If you read about a place called Newry, it will tell you that it is a city just on the edge of Northern Ireland’s border with the Republic of Ireland. It will tell you of Newry’s Cistercian monastic beginnings in the twelfth century, and it will tell you that its town hall was designed to sit on a bridge above the Clanrye river, which straddles the counties of both Armagh and Down that Newry resides in. It is set within a region designated by tourist boards as an “area of outstanding natural beauty,” and is frequently described as the gateway to the Mountains of Mourne. Your reading will refer to its esteemed maritime trade history with placenames such as Merchant’s Quay and Sugar Island, and, indeed, how it blossomed under the currency exchanges between the British Pound and the Irish Punt (later Euro). It is also the place where Southern Regional College, one of six Further and Higher Education colleges in Northern Ireland, is located alongside its other campuses in the towns of Banbridge, Armagh, Lurgan and Portadown, and that together these campuses service over 10,000 students.
However, your reading will also note that Newry is a post-conflict space with peace arriving in Northern Ireland at the cusp of the 21st century in 1999. More recently, it has experienced political and economic changes (such as Brexit), and—like a number of places across the U.K.—these have given rise to new challenges, especially with Newry’s position as a midway point between the two metropolitan capitals of Dublin and Belfast. We are often described as being along the Dublin-Belfast corridor, with all the connotations of “passing through” that a corridor suggests. So, how does a team of teaching professionals, based in this southern region of Northern Ireland—combat the draw of students towards two major urban centers, with all that they can offer in terms of experiences, resources and opportunities? How do we offer subject engagement and transfer this to employability skills to the students that attend the Newry campus of Southern Regional College—as its own metropolitan center from the surrounding smaller towns and villages? How can we ignite passion for subjects like literature, philosophy, and history as meaningful and experiential pathways to employment?
We grow.
We grow our community, our reach, our connections, and our capacity to extend the classroom walls beyond our city, our campus, and indeed our country. This began in 2015, where—with the idea of creating a student and community-based conference—we established ICAS (Interdisciplinary Conference in Arts and Science) as a means to provide free and local access to the global conversations that take place daily in academia, and as a means to be a part of these conversations, too. In our inaugural year, we had a mere handful of attendees. At our recent tenth anniversary, however, we saw record breaking attendance. In the decade since ICAS was founded, dozens of delegates from across the globe have participated. The conference has explored a wide range of topics, including “Memory,” “Imagined Realities,” “The Digital Self,” “Borders and Liminality,” “Human Universals,” “Diaspora in the 21st Century,” “Posthumanism and the Anthropocene,” “Aesthetic Engagement with Public Spaces,” and this year’s theme, “Post-Truth.”
ICAS has grown in ways not even considered in the beginning. Pedagogically, it has become an invaluable platform for students to connect with ideas and each other. A central tenet of ICAS is the student involvement with the organization and operational management of the conference for which they can gain modular credit. The topic, once selected, is discussed with the larger student body and the team quickly jumps into action researching and recommending speakers and gaining professional learning skills, such as posting and answering calls for papers on H-net. Once the conference ends, each student team begins the preparatory work for the next year through feedback and commentary so they can continue to adapt and grow ICAS to benefit the community it serves. Economically, many students on the associated degree programs balance additional responsibilities, too, such as jobs or family commitments, making it difficult to attend university in the cities. Sustaining these courses locally, and hosting events (such as ICAS) provides a more accessible higher education experience for our community of learners. Notably, four of the five students contributing to this article manage both work and childcare alongside their studies.
When “post-truth” was selected as the theme for ICAS 25, we are not going to lie—it gave rise to some anxiety. Northern Ireland, like all post-conflict zones, has a complicated and painful relationship with the truth. Truth here has been split by tribalism, swamped in political symbolism, engulfed by a violent past. We worried that some papers such as Finnigan’s discussion on vocabularies of truth and the role of the “tout,” a pejorative for an informer, would cause offense or upset in a community setting where just a few decades ago the hard and fast rule here was “whatever you say, say nothing.” A number of authors of this paper can even recall watching news broadcasts in the 1980s—where censorship rules meant that actors performed the dialogue of certain political figures—and being surprised years later when they heard their authentic voices for the first time. We worried, too, that our little border city was too far removed from the global operations of U.S. politics, or that complicated philosophical frameworks might entangle our capacity to make any of this mean something real. So, with a student team in tow, we set about building a conference that was global in its approach. We decided that the most comprehensive way to discuss post-truth was from the outside in. We would discuss the broader (perhaps global) features and manifestations of “post-truth” (such as disinformation and social media) and then turn towards a more subject-specific lens, such as how archaeology is plagued with conspiracy theories, or our natural acceptance that literature’s banner is underpinned by the fictional and not the truthful. The main hope was to diminish any abstractedness of the concept to instead produce conversations that centered around: what does “post-truth” mean for us in this place?
The theme lent itself to a suite of discussions from a number of fields, however it was anchored by philosophy. Not philosophy as a theoretical framework for dusty lecture theaters but as a living and lived experience. The phrase “post-truth” describes the pervasive documenting of and anxiety around public truth claims in the 21st century and this meant that anyone in attendance could participate. By simply being online or having a social media profile, we are engaging in questions of philosophical ontology, and we are doing this daily. As the conference began, it became clear very quickly (faster than we imagined) that the global was absolutely intersecting with the local. We began by getting the participants to think around truth as a term through the keynote opened by literary scholar Michael Rodgers asking questions around how we describe and perceive truth. He scrutinized definitions of honesty, manipulation and deception. He asked: does fiction consciously deceive? Rogers noted that the search for truth has been explored over centuries and clarification of the terminology surrounding truth, such as “logocentrism,” used by Jacques Derrida (1976), or I.A. Richard’s “pseudo-statement” (1923), has been probed by critics and linguistic theorists attempting to affirm definition. Rodgers’ theoretical opening was followed up by an interview with the Sky News journalist, David Blevins, who was questioned on ethical reporting and journalism in the current environment of podcasts, TikTok, and social media. For him, instant uploads of events skewed biased narratives, and the pushing of prejudiced agendas were noted as poor journalism. Blevins warned against conspiracies and false narratives and argued that we need to be more astute (especially young people) with social media so that we can distinguish between rumor, speculation and what is verifiable, credible fact. This is becoming increasingly difficult as “news management” is prevalent and editing is manipulated to achieve a desired outcome—favorable to a distorted narrative and not wholly representative. Blevins indicated that journalism should be conducted with integrity. The second keynote speaker, Stephan Lewandowsky, presented “Honest Liars and the Threat to Democracy,” focusing on the American political landscape. Demonstrating a sizeable data driven study, he was able to show the relationship between political parties and factually informed versus emotionally informed truths. He further noted the retreat of democracy and the sharp rise in the number of countries autocratizing and how they are linked to truth types. Misinformation and disinformation were proposed as one of the reasons for this phenomenon.
The global picture that emerged from these speakers—the misshaping of textual truth, false narratives, conspiracy theories—whilst seemingly universal in its growth and influence, echoes the more localized concerns of a post-conflict society. For many decades Northern Irish society had operated through twinned, but divided, ontologies of identity. Competing historical narratives shaped our identities and offered teleological explanations on both belonging and exclusion. At a national level, the “truths” of the Troubles were separate ones. At community levels, the demand for information from political bodies and authorities was met with community enforced silence. Truth was weaponized. These particular speakers offered a way for us to see that competing identity narratives in Northern Ireland have utilized both the polarities of silence and information. If we are really in a post-truth and post-conflict society, the question that these speakers left us asking was this: can we now speak a unified truth? The answer to this question was somewhat addressed in Finnigan and Langlois’ paper, entitled “Say Nothing in the Grey Zone: A Vocabulary of Truths.” Their paper opened with a discussion on the complex triumvirate of truths between a perpetrator, victim, and witness, with Langlois illustrating his point through the case of the Sonderkommandos during the Holocaust. He argued that the concentration camp is often conceptualized as a unique space, giving birth to a concentrationary camp universe, or what Primo Levi famously refers to as the “grey zone” (1989). This is a space in Levi’s meditations on the subject where the lines separating victim and perpetrator become blurred, while all the while, paradoxically, remaining firmly delineated. Finnigan’s comparative illustration of the “tout” during the Northern Irish Troubles argued, using Austin’s notion of illocutionary force in Seamus Deane’s novel, Reading in the Dark (1996), how the act of “touting” contains illocutionary force and how informers have been perceived as “code-breakers and folk devils” (Dudai, 2012). This paper showed that we have actually shifted towards a more transparent arrangement with the truth in Northern Ireland at the community level, with the very epistemological act of an open presentation on the act of touting and discussion of this topic. By linking the burial of truths in one conflict zone to other conflicts and atrocities, this suggests that we have begun to actually “say something,” finally.
The truth of landscapes also came under discussion with Nigel Linden’s talk on the relationship between thrash metal lyrics and protests on environmental matters and Riley Finnigan’s archaeological discussion on how the field is beset by conspiracy theories. Both speakers suggested that the very grounds that we stand upon are significant theaters of misinformation and exploitation. This idea was not lost on a border community audience. The site of the conference, Newry, is at most five miles from the border with the Republic of Ireland. In some places, mere fields separate both countries and (in a post-Brexit world) continents. Conversations around the military controlled “hard-border”—during the Troubles and due to the fear of seeing them re-appear due to Brexit conditions—dominated political discussion here just a few years ago and, with more recent suggestions of Irish unification, highlights the very real impact that landscapes too are open to negotiation. Like Gloria Anzaldúa suggests in Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza (1987), borders create not only geographical divisions, but also cultural, linguistic, and ontological ones—harboring hybrid and possibly ambiguous identities. We’re familiar.
The conference ended with the idea of solutions to post-truth and strategies for recovery. How do we tackle post-truth in a post-conflict society? Well, for starters, open and transparent discussions positioned globally, like ICAS, are an indication that enough of us are here to examine, deconstruct, and ultimately challenge the dispensing of truth. Shania Rafferty’s paper took on the booming global health food industries and its false representations, stating that “through exploiting cognitive biases and emotional appeals, post-truth marketing manipulates consumer behavior.” Ionut Untea’s paper called for us to think on our parrhesiastic obligations to challenge the myths we live by, punning on Lakoff and Johnson’s metaphors (1980) that hope in a post-Truth world is possible, in that exemplary people (Yousafzai or Thunberg, for example) determine the kind of viral reactions that makes the “mere metaphor” a force of protest/a force of change. These final papers arrived as a necessary wake-up call, encouraging us to open our metaphorical eyes and recognize exploitation and falsehood at the individual level—whether it stems from global corporations or national governments. We ended the conference with a play by a local theatrical group, Newpoint Players, who hosted an interactive performance wherein we placed Padraig Pearse, a key figure in the 1916 Irish Rebellion, on trial for crimes against Ireland. The revivification of historical figures and the narratives attached to them gave a cathartic ending. It gave us permission to say that it was okay to look back at our contested histories and truths and decide to give it all a second glance—and, for a change, to say something.
Pearse was, incidentally, found innocent by the audience.
The interrogation of post-truth across so many disciplines is needed, and ICAS demonstrated the urgency required in reviewing the damaging effects false narratives and misrepresentations are creating throughout society. Concluding thoughts would be that the integrity of information relayed in any form is essential to the healthy development of a free-thinking, equal society, and that the false narratives perpetrated by governments (past and present), conspiracists, and industry are detrimental to our very existence.
C. Smith
Clare Smith is an undergraduate student of History and English Literature with a particular interest in post-colonialism, cultural history, and the politics of representation. Her work explores how historical narratives are shaped through literature, performance, and memory. Passionate about interdisciplinary research, she is eager to expand her studies at postgraduate level and contribute to emerging scholarship on the legacies of empire, resistance, and identity in modern historical discourse.
P. Quinn
Paula Quinn is a mature student in her final year studying a BA Hons in English and History degree. She is a married mother of three and decided to return to education to facilitate a change in career. Her recent dissertation concerned the political usage of allegory as a literary tool. Aside from studying, she enjoys reading, music and walking.
L. Finnigan
Liz Finnigan is a lecturer at Southern Regional College and is the Course Director for undergraduate English and History programmes. In 2019, she was appointed as Senior Fellow to the Higher Education Academy. Her most recent publication was a book entitled Cognitive Spaces and Perspective in Literature which was published with Palgrave Macmillan in December 2024. She is currently working with Glasgow University and Strathclyde University on a series of vision and language experiments on spatial patterning.
A. Horsman
Before joining Southern Regional College in Newry as an English & History lecturer, Adrian Horsman was a television and radio journalist specialising in Irish politics on both sides of the border. He was BBC Northern Ireland's Dublin correspondent and later TV3 Ireland's Belfast correspondent. Adrian was also broadcasting for South African radio at the time of the first Democratic elections there in 1994. He has a passionate interest in peace processes and political reconciliation.
P. Torley
Paul Torley is a History Lecturer on Southern Regional College’s undergraduate English and History programmes. He has nearly 30 years’ experience in Adult and Community education. He gained his degree in English & History from Ulster University and an MA in History from Queens. His current research focuses on memory and commemoration in the recent conflicts in Ireland. He is an avid Byzantine historian in his spare time.
S. Hunt
Samantha Hunt is a 30-year-old mother of one and a fourth-year undergraduate student working towards a BA (Hons) in English and History through Southern Regional College and Liverpool John Moores University. Her academic interests include feminist studies and all things fantasy —whether in books, film, or folklore. She aspires to continue her education at postgraduate level, with the goal of obtaining both a Master’s and a Doctorate.
S. Miller
Shannon Miller is a US-born student currently based in Northern Ireland. She is pursuing her BA Honours English and History degree. Her educational journey has been driven by a deep curiosity around the interconnecting stories that shape and reflect our societies. Her main research interests focus on socioeconomic inequalities and their portrayal in literature. She has a keen interest for dystopian fiction and emerging climate fiction and believes literature plays a vital role in raising awareness of pressing global challenges and inspires thoughtful dialogue around these topics.
S. Rafferty
Shania Rafferty studies Literature and History, with particular interest in how narratives produce and reflect social meaning. Her research interests focus on the ideological work of texts—how writers, across genres and periods, engage with the cultural discourses of their time. She is especially interested in how meaning is constructed and circulated through different forms, from historical writing to contemporary media and marketing.
