A conference on new educational paths towards gender affirmative healthcare. Call for abstract open now.

Below are the text of and signatories to the SWIP Ireland Statement on Gaza. If you are a member of SWIP and would like your signature added, please contact us by email.

What counts as doing philosophy? Does philosophy enable us to think differently and think difference? What kinds of sense-making are we engaged with? Who are we writing for and speaking with - academics, a public, counterpublics? Who decides what philosophy is? Who polices its boundaries? What qualifies one as a philosopher? Have perceptions of philosophy changed in recent years? Why do philosophy? What do we see as our role as philosophers?

In this moment of political, social, cultural, environmental, and existential uncertainty, we need to consider philosophy’s actual and possible role in helping us address the challenges we face. Philosophy is frequently dismissed as an irrelevant, ‘ivory-tower’ discipline at a time when, arguably, the need for the analytic tools and the critical thought it cultivates has never been more urgent. We must ask how philosophy can contribute to current debates in politics, arts, science, the environment, and education.

SWIP-Ireland’s Eighth Annual Conference seeks to probe the boundaries between philosophy and the arts, literature, critical theory, and gender theory; raise questions about the proper relationship between philosophy and sociology, politics, and the sciences; and examine how different philosophical concepts and orientations shape political and other structural domains.

The hope of the conference is to open up a broad conversation about philosophy itself, its aims, its scope, its limits, as well as its relationships with other fields of scholarship and practice. It is an opportunity to unite philosophers with researchers and practitioners in other fields in an attempt to address these urgent questions about how philosophy enables thinking differently.

Maynooth University, 17-18 November 2023

Ro McCarthy, single in her fifties and working a quiet job, is sustained by her love of books and her deep friendships. Although she still doesn't approve of marriage - not even for the straights - she is canvassing for yes in the 2015 marriage equality referendum. But, as the ghosts of her activist past join her on the campaign trail and her eagerness to confront a familiar discrimination turns to obsession and fury, Ro must finally face the long-buried trauma and loss of her youth.

Wednesday 31st May 2023

18:00 - 19:45 at Waterstones, Dublin - Hodges Figgis

Special Event for Postgraduate and Early Career Researchers in association with SWIP Ireland

Workshop: Dancing in the Dark – A Survivor's Guide to the University by Anne Pirrie, Nini Fang & Elizabeth O'Brien

This workshop will engage participants in exploring their own potential "insecurity, uncertainty and fears" of life at the university, led by co-authors Annie Pirrie and Elizabeth O’Brien.

In this unique workshop we will explore life in the university, seeking out pockets of community, as sources of light and of shade, of illumination and relief. We begin by considering together the heart work and art work of a little blue book…

This book is at once an exploration, a dance in the dark, an invocation to intellectual openness and to dwelling. It speaks to the insecurity, uncertainty and fears that attend having one's being in the university and considers these as virtues rather than as failings.

It invites you to resist impulses to run from the unanswered questions into well-worn ways of knowing, and trusted methodologies that will likely produce familiar kinds of answer. This invitation, to tolerate uncertainty, could have many impacts on the academy, including celebration of diversity, a shaking up of hierarchies and traditions and the emergence of fearless, curious people, working together to make progress on the world’s problems.

Participants who come to the event will be gifted a free copy of the book. Light refreshments available from 12.30-1pm. Workshop begins promptly at 1pm.

Date: 5th May 2023

Time: 12.30-3pm

Location: Maynooth University - Department of Education, Room SE230