The 23rd International AEDEI Conference, entitled “The uses and abuses of Irishness”, and organised by the Department of English at the University of Huelva and the Research Cluster WAÉIRE, invites papers, panels and roundtables that deal with the broad topic of use, its description and representation, and the various ways in which this theme has been discussed and imagined from all disciplines and fields of knowledge within Irish Studies.

The configuration of Irish national identity both before and after Independence drew substantially from ideological and cultural devices that generated hierarchies, and they led to an exclusionary matrix where heterodoxy and diversity have been difficult, if at all fully possible, to accommodate. To a large extent, the uses of “Irishness” as a term and for the sake of a broader, superior national project can be said to correlate with the uses, and very often abuses and exclusions, of certain groups and realities. Such conditions require an engagement in critical debates that can usher in new possibilities of Irish identity and which, not dwelling on traditionally utilitarian mindsets, allow for a more inclusive, sustainable and just world.