As part of the RTE Radio 1 Culture Night special, Inside Culture comes to you from The Coach House stage in Dublin Castle.
We’re looking at identity through ideas of citizenship, place, our bodies and race. A panel of cultural commentators and thinkers join us on the show. We’ll also be hearing short talks and performances responding to the theme of identity by poets, campaigners and essayists.
The panel consists of Peter Murphy, writer and spoken word performer, Chris Kissane historian & writer, as well as BBC/AHRC New Generation Thinker, and Emma Dabiri, teaching fellow in the Africa Department at the School of Oriental and African Studies, who is currently completing her PhD at Goldsmiths University. Her work explores the category ‘mixed-race’ and its relationship to the concept of ‘identity’.
To kick off the live show, Aoife McLysaght, head of the Department of Genetics in Trinity College, gives us a talk on the natural history of our DNA and its influence on our identity.
Writer and performance poet, Colm Keegan, joins us to perform a piece written for this Inside Culture/Culture Night special, responding to that notion of voice and identity. Colm is one of the organisers of Lingo, the spoken word festival, which is coming to Dublin next month. See lingofestival.com for more.
As identity becomes increasingly valuable, and access to our personal information online is easier to get hold of, it’s no surprise that our identity is something that can be stolen. Louise Williams, broadcaster and human rights campaigner, joins us now to tell us about why we should never take our identity for granted.
Towards the end of the show, we turn to the idea of the self. The ‘self’ is possibly the least tangible aspect of our identity. Essayist Mark O’Connell gives us a sneak preview of his new book, To Be A Machine, which investigates the future of our personhood in a very real future of machines replacing human parts, or what’s called transhumanism. To Be A Machine – Adventures amount Cyborgs, Utopians, Hackers, and the Futurists solving the modest problem of Death, will be published by Penguin later this year.
Broadcast on 19th September 2016
