[Air-L] Call-for Papers for an Online Conference and Publication

Mon Feb 23 02:28:09 PST 2026

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 at uni-jena.de and  
sabine.egger at 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 at 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
>
> _______________________________________________
> The Air-L at listserv.aoir.org mailing list
> is provided by the Association of Internet Researchers http://aoir.org
> Subscribe, change options or unsubscribe at:  
> http://listserv.aoir.org/listinfo.cgi/air-l-aoir.org
>
> Join the Association of Internet Researchers:
> http://www.aoir.org/

-- 
Apl. Prof. Dr. Fergal Lenehan
https://redico.eu
Intercultural Studies/IWK, Jena

fergal.lenehan at 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-cosmopolitanism/