RIA Seminar Series ‘Ireland 2030’ Panel 1: Technology and Irish Culture

What would we like Ireland to look like in 2030? In what kind of society do we want to live, on both sides of the Border? This seems like a simple question. 2030 is just eight years away, so surely politicians, intellectuals, journalists, and the public are busy imagining our future. But this is not really happening. Initiatives like Project 2040, a national development plan for the Republic of Ireland, have in the past several years been overshadowed by emergencies that have demanded all our attention: climate change, Brexit, the Covid pandemic, and now the war in Ukraine. These emergencies have forced us to into a reactive, crisis-response mode of thinking. There is a sense that events are unfolding so fast that we can hardly keep up. This raises the question: Are we still shaping our future? Or are we merely adapting, breathlessly, to the rapid changes which characterize life in the twenty-first century?

The RIA seminar series ‘Ireland 2030’ is an attempt to think about ways in which meaningful human agency can be regained, specifically on the island of Ireland and in a time of globally accelerated change. We understand human agency as the ability to shape the lives we live as opposed to merely reacting to the economic, technological, and political demands of the moment; human agency also entails the primacy of persons over systems. Climate change, Brexit, the coronavirus pandemic, and the war in Ukraine can be seen as the catalysts for our initiative: these events have all shattered current horizons and frameworks, calling for new ways of thinking and acting. The challenge now is not to attempt to return to ‘normality’ but to rethink what this normality should be.   — Philipp W. Rosemann MRIA

Panel 1: Technology and Irish Culture (May 4, 9:30–13:00)

9.30        Welcome Address: Philipp Rosemann, MRIA

9.45        Alan Titley MRIA, University College Cork

On the Need and Use of Getting Irish Literature into the Future

10.30     Ola Majekodunmi, journalist and broadcaster

Being an Irish-speaker in an online community

11.15     Break

11.30    Dr Deirdre Ní Chonghaile, coordinator of the project Amhráin Árann

“ag teacht le cuan”: language equity, cultural heritage, and the digital frontier

12.15     Professor Kevin Scannell, Saint Louis University

Artificial Intelligence in minority language contexts: a new digital divide?

On the one hand, global technology is a driver of relentless homogenization, which threatens to level culturally distinctive patterns of thinking and acting. In Ireland, such homogenization poses a particular challenge for the future of the Irish language. On the other hand, the same global technologies offer new opportunities for speakers of minority languages to assert agency and autonomy. So, for example, while traditional oral arts were steadily eclipsed by global mass media in the twentieth century, they have been revitalized in the twenty-first century by digital communication technologies and the global reach of archival digitization projects. What is the way forward here? More generally, what are the conditions for another ‘Celtic revival’ in the globalized twenty-first century? And, should we want one?

Booking for this seminar and further information on the series is available at: https://www.ria.ie/ireland-2030