EDU LARP Learning and Social Education Through Live Action Roleplay

I am delighted to announce that René Hedegaard Nielsen from Denmark will be joining us for the first lecture of the new semester to discuss live action role playing for children and young adults within the context of social education. He will speak about his work on Tuesday, October 21st in    T3.13 at 5pm. T3.13 is in the Tara Building, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick

René and the Fantasyfabrikken will be taking part in the Locating the Gothic festival Oct 23 - 26th in Limerick.

Bio

René Hedegaard Nielsen

René is an expert on the place of live action role-playing (LARP) for children and young adults within the context of social education. He studied social education in Denmark where he currently works as director a youth social club and co-owner, together with Tommy Salholt and Steffen Jense, of Fantasyfabrikken . (https://www.facebook.com/FantasyFabrikken) a group of artists who create spfx, events, props and monsters for large scale performative events, TV and film. His work experience ranges from the practical (as department head for a Danish youth club) and the improbable (special effects creator for first Danish Zombierun). Rene has worked for Warner Brothers on ‘Heart of the Sea’ (London) in Denmark on ‘Barda’ television series (Denmark) and for children’s TV channel ‘Ramasjang’ (Denmark). He also has a background in commercials. However, his real passion is for live-action role-play and the promotion of the social benefits of this among children and young adults. He has worked on LARP projects for 22 years, many of them large scale (up to 600 participants)

Lecture Four ‘In the Streets: performing identity through parades, rituals and festivals in Ireland, 1750 – 2014’.

 For our final lecture of the series I'm delighted to announced that Dr Niamh NicGhabhann, the course director of the MA in Festive Arts at the Irish World Academy will be joining us to speak about performing idenity through parades, rituals and festivals. 

The talk takes place on April 14th (Monday) at 7pm in T1.16, Tara Building, Mary Immaculate College, Limerick. 

All are welcome!

Abstract

This lecture reflects the path of the MA Festive Arts programme at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance. Beginning with the origins of festivals and their meanings in societies, it will trace the movement of festivals through parade, protest, ritual, carnival and riot. There will be an emphasis on festivity and ritual in Ireland in particular, from the uses of medieval sites as the locus of festival throughout the modern period, to the ritual processions and parades in the changing cultural context of late nineteenth-century Limerick. In examining the creation of meaningful space between the medieval cathedral of St. Mary and the new cathedral of St. John, ideas of place, space, movement, body and authority will be explored.

Bio:

Niamh NicGhabhann is the course director of the MA Festive Arts programme at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick. Prior to moving to Limerick, she was the doctoral fellow on the IRC-funded ‘Reconstructions of the Gothic Past’ project, based at TRIARC: the Irish Art Research Centre at Trinity College, and postdoctoral researcher on the ‘Monastic Ireland’ digital humanities project, based at UCD School of History and Archives and the Discovery Programme. She is a writer and curator, and a founding director of the NovaUCD campus company, Stair: an Irish Public History Company (http://stairpublichistory.wix.com/stair). With Dr. Maeve Houlihan at the Kemmy School of Business, she is also currently engaged in the ‘Innovation and the Humanities’ research project. Her monograph, Building on the Past: medieval buildings in Ireland 1789 – 1915, will be published by Four Courts Press in winter 2014.

Lecture Three: From Blackboard to Bestseller

Have you ever dreamed of giving it all up and becoming a writer? Well that's just what out third speaker this season did - becoming a best selling author. A former pupil of Mary Immaculate College, Roisin Meaney's lecture is sure to be interesting and entertaining!

Monday, April 7th at 7pm in T1.16.


Roisin Meany: From Blackboard to Bestseller

Abstract:

In my lecture From Blackboard to Bestseller I’ll chart my rather scenic route into the world of fiction writing, an occupation that had never featured in my career plans when I was growing up. I’ll outline the various serendipitous stepping stones that led me out of the classroom and brought me to where I am today. I’ll also share the glitches that tripped me up from time to time, the things I have learned about the world of publishing and my hopes for the future.

Brief Biography:

In August 1977, just before beginning her three years in MICE, Roisin Meaney wrote seven words and won a car. Twenty-four years and one teaching career later she wrote eighty thousand words and won a book deal. In 2008 she put her red pen out to pasture and left the classroom to become a fulltime writer. Today she’s the author of nine (soon to be ten) published novels, four of which have ended up in the top five of the Irish fiction charts, one (The Last Week of May) going all the way to the top and another (The People Next Door) making it as far as number two (Anne Enright was hogging the top slot at the time with The Gathering). Two of Roisin’s books have been published in the US, and she has been translated into Danish, German and Italian. She’s been described as the new Maeve Binchy and the Irish Joanna Trollope. On the first Saturday of each month she tells stories to toddlers and their teddies in the library at The Granary. She is a fan of cats, chocolate and random acts of kindness. 

www.roisinmeaney.com

Twitter: @roisinmeaney

Facebook: Roisin Meaney

Lecture Two - 'Forgetting To Remember: Making Folk Memory Projects in Limerick and Louth' Tracy Fahy

Our Second lecture takes place on Monday, March 31st at 7pm in T1.16. 

Tracy Fahey from Limerick School of Art and Design will speak on her work with Memory project and it promises to be a really interesting insight into memory projects within fine art practice.

Forgetting to Remember: Making Folk Memory Projects in Limerick and Louth

The talk focuses specifically on two projects currently under way through Tracy Fahey’s fine art collective Gothicise, an open, collaborative, multidisciplinary network that investigates sites and stories that are concerned with otherness, the uncanny and sometimes the downright strange (www.gothicise.weebly.com)

In this talk she will analyse Remembering Wildgoose Lodge, a Louth-based project investigating individual, family and community memories of a traumatic historical event, and the different modes of investigation and enquiry guided by this work. There is also a presentation of a second project now in its genesis that relates directly to Limerick’s folklore and culture. Titled Waking St. Munchin, this project deals with the alleged city-curse of Limerick and is being carried out in conjunction with Open House Limerick, Dr. Niamh Nic Gabhann from the MA in Festive Arts programme in UL and postgraduate researcher in folklore and fine art, Marian Sheehan.  Audience participation and contributions are warmly welcomed!

The analysis of both of these projects deals with the role of memory projects within fine art practice, and in particular the different methodologies employed in social engagement and community negotiation. It also looks at the wider value of folk memory in constituting community identity and culture.

Tracy Fahey (bio)

Tracy Fahey is Head of Department in Fine Art and Head of Centre of Postgraduate Studies in Limerick School of Art and Design. She has previously worked as Head of Department of Humanities, IT Carlow and Head of Faculty of Design, Griffith College Dublin. She currently sits on the Board of the Hunt Museum (2012) and the Limerick Printmakers (2012). 

Her main area of research is the Gothic, specifically Irish Gothic and the Gothic nature of domestic space.  She has delivered papers on the Gothic at conferences in University of Aarhus, Denmark, University of Stirling, University of Cardiff, University of Northampton, Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds.  In the last year she has given papers at the Studies in Gothic Fiction conference in San Diego, the International Gothic Association conference in University of Guildford and the Art and Geography conference in NUIG.   She is a founder member of the Gothic Association of New Zealand and Australia (2013) and the Irish Network for Gothic Scholars (2013).   In 2013 she both established the LSAD research centre ACADEmy (Art, Curatorial, Applied Design & Education research centre) and together with Prof.Donna Lee Brien (Central Queensland University, Australia)  founded CAIRN, the Creative Australasian Irish Research Network (2013).  Her short stories have been published in several anthologies; Impossible Spaces (2013), Hauntings (2014), Girl at the End of the World (2014) and Darkest Minds (2014).  Currently she is working with Dr. Maria Beville of Mary Immaculate College on the organisation of a Limerick conference, Locating the Gothic (forthcoming, October 2014)

In 2010 she founded the Limerick-based collaborative gothic art practice, Gothicise,(www.gothicise.weebly.com) who have produced ghostwalk/ghosttalk (2010), The Double Life of Catherine Street (2011) and A Haunting (2011) and are currently working on two memory projects, Remembering Wildgoose Lodge (2013 - present) and Waking St. Munchin (2014).