Dear colleagues, The following call – see below – is for an online conference and accompanying book on life writing, including also digital forms. T herefore it may be of interest to some of you. Kind regards, Fergal Lenehan Call for Papers: “The Road Less Travelled? Irish-European Lives and Multi-Modal Approaches to Life-Writing” Online Conference 25-26 June 2026 Organisers: Associate Prof. Sabine Egger (Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick) Apl. Prof. Dr. Fergal Lenehan (Friedrich Schiller University of Jena) Life-writing, the purposeful recording of one’s own or of someone else’s life experience, is now seen as inherently multi-genre and multi-modal, well beyond the narrower parameters of memoir and autobiography. Literary Irish Studies has engaged greatly with both memoir and autobiography, not least that of Irish migrants. However, the study of Irish migrant memoir and autobiography has, understandably, been dominated by Irish-American, Irish-British and, more recently, Irish-Australian migrants. The publishing of Belfast-born artist Elizabeth Shaw’s Irish-British-East German memoir, How I Came to Berlin, for the first time in English in 2025, and current research suggest that there may indeed be a hidden reservoir of Irish-European life-writing that has still to be investigated by scholars. This online conference, therefore, aims to explore life-writing by those Irish who have found themselves in various parts of Europe as migrants, exiles or travellers; in person, in imagination and in the digital world. Furthermore, we are interested in a broad range of modes of life-writing, for example by women and members of marginalised groups that may have found it difficult to position themselves to narrate their own life histories in the sustained, authoritative style associated with the classic forms of autobiography, but also by others transcending generic and medial boundaries. Thus, for our online conference on 25 and 26 June 2026 we are looking for scholars to examine Irish-European life-writing from a multi-generic and multi-modal perspective. Topics to be examined may include: • Irish-European memoir and autobiography in comparison with Irish-American and Irish-British memoir and autobiography (and those linked to other global. diasporas), in English, Irish and indeed further languages when applicable. • Irish-Central European life-writing, particularly with a focus on German-speaking areas, understood in terms of diaspora, travel destinations, points of reference; the latter may also be linguistic, historical, social or cultural connection points in Irish writing and Irish lives (e.g. Hamilton’s Speckled People as a contribution to ‘New Irish’ autobiographical writing); Irish-Eastern European life-writing. • Studies of the personal essayistic engagement with Irish-European life and lives, from Hubert Butler to Emilie Pine, and incorporating the essays published in publications specialising in the essay form, including The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Winter Pages, Irish Pages and Tolka, as well as other publications. • Irish-European autofiction and its position between life-writing and fictional writing. • Visual-oriented approaches to life-writing, such as auto-fictional, biographical and autobiographical graphic novels, from an Irish-European perspective. • Online versions of Irish-European personal essay-writing, such as blogs and vlogs and social media accounts dedicated principally to the topic. • Varieties of Irish-European podcasting or visual media which may be seen as taking a personal essayistic form. • Multi-modality in Irish-European women’s life-writing. • Overviews of autobiography and related forms of life-writing in other European literatures (ideally in comparison with Ireland, but also contextualising overviews without explicit reference to Ireland) Abstracts, setting out clearly the goal and potential arguments of your paper, should be sent to: fergal.lenehan@uni-jena.de and sabine.egger@mic.ul.ie by 30 March 2026. The conference is free and open to all. Prof. Liam Harte (University of Manchester) has been confirmed as one of our keynote speakers. Funding for the publication of outcomes of the conference has already been secured for a peer-reviewed open-access e-book with a renowned academic publisher. Presenters with suitable papers will be asked to turn their oral presentation into a written chapter, to be handed in by September 2026. Quoting Yu Tian via Air-L <air-l@listserv.aoir.org>:
Hi AoIR,
Happy 2026! We are pleased to share that 2025 marks a milestone for Communication and Change with 20 peer-reviewed and editorial articles published and several special issues scheduled for publication in 2026! We invite you to take a look.
https://link.springer.com/journal/44382
Table of Contents
1. Building a methodological profile for communication’s study of the passive generation of information
Huma Rasheed & Robert Holbert
1. Stuck in the middleware with you: the challenges of capitalizing a market-oriented approach to platform governance
Blake Hallinan, Omer Rothenstein & Nicholas A. John
1. The end of experimental research as we know it? A perspective on generative artificial intelligence in communication science
Jörg Matthes & Sofie Vranken
1. The evolution of agenda-setting research and theory from 1972 to 2025: from newspapers and TV to social media and artificial intelligence
David H. Weaver
1. Media History vs. Media Change: ahistoricism, technological determinism, and other problems
Otávio Daros
1. A chatbot for the soul: mental health care, privacy, and intimacy in AI-based conversational agents
Tamara Kneese, Briana Vecchione & Alice Marwick
1. Using large language models for survey research in communication: opportunities and challenges
Sebastián Valenzuela, Stephan Winter & Sebastián Rivera
1. A bias towards neutrality? How LLM guardrail sensitivity affects classification
Richard Rogers & Xiaoke Zhang
1. Reimagining AI in Latin America: situated narratives of users, developers, and decision-makers on understanding and governing AI
Teresa Correa, Francisca Luco, Mónica Humeres, Dusan Cotoras, Alexandra Davidoff, Yelena Hernández-Estrada, Iñaki Oyarzún-Merino & Claudia López
1. Emerging AI individualism: how young people integrate social AI into everyday life
Petter Bae Brandtzaeg, Asbjørn Følstad & Marita Skjuve
1. Communication, change, and the challenge of AI: an introduction to the inaugural issue of Communication and Change
James E. Katz
1. Generative AI and its disruptive challenge to journalism: An institutional analysis
Seth C. Lewis, Andrea L. Guzman, Thomas R. Schmidt, Bibo Lin
1. Introducing Communication and Change: A journal for empirically grounded communication research and theory
James E. Katz
1. 100 years of communication: Change and continuity in inaugural communication journals 1924–2024
Lee Humphreys, Didem Özkul & Stephanie Belina
1. Artificial intelligence as primitive accumulation: Enclosure, extraction, exploitation
Graham Murdock
1. Mobile AI: Communication and mobility after the smartphone
Gerard Goggin
1. A framework for thinking about and deploying ethics in AI
Peng Hwa Ang
1. Extending the self through AI-mediated communication: Functional, ontological, and anthropomorphic extensions
Scott W. Campbell, Nicole B. Ellison & Morgan Quinn Ross
1. An ecological approach to debated questions in communication research: Issue competition, media convergence, and AI-generated content
Jonathan J. H. Zhu & Tai-Quan Peng
1. Communication and Change: Our Vision
James E. Katz, Baohua Zhou, Lei Guo & Jianhua Yao
Also, consider submitting your articles in 2026!
Submission guidelines： https://link.springer.com/journal/44382/submission-guidelines
Submission Website： https://link.springer.com/journal/44382
Social Media Handle: X (previously known as Twitter): @CAC_Springer Bluesky: cacspringer.bsky.social
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-- Apl. Prof. Dr. Fergal Lenehan https://redico.eu Intercultural Studies/IWK, Jena fergal.lenehan@uni-jena.de Tel.: +49 (0)3641 – 944379 Fax: +49 (0)3641 – 944372 Home Office: +49 (0)1737645442 Sprechzeiten: nach Vereinbarung Latest open-access article "Examining realised and unrealised contacts: theoretical thoughts on digital interculturality" https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/14708477.2024.2419666 Latest co-edited book: "Reimagining Digital Cosmopolitanism: Perspectives from a Postmigrant and Postdigital World". Available to download here: https://www.transcript-verlag.de/978-3-8376-7532-0/reimagining-digital-cosmo...