MONDAY 8th NOVEMBER (ALL SESSIONS ON ZOOM)
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10:00 – 10:30:
Welcome from the Organising Committee
10:30 – 12:15:
Panel 1a: The Body & Class
Chaired by Dyuti Chakravarty
Shambhawi Vikram – Swachch Banega Ye Bharat (Let’s Make a Clean India): Challenges to a ‘Politics of Menstruation’ in Contemporary India
Jenni Ramone – ‘Whose breasts are they?’: Breastfeeding and Ownership in Global Working Class Texts and Contexts
Katie Beswick – Being Slaggy/Representing Slaggyness: Sex, class and embodiment in Britain
Samantha Harper-Robins – A Somatic Testimony
Panel 1b: Class & Activism in Academia
Chaired by Anne Mulhall
Jordan Kirwan – Triumphs and tribulations: understanding academia as a site for activism
Eamonn Jordan – The Working Critic
Lauren Schandeval – Institutionalising Class Studies in US Academia
Steph Hanlon – Neoliberal Individualism: Researching Marriage Migration and ‘Reflexivities of Discomfort’
Panel 1c: Class in literature 1
Chaired by Clara Mallon
Eva Bourke – Class and the Domestic Noir Genre
Sharon Dempsey – Class & Crime Fiction from the North of Ireland: A Work in Progress
Aafke van Pelt – The “Mill Girls” of the Belfast Mill Strike: Gender Activism in the Workplace in Charabanc’s Lay Up Your Ends (1983)
Ciara McAllister – Soldiering on: Militarised Masculinities and the Working Class in the Drama of Christina Reid and Martin Lynch
12:15 – 1:00: Lunch Break
1:00 – 2:15:
Keynote 1: Dr. Ebun Joseph – The intersection of Race and Class: Critical race theory and why inequality persists
Chaired by Alice Feldman
2:15- 2:30: Break
2:30-3:30:
Panel 2a: New Methods in Class Solidarity
Jo Fletcher-Saxon, Dr Lou Mycroft and Dr Joanna Norton – #SolidaritySpaces: a site of activism, connection and strength.
Dr. Nick Bentley & Dr. Mark Brown- The Stoke Method: the development of verbatim, class-based drama techniques at the Victoria Theatre, Stoke-on-Trent
3:30-3:45: Break
3:45-5:30:
Panel 3a: Class in literature 2
Chaired by Salomé Paul
Prof. Rosina Martucci – The Irish working class in Frank McCourt ‘s novels
Sarah Attfield – Class on Screen: Representations of Working-Class Life in Irish Cinema and Beyond
Michelle Ryan – Class act: An exploration of social class in Irish sitcoms and comedy series.
Nathaniel Heggins Bryant – “Amnesia in the Hulks: Penal Contexts, Mismemory, and the Future of the Irish Economy in Mike McCormack’s Notes from a Coma”
Panel 3b: Class, Politics and the Irish Diaspora
Chaired by Eddie Molloy
Aidan Beatty – Friedrich Engels’ Two Irish Wives: Recovering the Narratives of Mary and Lizzie Burns
James Patrick Walsh – Naming the Unnamed in Leadville, Colorado: The Effort to Memorialize 19th Century Irish Immigrants Buried in Unmarked, Sunken Graves.
Garret Scally – Tunnels: Performing the Irish Diaspora
June Melody & Valerie Walkerdine – Growing up Irish: Towards an affective history of Irish working class girls in London, 1984-2001
Panel 3c: Publishing & Archiving as a Class Act
Chaired by Dyuti Chakravarty
Jenny Farrell – The Culture Matters: Working People’s Anthologies from Contemporary Ireland, a Pioneering Project
Emma Penney & Sophie Meehan – The Working-Class Writing Archive
Jessica Pauszek – Have You Ever Heard of The Federation of Worker Writers and Community Publishers? (What It Means to Collaboratively Archive Decades of Working-Class Community Writing)
TUESDAY 9th NOVEMBER (ALL SESSIONS ON ZOOM)
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10:30 – 12:15:
Panel 4a: Accounts of Class & Education
Chaired by Paul Bermingham
Dr Benabdi Farouk – The Working Class Children and their Education in Victorian England
Brittany Wright – Talking teachers, telling tales: exploring former educators’ stories of place and social class in a former coalmining town
Sorca Mc Donnell – Emerging themes from a co-operative exploration of the experiences of working class women who have attended higher education
Tallulah Eyres – “Low Horizons, High Aspirations’: Working-class journeys into higher education”
Panel 4b: Women’s Labour Activism
Chaired by Rosie O’Halloran
Isabel Roque – Social activism and trade unionism in Portugal during the COVID-19 pandemic
Martha Romero-Delgado – Intersectionalities of Class and Gender: Feminism, Anarchism and Free Women from Spain
Olivia Frehill – Locating the Labouring Class Female Body: A Historical Examination of Dublin Domestic Servants, c. 1890 – 1940.
Dr. Dolores Señorans – On journeys, sweatshops and neighbourhoods: An ethnography with unwaged garment workers in Buenos Aires, Argentina
12:15-1:00: Lunch Break
1:00 – 2:45:
Panel 5a: Class Inequality in Higher Education
Chaired by Fergal Finnegan
Kathleen Lynch – Social Class Inequality: Is Education Liberatory? Exploring the Contradictory Purposes of Education
Colby King & Michele Fazio – Dilemmas in Class: Lessons from Working-Class Student Support Programming
Maria Keil – Heretic Academics: Social Class Background and Class Awareness in the Academic Field
Dr Teresa Crew – Student Support and a Working Class Academic Pedagogy.
2:45: 3:00: Break
3:00 – 4:30:
Panel 6a: Emerging From the Silence: Representations of Working-Class Women in Irish Theatre
Chaired by Justine Nakase
Salomé Paul – ‘Not in Flesh’: The Construction of the Disenfranchised Woman in Irish Theatre
Fiona Charlton – The Juno Complex: Tracing Representations of Working-Class Women in Irish Theatre
Clara Mallon – Hope in the Face of Despair: (Re)Situating and (Re)Presenting Working-Class Women in Natural History of Hope
Panel 6b: Language, Imagination & Place in Working-Class Communities
Chaired by John Bisset
Kerron Ó Luain – “Sure why would they need Irish?”: experiences of class, language and education in Ballymun, c.1970-76.
Declan Byrne – The Dublin Docks: Deindustrialisation in the Inner City
Vincent Portillo – Deindustrial Dearborn: language & labor in an Arab-American working-class community
Joanna Norton – Luton 2050: Working Class Communities Imagining Their Future
4:30- 5:00: Break
5:00 – 6:45:
Panel 7a: Class & Literary Orthodoxies
Chaired by Heather Laird
John Attridge – Class, Literature and Identity Politics: Elevating Working-Class Voices in New Literary Pedagogies
David Archibald and Carl Lavery – Proletarian Poesis
Jim Daniels – Work Poetry and Working-Class Poetry: The Zip Code of the Heart
Magnus Nilsson – It’s literature, sort of… What literary studies can teach us about working-class literature and vice versa.
WEDNESDAY 10th NOVEMBER (ALL SESSIONS ON ZOOM)
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10:00am – 11:45:
Panel 8a: Experience & Resistance in the Labouring Class
Chaired by Sandrine Ndahiro
Sara Burdis – ‘Identities: Media Racialisation of the Irish Working-Class’
Luka Lei Zhang – “Socialism is Great”: A Worker Writer’s Resistance against Communism and Patriarchy
Devika Singh Shekhawat – Health, Colonialism and the Working Class Tracing questions of health of the workers of Tea Plantations in Assam and North Bengal during the British Rule.
Anjum Khan – Working Bodies and Weary Prospects
Panel 8b: Teaching in a High Poverty Area
Chaired by Carl Emery
Dr Carl Emery – Research Fellow, Disadvantage and Poverty, University of Manchester
Louisa Dawes – Lecturer in Teacher Education, University of Manchester
Liz Agbetoh – School Improvement Lead, Blackburn Education Diocese
11:45 – 12:30: Lunch Break
12:30-2:15:
Panel 9a: The Art of Class
Chaired by Marty Gilroy
Clodagh Troelostra-Heffernan – “Some people know what it’s like/[…] and other people don’t”: Welfare Bureaucracy and Poverty in the poetry of Rita Anne Higgins
Aidan Teplitzky – Get to the _ _ _ _ing point: Embodying the affectual value of swearing in compositional language
Michael Lydon – ‘Hear the Celtic Tiger Roar’: Damien Dempsey and the Noises of Working-Class Ireland
Jacob Miller – “Now everything’s out of control”: Hauntology, Alienation, and Populism in Glen James Brown’s Ironopolis
Panel 9b: Class, Intersectionality & Contemporary Literature
Chaired by Louise Walsh
Lauren McNamara – A Child with a Disability in a Working Class Family in Christine Dwyer Hickey’s Tatty
Avantika Tewari – Beyond a Class Analysis of “Sir,” Towards Revolutionary Love
Hannah Keziah Agustin – Deconstructing Maria, Evil Maria, and the Role of Women in the Proletarian Revolution in Metropolis (1927)
Sherry Lee Linkon – Problems of Belonging: Class and Race in Bastard Out of Carolina and The Bluest Eye
Panel 9c: Class Considerations in Professional Practice
Chaired by Rosie O’Halloran
Petra Seitz – ‘Like writing a first hand account of the Donner party based on the fact that you’ve eaten beef jerky’: Absence of Working Class Voices in Office Interior Historiography
Stuart Whomsley – Clinical psychology and class
Iona Burnell – ‘The Lives of Working Class Academics: getting ideas above your station’
Peter Kearns – Disability Service and Class in Ireland
2:15-2:30: Break
2:30-3:45:
KEYNOTE 2: Michael Pierse – Festivalisation, art, conflict and class: Féile an Phobal—a case study
Chaired by Eddie Molloy
3:45-4:00: Break
4:00 – 5:45
Panel 10a: Working-Class Poets on Poetry
Chaired by Sherry Lee Linkon
Jim Daniels – Work Poetry and Working-Class Poetry: The Zip Code of the Heart
Fran Lock – The ‘Aven’t Gard:Working-class Women and Innovative Poetry
Charles Lang – ‘On Working-Class Aesthetics’
Dave Lordan – The Persistence of The Oral – folksong, identity, & social memory in Irish working class culture.
Jen Vernon – Performing Working-Class Poetry toward Community
THURSDAY 11th NOVEMBER (ALL SESSIONS IN-PERSON AT LIBERTY HALL, DUBLIN)
YOU ARE WELCOME TO JOIN US IN-PERSON at liberty hall
IF you can’t make it simply join us by clicking the live-stream links
9:30-11:00
Panel 11: Direct Action, Housing & New working-class movements’. Ireland 2014-2019
Chaired by David Landy
Aisling Hedderman, Rosi Leonard, Seamus Farrell & others in Conversation
11:00-11:20: Coffee break in Liberty Hall
11:20-12:40
Panel 12: Reflecting on the Agents of Change
Chaired by Michael Taft
George Tsogas – Workers’ inquiry and workplace immersion movements
Fredrik Egefur – ‘The Winter Palace’ in Malmö, Sweden – Subversive squatters, welfare state-anarchists or just a slightly radical cultural association?
Christopher Loughlin – Expanding Labour: the Irish New Wave and the New Global Labour History
12:40-1:40: Lunch Provided in Liberty Hall
1:40-3:00
Panel 13: Strike movements & Riotous Moments: perspectives from the inside
Chaired by Darragh O’Connor
James Windle – Reconsidering the 1991 Blackbird Leys Rioters as an Underclass: An Insider Perspective
Pål & Ola Brunnström – Why wild-cat strikes could save the Swedish model
Hannes Rolf – The end of a performance? Municipal rent strikes in Sweden in the 1970s and 1980s
3:00- 3:20: Break
3:20 – 4:40
Panel 14: Labour Movements at the Intersection of Race & Gender
Chaired by Eddie Molloy
Marc Kagan – The Transition from Irish to Black to Irish Leadership of New York City’s Transport Workers’ Union Local 100
Robert M. Zecker, – “Nothing Less Than Full Freedom” – Radical Immigrant Newspapers Champion Black Civil Rights
Erin Geraghty – Strikes and Suffragettes: How class politics both helped and hindered collaboration between the Irish suffragettes and the labour movement 1912-1914
4:40-5:00: Break
5:00- 6:30
Panel 15: The Digital Marginalisation of the Working Class’
Adeline O’Brien, Roisin Doherty & others in conversation
6:30-8:30
The Working-Class Writing Archive in Performance
Grab a refreshment and enjoy performances in the Cois Life Bar, Liberty Hall
FRIDAY 12th NOVEMBER (ALL SESSIONS IN-PERSON AT LIBERTY HALL, DUBLIN)
YOU ARE WELCOME TO JOIN US IN-PERSON at liberty hall
IF you can’t make it simply join us by clicking the live-stream links
10:45-11:30
Coffee Morning in Liberty Hall with Exhibition & Installation by ATD & Lockdown Liberties: ‘Socio-Economic Discrimination through the Creative Lens’
11:30-12:30
Panel 17: Oral History and Personal Narrative in the 20th Century
Chaired by Rosie O’Halloran
Debbie Mulhall & Kelly Fitzgerald – ‘Battered and beyond’: oral history & domestic violence
Jean Bridgeman – Voices from a shed: Methodologies in self- organised community education Helping to articulate class lived experience
12:30-1:30: Lunch provided in Liberty Hall
1:30-3:15
Panel 18: Methods in Self-Organised Place-Making
Chaired by Jerry O’Neill
Mary Broe – A counter map to the present regenerated landscape of Pearse Street.
Steve Thornton – Working Class Stories on the Street Where You Live Exploring workers’ struggles on the Shoeleather History walking tour
Georgina Perryman – Community- based heritage in Dublin: Progressive place-making through walking tours and festivals amid urban transformation
John Bohan – “Maynooth: Community Struggles for Community Resources – Fighting for Water, Waste, and What’s Ours In an Irish Town”?
3:15-3:40: Break
3:40- 5:00
Panel 19: Class & Resistance under Neoliberalism
Chaired by Rosie O’Halloran
Matthew Sparkes – The coming ‘crisis’ of the Covid-19 pandemic: class stigma and neoliberal policymaking
Fergal Finnegan – Towards a realist and radical version of class analysis in Ireland
Stephen Gaffney – Taking the long view of youth unemployment as a policy problem in Ireland.
Philip Finn – Exploring the positives of unemployment as life-making within and against capitalism
5:00-5:30: Break
5:30-7:15
Roundtable: The Class Politics of Repeal
Chaired by Steph Hanlon
7:15-9:15
Working-Class Writers Read
Grab a refreshment and enjoy some performances in the Cois Life Bar
Working-Class Studies 