CAIS Keynote: Rhona Richman Kenneally – The Matter of Whose Lives? Performing Irishness on the Body

Rhona Richman Kenneally is a Professor and former Chair in the Department of Design and Computation Arts, and a co-founder and Fellow of the School of Irish Studies at Concordia University. Her work crosses the domains of design justice, critical materiality, food studies, and the architecture and design of the built environment. Recent publications explore food-related activities, especially in the home, in mid-twentieth-century Ireland, and a new research thread investigates textiles and clothing through the lens of material ecocriticism, to acknowledge the power of wearables as agents in their own right in the material world. Rhona has served as editor of the Canadian Journal of Irish Studies through eight annual volumes of that periodical. She is also co-editor of an upcoming special issue of CJIS, devoted to Ireland’s Repeal the Eighth Amendment referendum of 2018.