Digital Pathways to Queer Irish Histories: Digital Media, Queer Archives and Queering Cultural Memory Through Technology (original) (raw)

Abstract

Digital media and platforms have proven critical for transformations in Ireland’s LGBTQ community. They have offered new critical pathways through which we can engage with LGBTQ histories, how we archive those histories, how we engage in community activism to incite change, while also facilitating the community to engender collective action. The technological affordances of digital media have offered interactive and co-creative processes of memorialising and archiving the LGBTQ community in Ireland. Accordingly, archiving in digital media cultural practices engenders a new mode of production, engagement, archiving and memorialisation, in ways that develop and propagate queer histories across platforms in a new information age. Participatory digital platforms have accordingly provided an interactive setting that operates at the intersection of media, technological affordances and community belonging. To that extent, this chapter aims to focus on three case studies which have provided digital avenues for interaction with queer Irish archives and histories: (1) The #fairviewparkpapers1983 Irish Queer Archives social media campaign, (2) The Queer-in-Progress. Timeline with the Project Arts Centre and (3) The acquisition of the Cork LGBT Archives by the Digital Repository of Ireland. This chapter argues that these three cases offer new means for not only exploring issues of visibility, intimacy and community belonging online for the Irish LGBTQ community but also argues that digital media has served as a platform for the Irish LGBTQ community to maintain new forms of engagement with queer archives and Ireland’s historical past in ways that empower modes of memorialisation and interactions with queer Irish history.

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  1. School of Information & Communication Studies, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
    Páraic Kerrigan

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  1. Páraic Kerrigan
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Correspondence toPáraic Kerrigan .

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  1. School of Sociology, University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland
    Barbara Górnicka
  2. School of Humanities, South East Technological University, Waterford, Ireland
    Mark Doyle

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© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG

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Kerrigan, P. (2023). Digital Pathways to Queer Irish Histories: Digital Media, Queer Archives and Queering Cultural Memory Through Technology. In: Górnicka, B., Doyle, M. (eds) Sex and Sexualities in Ireland. Genders and Sexualities in the Social Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-36550-8\_4

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