Welcome

Under the term “Ethics”, the 22^nd International AEDEI Conference, organized by the Department of Modern Philology and the Centre for Irish Studies “Alka-Éire”, aims to welcome participants interested in engaging in the discussion of the multifarious meaning of such strongly weighted concept.

    Colegio de los Irlandeses in Alcalá de Henares (Madrid)

Often associated with morality, codes of conduct, principles, or ideas of right or wrong, when applied to literary and cultural fields, ethics usually evokes a certain position towards something, the truthfulness of a given representation or its validity. One of the earliest texts to link writing with responsibility was Aristotle’s Ethics, which distinguished the art and the sciences on the level of the responsibility attached to each one. While the sciences are usually connected with measurable and quantifiable facts, art and the humanities, due to its aesthetic value, are more open to interpretation. In the Irish context, the flourishing of literary genres and artistic forms of expression that are giving voice to alternative or marginal perspectives have contributed to displacing mainstream accounts challenging received interpretations that call to a required ethics of representation. Arguing that ethics frees us from one-dimensional, straightforward interpretations in the way it embraces a plurality of meanings that underline the multidimensional quality of experience, this conference will critically address these issues. The approaches will be interdisciplinary, covering any field of Irish Studies from an ethical lens, and will aim at bringing awareness to misrepresentation, invisibility, untruth or the unveiling of silences from the past.