The Program Committee for the American Conference for Irish Studies (ACIS) and the British Commonwealth and Postcolonial Studies Conference (BCPS) cordially invites the electronic submission of proposals for papers, panels, and other relevant presentations.
Hosted in the DeSoto Hotel on Liberty Street in the Historic District of Savannah, Georgia, USA, the conference opens on Sunday, February 23, and closes on Wednesday, February 26, 2025. Submissions should engage with (or be adjacent to) the conference’s theme, “Tradition + Innovation” / “Traidisiún + Nuálaíocht.” Fáiltíonn an chomhdháil roimh aighneachtaí i nGaeilge.
While many former colonial possessions and their diasporic communities have navigated—and continue to navigate—a range of traditional identities and practices while also generating and advancing innovation, it can be argued that Ireland and the global Irish are exemplars for this negotiation with history.
Ireland’s centuries of history as a colonized country have informed its tradition-innovation calculus. Being able to promote itself as the European Union’s sole English-speaking (and common law) member nation has helped the Republic attract biopharmaceutical, information technology, and other cutting-edge companies. However, the English language as a significant asset for innovation emerged from a radical decline in the use of Gaeilge, the Irish language, a key component of Irish tradition. Central to this falling-off was a colonial innovation: the National School initiative, articulated in the Stanley Letter of 1831.
But Ireland is not alone in negotiating the legacies of its colonial past. Other former colonies wrestle with the push and pull of maintaining a connection, however tenuous, with a past that is ever more idealized and a future that is ever more precarious. While Ireland may certainly serve as a model for walking such a tightrope, it is not alone in its reconciliation of a complicated history with the real need to create a unique national space within the global community.
Many disciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches are possible when addressing the potential futures currently being created by former colonies of the European powers. How tradition can and should inform the foregoing is but one of many questions relevant to the tradition-innovation dynamic. Others include, but are not limited to, the following:
- When seen as authoritative, has tradition stymied innovation?
- When seen as threadbare, has tradition spurred innovation?
- Has innovation become tradition?
- Has the economic stress of maintaining tradition necessitated innovation?
- Has fear of tradition precipitated innovation?
- Has innovation depended on tradition?
- Has innovation compromised or canceled tradition?
- Has innovation caused certain traditions to revisit their mutual relationship?
- Has being Irish abroad, in innovation-heavy economies, induced nostalgia for tradition?
- Have certain tradition-disrupting innovations, introduced in past centuries, become essential features of the Irish scene?
- Has the promotion of Irish culture as tradition-rich eclipsed a narrative about the country as innovative?
- For other British Empire countries, what consequences resulted from Irish innovation in response to traditional colonial power structures?
- Does innovation in the Global North compromise the potential futures of the Global South?
In 2022, Ireland’s Tánaiste Leo Varadkar, spoke, perhaps, for every nation-state whose development was hindered by the European colonial project, when he wrote, “The future health of our national economy rests on our ability to innovate to respond to change. Innovation . . . will help us to take the radical actions required to build a sustainable planet and move towards a digital society."
