Date: Tuesday 18 February 2025

Time: 13.00 - 14.00

Location: Boydell Lecture Room, Department of Music, House 5, Trinity College Dublin.

Trinity College’s Music Composition Centre in collaboration with School of Education (TCD) present this talk by Áine Mangaoang. All welcome.

Áine Mangaoang: ''SineĢad O’Connor is notable for being a radical activist and unapologetic social critic who was ahead of her time in many respects, as the obituaries following her untimely death in July 2023 detailed. But few appear to have noted her truly trailblazing work in supporting Deaf communities at a time when Deaf rights and media visibility were thoroughly overlooked.  In this talk I articulate how O’Connor’s music videos prove to be a pivotal moment in the intersection between Deaf culture, sign language and Irish popular music history. Following her global chart-topping achievements with ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ (1990), O’Connor’s decision to prominently feature sign languages in subsequent music videos laid the groundwork for future artists to build on her example. Drawing from two songs from O’Connor’s back catalogue, I establish how she brought her philosophies of solidarity and intersectionality into action through these works, communicating her music and message with Deaf audiences. As an artist whose feminism was rooted in ‘the importance of being able to speak and of being heard’ (Dillane 2021), I demonstrate that O’Connor’s legacy includes her role as a pioneer for inclusivity and disability accessibility in Irish music history and beyond.''

Biography

Áine Mangaoang is Associate Professor in Popular Music at the University of Oslo. Her books include Dangerous Mediations: Pop Music in a Philippine Prison Video, winner of the 2021 IASPM-US Woody Guthrie Book Prize, and Made in Ireland: Studies in Popular Music (with John O’Flynn & Lonán Ó Briain). She is Principal Investigator for the four-year interdisciplinary project Prisons of Note, supported by the Norwegian Research Council’s Young Research Talent Award. Recent writing on music on the margins appears in the Journal for the Society for Musicology in Ireland, Musicæ Scientiæ, and in her forthcoming collection Sound & Detention: Towards critical listening, sonic citizenship, & social justice.

For further information please email Audrey Grant, Department of Music TCD at <musicsec@tcd.ie>

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