Start Date
End Date
Where
Museum of the Home - 136 Kingsland Road, E2 8EA
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Join us for a symposium that explores home as a dynamic cultural space, beyond private retreat, in which diasporic identity was sustained, and new forms of music and performance were forged.
Our full-day programme of music, talks and discussion brings together historians, cultural scholars, musicians, and community voices to consider material culture, gendered labour, religion, and intergenerational transmission within the migrant home.
This symposium positions the Irish home as an intimate yet powerful engine of cultural transformation where identities were preserved and influential contributions to post-war British music and performance emerged. The programme will create a dialogue with the display of A Room Upstairs in 1956 in our Rooms Through Time gallery.
Programme
10.30am – 10.45am:
HE Martin Fraser welcome & Museum of the Home introduction
10.45am – 11.30am: Keynote Address
Prof Enda Delaney (University of Edinburgh), ‘Home Away from Home: The Irish in Post-war Britain’ and Q&A
11.30am – 12.30pm: Session 1
Dr Sara Hannafin (University of Limerick), ‘The nation flagged daily: The home lives of the second-generation Irish in Britain‘
Rosanna Lee (V&A x Design Trust), ‘Cuttings from the Cranesbill’
Q&A
12.30pm – 1.30pm: Lunch
Opportunity to view the 1950s room
1.30pm – 2.45pm: Session 2
Joe Horgan (Irish Post), ‘Reflections on the home lives of the second-generation Irish in Birmingham‘
Prof Aoife Monks (Queen Mary University of London), ‘A Nation Once Again: Houses and Performers as Diasporic Archives‘
Prof Sean Campbell (ARU Cambridge), ‘Music, the migrant home and the second-generation Irish in England‘
Q&A
2.45pm – 3.05pm: Break
3.05pm – 4pm: Session 3
Orla Fitzpatrick, ‘Home places: writing and picturing the Irish diasporic home in London‘
Rachael Kelly Ryder (Glasgow School of Art and National Library of Scotland Moving Image Archive), ‘The Migrant Home in Motion: Memory, Music and Moving-image‘
Q&A
4pm – 5pm:
Closing remarks and refreshments