CFP: 22nd International AEDEI Conference

“Ethics”
University of Alcalá, 29-31 May 2024
Call for Papers

“Those with the power to represent and describe others
clearly control how these others will be seen” (Deepika Bahri)

Ethics is a strongly weighted concept, though evasive in its definition and multifarious forms of articulation. Deriving from the Greek “ethos”, which came to mean character or disposition, the term has been constantly scrutinised by thinkers across disciplines, including philosophy, history, science, medicine, politics or religion. As such, it has been employed as an assessment tool in various spheres of human knowledge, for even if we do not concur on a shared definition, we are certain that we would cease to exist without a prevailing ethics. Throughout the centuries, human beings have told stories about themselves and about the world, constructing narratives that probed into who we are, what we do and where we belong; in sum, ethical views on the place we occupy in relation to societal others. Often associated with morality, with codes of conduct, principles, or with ideas of right or wrong, when applied to literary and cultural fields, ethics usually evokes a certain position towards something, the truthfulness of a given representation or its validity. Awareness of an ethics of reading, writing and interpreting has developed since the 1980s in what has been identified as The Ethical Turn. But Aristotle’s Ethics was one of the earliest texts to link writing with responsibility, precisely distinguishing the art and the sciences on the level of the responsibility attached to each one. While the sciences are usually connected with measurable and quantifiable facts, art and the humanities, due to its aesthetic value, are more open to interpretation. Thus, language, literature, culture and history have, since then, turned into vehicles from which to tackle questions on ethics, morality and worth, at the same time that an ethics of reading and writing has placed its own demands.

In the Irish context, the current flourishing of literary genres and artistic forms of expression that are giving voice to alternative or marginal perspectives –including the disempowered, the vulnerable and the invisible–, have contributed to displacing mainstream accounts challenging received interpretations that call to a required ethics of representation. The rise of the historical and biographical novel, the memoir, confessional writing or autofiction, not to mention the focus placed on precarity and resistance are thus part of this ethical turn towards the responsibility of what we do, how we do it and what purposes it serves. In this regard, further debates on the return to the human, the posthuman or the Anthropocene also find a perfect site of debate within an ethical frame of reference that demands to be addressed in more conscientious way. From this angle, the need to call on questions of responsibility in various forms of representation in Irish studies seems both unavoidable and unquestionable, since an ethical view of the world is closely linked to the discursive nature of language, literature, history and culture. Arguing that ethics frees us from one-dimensional, straightforward interpretations in the way it embraces a plurality of meanings that underline the multidimensional quality of experience, this Call for Papers will accept proposals that critically address these issues. The approaches will be interdisciplinary, covering any field of Irish Studies from an ethical lens, and will aim at bringing awareness to misrepresentation, invisibility, untruth or the unveiling of silences from the past.

The 22nd International AEDEI Conference, entitled “Ethics”, and organised by the Department of Modern Philology and the Centre for Irish Studies “Alka-Éire” at the University of Alcalá, suggests the following themes and topics, among a wider list:
– Issues of responsibility in reading, writing or alternative forms of expression
– Ethics of being and operating in the world
– Environmental ethics
– Ethics and technology
– Ethics of representation
– Ethics of care
– Between ethics and aesthetics
– The need of ethics to address, revise and reassess the past
– The articulation of historicities, ethics of memory and commemoration
– Ethics and social justice
– Narratives of empathy and affect
– Theories of the Anthropocene and the posthuman
– Resistance, resilience and vulnerability
– The unveiling of silences and other forms of biased interpretations
– Individual and communal forms of vulnerability and precarity

Submission requirements and dates
To propose a paper or a roundtable at the annual AEDEI Conference, you will have to
be a paid-up member of AEDEI. To become an AEDEI member, which will automatically make you member of EFACIS, visit the website: www.aedei.es.
Abstracts of around 250 words should be sent to aedei.2024@uah.es by January 31st, 2024

Proposals for panels or roundtables should include the following information:
– title of the paper
– full name
– institutional affiliation
– a 250-word abstract (500 words for a round table)
– a one-paragraph biographical note.

Prospective speakers will be notified of a decision by the end of February. 2024

Scientific Committee
Asier Altuna García de Salazar (University of Deusto)
Mª Amor Barros del Río (University of Burgos)
Mariana Bolfarine (Federal University of Rondonópolis, UFR)
Teresa Caneda Cabrera (University of Vigo)
José Carregal (University of Huelva)
Aida Rosende Pérez (University of Vigo)
Margarita Estévez Saá (University of Santiago de Compostela)
Luz Mar González Arias (University of Oviedo)
Elena Jaime de Pablos (University of Almería)
Laura P. Z. Izarra (University of Sao Paulo)
Alfred Markey (University of León)
Juan Ignacio Oliva Cruz (University of La Laguna)
María Auxiliadora Pérez Vides (University of Huelva)
Pilar Villar Argáiz (University of Granada)