2025 EFACIS Conference in Åbo / Turku, Finland: '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 tension between mediated experience and phenomenal perception to how polictical and cultural narratives direct our attention to some aspects of society while creating blind spots elsewhere. 

Conference Web page: https://blogs2.abo.fi/naes-efacis2025/

 

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