Thought Lab Research Group Launches at IADT

Thought Lab’s founding members are Dr. Jessica Foley, Dr. Linda King, Dr. Tina Kinsella, Dr. Martina Mullaney, Dr. Siobhán O’Gorman and Dr. Maria Parsons. Jointly, these researchers cross disciplines in critical arts and humanities research spanning a range from design to literature, artistic practice to performance studies, philosophy to popular history.

Thought Lab is committed to fostering critical and experimental research that makes meaningful connections with the public and communities. To reflect this remit, Thought Lab was delighted to welcome Dr. Roisín Higgins (Professor of History at Maynooth University) to launch the group with an inspiring public lecture entitled ‘Creativity and Collaboration – How Do We Tell New Histories’ which took place at IADT on 25th January 2024. To a large audience comprising representatives of cultural institutions and the local community, fellow scholars and practitioners, and IADT staff from all areas and departments, Roisín’s thoughtful, perceptive and moving talk explored how we can find alternative paths through history to access and communicate personal experience’s which are affective threads that tremble through time. This talk was followed by a lively Q+A that explored how the boundaries of current historical research might be destabilised, expanded, and pushed in new directions through interdisciplinary investigation and collaborative inquiry.

The Thought Lab members are currently involved in several high-profile research projects, including the Creative Approaches to Public Space (CAPS) initiative, the FilmEU Congo-VR project, and the IRC/AHRC funded Feminist Art Making Histories. Thought Lab will run more events in the future, in addition to exploring cross- and interdisciplinary research opportunities with external partners.

Roisin Higgins: ‘This is genuinely such an exciting group of individuals who have come together in Thought Lab. They are allied by their common aim of creating space to explore, incubate, develop and showcase critical and experimental, interdisciplinary and collaborative work and they foreground genuinely inventive crossovers between histories, theories, and creative practices. These women can answer the question of how to tell new histories; they have spent their careers creating spaces in which genuinely new histories are collected and told. They have expanded the archive, and they’ve expanded what people in Ireland understand as the archive and, if necessary, they’ve created the archive, including, reinterpreting and translating work for multiple audiences, throwing the discipline of history slightly off center, so that in those moments of instability and unfamiliarity, we find something new.’

Links:

For more information on the Congo-VR research project, see: https://www.filmeu.eu/research/pilot-projects/congo-vr and https://congopanorama.filmeu.eu/.

For more information on the Creative Approaches to Public Space project, see here.

For more information on the Feminist Art Making Histories research project, see here.