September European Cultural Identity Workshop at NUI Galway

NUI Galway will host an Irish Research Council Funded Creative Connections Initiative workshop on Friday, 27 September, examining questions of European identity through a focus on the themes of sport and digital media.

The workshop will draw on a range of disciplines in the Arts, Humanities, Social Sciences (AHSS) and STEM areas from NUI Galway, Trinity College Dublin, and Queen’s University, Belfast to examine the topic of European cultural identity. Additional strands in the network will examine the themes of schooling and curriculum design, and landscape as key components of Europe’s shared cultural heritage and identity. These strands will be used as a prism through which participants will explore European cultural identity, its construction and current crisis.

NUI Galway partner in this initiative, Dr Seán Crosson of the University’s Huston School of Film & Digital Media and leader of the Sport and Exercise Research Group, said: “Sport annually engages millions of diverse people across Europe, both as participants and spectators. Participants engage in sport in a wide variety of competitive, educational, recreational and, increasingly, health-related contexts, while spectators attend sporting events or follow them via the mass media. Widespread engagement with sport, accelerated by considerable technological and digital media advancements, means that sporting practices and representations contribute significantly to the social construction of cultural identities. In its various forms, sport offers a unique opportunity to encourage an appreciation among citizens of their shared cultural heritage and common values at the heart of European identity.”

Workshop two will facilitate an interdisciplinary examination of the interconnection of sport and digital media and their roles in constructions of European cultural identity, bringing together researchers in film, digital media, sport and leisure studies, French studies, psychology, media and communication studies, and medicine.

The keynote speaker at the workshop will be Professor Alan Tomlinson, Professor in Leisure Studies, University of Brighton. A leading contributor in the area of sport and media studies, Professor Tomlinson’s work includes Sport and the Transformation of Modern Europe: States, media and markets 1950-2010 and The Sport Studies Reader. Professor Tomlinson’s lecture ‘Sport, Digital Media and European Cultural Identities’ will explore where and how sport contributes to or problematises conceptions of European cultural identity, with examples from the mass media and new/digital media forms.

The workshop will take place in Moore Institute, Humanities Research Building from 10.30am-5pm.

A full schedule for the day long workshop is available at https://www.tcd.ie/trinitylongroomhub/research/European-Culture-project.php7

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