Date/Time
Date(s) - 02/25/25
12:00 pm - 1:00 pm
Categories
The Fulbright Association (FA) Ireland Interest Group is 300+ participants strong, and we have been in existence for over three years. We share an interest in and extend the Fulbright Program tradition of education and cultural exchange.
The Ireland Interest Group Board is pleased to invite you to a Zoom event, From American Parcels to Care Packages: Irish American Diasporic Exchange 1920 to 2020
to be held February 25, 2025, 12:00pm-1:00pm EST. We hope you can join us! The link to register is below:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/7q6Ibce3Rc25XEaIIuyNBA
Our speaker is Dr Eleanor O’Leary, Lecturer in Media and Communications at the South East Technological University, Ireland. She is the author of Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland (Bloomsbury, 2018). Other recent publications include “Irish dance and identity politics on TikTok” (2024, Irish Studies Review). Recent funding awards include the Royal Irish Academy Charlemont Grant (2020) and Arts Council Young People, Education and Residences Scheme (2023).
Dr. O’Leary provides the following introduction:
Despite extensive research on the long history of emigration from Ireland to the United States, little work has focused on the ways in which diasporic relation has been brokered through material culture. This session details intergenerational narratives of diasporic exchange between the United States and Ireland between 1920 and 2020. For much of the 20th century items flowed primarily from the United States to Ireland in the form of second-hand goods and gifts sent to alleviate material poverty and to mark significant familial milestones including births and weddings. Broadly conceptualised as social remittances, these exchanges encapsulate a range of ideas, practices and behaviours as well as objects of popular and material culture circulated by migrants to their home nation either in the form of items sent home from abroad or during return visits. The limited work produced on Irish American social remittances has tended to focus on exchanges of ideas, information and financial remittances with the exception of a small number of valuable publications on clothing and dress. Social remittances tell a tale of two culturally embedded agents –sender and receiver and this session relates the significance of material objects exchanged including printed material, clothing, household goods, foodstuffs and toys. The extension of familial care through material culture is also mapped into the 21st century when it becomes the sending of care-packages from Ireland to family members living abroad especially after the collapse of the Irish economy in 2008. Theoretical frameworks related to consumer culture, gift-giving, caregiving and gender are applied to the practice of sending parcels. Diasporic exchange provides a framework to examine complex questions about modernity, consumer culture, tradition, everyday life and belonging, noting national inflections of globalised identities as they are mediated over time.
REGISTER AT:
https://us06web.zoom.us/meeting/register/7q6Ibce3Rc25XEaIIuyNBA