“I whelm them with a single wail”: The centring of marginalised voices through multimodal research

Dr Jenny O’Connor is currently engaged in the Lyrical Bodies project at SETU, which builds upon the scholarship of Drs Úna Kealy and Kate McCarthy in investigating and reviving interest in Teresa Deevy’s work. The project considers the oppression of deaf women in Ireland, and their resistance to the usurping of power, status and human rights, through a never-before performed ballet by deafened Waterford playwright Teresa Deevy entitled Possession which focuses on the role of Queen Medb in The Cattle Raid of Cooley.
While this work on Deevy’s reimagining of Queen Medb’s role in The Táin takes place within the Lyrical Bodies project, Dr de Brún’s work is similarly interested in giving voice to Queen Medb and centralizing her role in the story through the creation of a persona poem that was specially commissioned as part of a wider project entitled ‘Threading the Táin’. This ambitious project involved 40 female volunteers across five counties who worked together to create a series of tapestries responding to this ancient Irish myth. The tapestries are currently on display in Co. Louth alongside the five poems commissioned to respond to them. Dr De Brún and Dr O’Connor each acknowledge the complexities around issues of voice and strive to offer a ‘strategically authentic voice’ in their work, one whose objective is to create social change (Gubrium et al. 2014a, p.9).

This paper explores the potential of multimodal research and offers rich possibilities for active and creative engagement that fosters the principles of equity, diversity and inclusion.