Wellcome Trust Funded Symposium May 2021: Researching Representations Of Child Sexual Abuse In Contemporary Culture

The Researching Representations of Child Sexual Abuse in Contemporary Culture seminar series (postponed due to Covid-19 in Spring 2020) has been reconvened as a 2-day online symposium taking place on the afternoons of 25th and 26th May 2021. The symposium brings together survivors, practitioners and researchers from across disciplines to discuss their work on CSA, to explore the role of cultural representations of CSA in contemporary society and to consider how these representations may affect both survivors and general audiences. The symposium features talks by CSA survivors, talks by scholars from disciplines such as history, sociology, social work, criminology and psychology on their research in the area of CSA, talks by scholars of literature, film, narrative medicine and creative media effects on how cultural representations affect audiences, and talks by social work and healthcare professionals on their work with survivors and how cultural representations of CSA affect this.

Speakers Include

• Nick Basannavar
  (Social and cultural history, Birkbeck)
• Ruth Beecher 
  (Social and cultural history, Birkbeck)
• Ailise Bulfin 
  (Literature and culture, UCD)
• Claire Cunnington 
  (Sociology, University of Sheffield)
• Leanne Gregory 
  (Clinical Psychologist)
• Eimear Lacey (Social Work, Crumlin Children’s Hospital)
•  Hazel Larkin 
  (Activist and PhD researcher, DCU)
• Maeve Lewis 
  (Director, One in Four)
• María Ángeles Martínez Martínez 
  (Cognitive Literary Linguistics, University of Alcalá)
• Simon McCarthy-Jones
  (Clinical Psychology and Neuropsychology, TCD)
• Rosaleen McElvaney 
  (Psychotherapy, Children’s Hospital Connolly)
• Joe Mooney 
  (Social Work, UCD)
• Victoria Pöhls 
  (Cognitive Literary Studies, Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics)
• Xavier Aldana Reyes 
  (English Literature and Film, Manchester Met)
• Brendan Rooney 
  (Media Psychology, UCD)
• Michael Salter 
  (Criminology, University of New South Wales)
• Maria Stuart 
  • (School of English, Drama & Film, UCD)
• Emily Troscianko 
  (Medical Humanities, Oxford)
• Shaakya Vembar 
  (Psychology, TCD)

The symposium is funded by the Wellcome Trust and hosted by the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin. The full schedule and speaker abstracts and bios will be posted here soon. The panels are free to attend for anyone interested and details on how to register are available here.

Contact the organisers:

Ailise Bulfin: ailise.bulfin@ucd.ie

Shaakya Anand-Vembar: vembars@tcd.ie