Presentation short abstract

This work engages wind and the banshee as two queer objects from which to consider the position(ing) of F/folklore and the audio(-visual) within the academy. In writing a new cultural geography of wind, this paper develops the ‘windscape’ as methodological intervention and means of scéalaíocht.

Presentation long abstract

This work engages wind and the banshee as two queer objects from which to think expansively about the position(ing) of F/folklore and the audio(-visual) within the academy. This is to advance lively debates on the constitution of ‘academic’ material and broaden extant argumentation concerning the inclusion and validity of soundscape as both method and output. F/folk and the audio(-visual), as ‘modes’ of knowledge, continue to be relegated to the peripheries of the Western intellectual tradition. Attempting to undo this ‘ontological freezing’, this work rejects the neo-Kantianism structuring the Anglo-American academy that protects the dominance of textuality. As methodological intervention, then, this paper critically interrogates and problematises the normative use of the wind muff / shield. Attempting to apprehend the environment in its ‘chaos’ and ‘excess’, it seeks to undo (and deconstruct) the epistemological silencing and sanitisation of wind otherwise. The development of novel ‘windscapes’ works to this end; in writing a new cultural geography of wind, the anthropocentric is destabilised by attending to the interconnected agencies of the more-than-human. This allows for the conceptualisation of new ways of apprehending and knowing (Irish) landscapes, emerging from multiple and mutable experiences of dwelling. Importantly, these are landscapes in which lurk serious traces of dispossession by the British; this more-than-textual work seeks to articulate those strange encounters overflowing from the Atlantic Irish coast, testifying to the centrality of scéalaíocht, story-telling, and defending an Oral tradition carried with, in, and through the wind.