Conference Papers and Presentations


In Brief

This page gathers a selection of my conference presentations that engage with my practice-based research, conscious connected breathwork, transnational feminist philosophy, and the relational politics of the maternal. Each paper is a site of staying with and preparing for the encounter — a space to think, feel, and breathe together through “histories that hurt”, and to ask how art practice, theory, and embodied practice might open space for relational transformation.


The Irish Catholic Maternal: Articulating Embodied Research Practice with Luce Irigaray



Critical Intersections Symposium, King’s College London (May 2025)
Curated by Dr Timothy Huzar

I was delighted to present this paper as part of a rich and generous symposium hosted by King’s College London. My contribution was situated within a panel Embodied Research and Critical Reflexivity, and it formed part of a wider day of conversation, reflection, and academic and artistic response – including the powerful exhibition Arch & Pillar is She: De-self-colonisation by Yianna Tsolaki.

The day sparked so many rich and expansive conversations — about the work of what it means to stay in the preparedness of the encounter, staying with discomfort, about how certain encounters are never the same both ways, and about the possibilities for relationality within the university. My deepest thanks to Dr Timothy Huzar for curating the event with such care, and to respondents Fanny Söderbäck and Rachel Jones for their thoughtful reflections and generosity.


Paper Overview

"The Irish Catholic Maternal" draws from my practice-based PhD research in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. It explores how transgenerational shame, rooted in the Irish Catholic diaspora in London, shapes the maternal relation — particularly under the conditions of dementia, migration, and embodied memory. The work combines philosophy, breath-based performance, film, archival research, and embodied workshops to reimagine the maternal encounter as a transformative, if precarious, site of co-presence.

Philosophically grounded in Luce Irigaray’s underexamined concept of shared air, and drawing on thinkers including Catherine Malabou, Jacques Derrida, and Christina Sharpe, the paper proposes breath as both a medium of relation and a politically situated inheritance. Through auto-theoretical and practice-led methods, I engage with breath as a form of listening — to silence, to inherited trauma, and to the spaces between language and touch.

Rather than seeking resolution or redemptive closure, this work holds space for fragmentary, durational modes of relation — where co-witnessing, slowness, and attunement allow for new ways of being-with. It is a refusal of assimilation into dominant norms, and an insistence on relational, embodied, and ethically situated inquiry.

Key Themes:

  • Irish Catholic maternal shame and diaspora

  • Breath as relational method

  • Embodied workshops and performance

  • Dementia as situated and relational

  • Shared air, co-presence, and affective inheritance



Curating Embodied Communities: Reorienting Maternal Narratives in the Irish Catholic Diaspora


Politics of Curatorship Spring Seminar 2025, School of Arts, Universidade Católica Portuguesa, Porto


Paper Overview

I was honoured to present my practice-based PhD research at the Politics of Curatorship Spring Seminar 2025 in Porto. It was a joy to share space with scholars, artists, and curators committed to reimagining how we think, feel, and create together.

My paper, Curating Embodied Communities: Reorienting Maternal Narratives in the Irish Catholic Diaspora, introduced key elements of my doctoral research in Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London. This research explores the intersections of transnational feminisms, embodied performance, and maternal shame within the Irish Catholic diaspora in London. Rooted in Luce Irigaray’s concept of "shared air" and in dialogue with thinkers such as Christina Sharpe and Sara Ahmed, I consider how breath can be a curatorial, relational, and political method.

In Porto, I shared parts of an ongoing project that combines philosophy, breath-based workshops, experimental film, and archival research to explore how we might remain with histories that hurt without resolving them. Through collective breath practices, circular readings, and participatory performance, the work curates what I call an ethics of co-presence — a way of listening, feeling, and staying with.

The presentation traced how breath becomes a form of embodied memory: a rhythm of shared vulnerability, situated knowledge, and refusal. It asked how we might curate differently — with slowness, with care, and with breath.

Thank you to the organisers and fellow presenters for holding such a resonant space for thinking, moving, and imagining together.



Key Themes:

  • Shared air and breathwork as methodology

  • Transgenerational shame and diaspora

  • Feminist curatorial practice

  • Maternal relationality and dementia

  • Non-extractive, embodied knowledge production




Upcoming Conference Presentations (2025)

The Association for Psychosocial Studies 2025 Conference: Hope and Despair / Crisis and Opportunity
Title: The Irish Catholic Maternal: Articulating Embodied Research Practice with Luce Irigaray in Response to the Permanent Polycrisis
Dates: June 9–10, 2025
Location: St. Mary’s University, London
Conference Website

UK-Ireland Digital Humanities Association: Collaboration Beyond Boundaries
Title: The Irish Catholic Maternal: Articulating Embodied Research Practice with the Philosophy of Luce Irigaray
Format: Presentation & Embodied Workshop
Dates: June 17–18, 2025
Location: Conference Website

London Critical Conference, Birkbeck University
Role: Stream Organiser – Interweaving Embodied Practice and Critical Theory in Transnational Feminisms
Dates: June 20–21, 2025
Contribution: Curating and chairing the panel Vulnerabilities, Exposed Fractures, and Re-embodying, and an embodied workshop Warm Bodies: An Embodied Exploration of Shared Air.

Location: Conference Website

Discourses on Motherhood Conference
Title: The Irish Catholic Maternal: Articulating Embodied Research Practice with Luce Irigaray in Response to Maternal Myth, Shame, and Ideology
Dates: June 27–29, 2025
Location: LCIR Gender Studies, London
Conference Website