / Turku (the former capital of Finland) is usually very pleasant at the beginning of May. And as the city is situated on the edge of the Finnish archipelago, we envisage that the conference programme will include an optional boat trip through the islands, a visit to Turku Castle, poetry readings, a musical entertainment, and more …

– KEYNOTE SPEAKERS –

Fiona Farr

Christopher Morash

Lorna Hutson

Andrew Newby

Invited Poet: Desmond Egan

Information on Werner Huber grants for EFACIS PhD students may be found here.

[1] Jonathan Crary, Suspensions of Perception: Attention, Spectacle, and Modern Culture (The MIT Press, 1999), p. 1.