Eóin Ó Cuinneagáin

Dia dhaoibh! Buerie biejjie!

I acknowledge the Sámi peoples as rightful custodians and speakers for the land on which I stand. To you, reader, I greet your ancestors and the indigenous on the land on which you stand.

I am a decolonial scholar pursuing doctoral research at Linnaeus University Centre for Concurrences in Colonial and Postcolonial Studies. I hold a BA (hons) degree in sociology from Trinity College Dublin, an MSc (cum laude) in sociology and an MA in cultural analysis from the University of Amsterdam.

Teaching

I teach BA and MA courses at Linnaeus University in English Literature and Migration. I also supervise and assess BA and MA papers in the areas of (de)coloniality, (anti-)racism, White innocence, Irish literature and oral knowledge.

Research

The title of my PhD dissertation is Towards Decolonial Aesthesis: Delinking from Anglocentrism, Predatory Extractivism and the Coloniality of Perception in Éirinn.

My dissertation aims to interrogate from where and how the antiquarians and folklorists of the 19th century appropriated and policed the Gaelic-derived perception of cartography, visuality and audibility in Éirinn and how the antiquarian and folklorization movements' location, reorientation and reformulation of power are inscribed within aesthetic and epistemic production today. It identifies three co-constructive operations arising there from: anglocentrism, predatory extractivism and the coloniality of perception(Tlostanova).

In my dissertation I recentre and reveal different forms of resistance and response of the cosmhuintir to antiquarianism and folklorization from the 19th century onwards in the form of decolonial aesthesis (Tlostanova; Gómez; Vázquez; Mignolo), a process which desettles the modern/colonial aesthetic, with the intervention of the colonized Gaelic subject in order to reclaim space, taste, identity and dignity. As a link in the reproduction of Gaelic oral knowledge, I demonstrate how a decolonial/Gaelic method and attitude can be invoked by drawing on the cartography, visuality and sonority that are embedded in Gaelic epistemologies such as amhránaíocht, scéalaíocht and sean nós rhythms.

*Éirinn – one of the Gaelic names used to describe the island of Ireland

*cosmhuintir – the ordinary people, the downtrodden, “the wretched of the earth” (Fanon)

*amhránaíocht – the practice of singing orally transmitted knowledge

*scéalaíocht – the practice of storytelling orally transmitted knowledge

*sean nós – the traditional ways of making knowledge and performing