Dreaming Our Futures

The Trans* Research Association of Ireland’s Second Annual Symposium

Dreaming Our Futures, the 3rd Annual Trans* Association of Ireland Symposium, will take place at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick on November 20 and 21st 2026.

Our keynote speaker is poet and activist-scholar, Dr Nat Raha. Dr Raha’s work focuses on transfeminism, LGBTQ+ genders and sexualities, practices and collectives of care and social reproduction, racial capitalism and decolonization, and critical theory. Her work spans across poetry, print cultures, art, politics, liberation movements and hi(r)story. She is the co-author of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds (2024) with Mijke van der Drift.

In his 1943 St Patrick’s Day Address, “On Language and the Irish Nation,” Eamon de Valera described a vision of an ‘ideal’ Ireland where “people [are] living the life that God desires that men should live”. de Valera’s ideal Ireland was notoriously repressive and isolating, and greatly conflicted with the promises of the 1916 Proclamation. Further, we continue to feel the ripple effects of his 1936 Constitution: embedding censorship, cis-heteronormativity, and pious religiosity into the fabric of Irish social life and nationhood. The 2026 Trans* Association of Ireland challenges the narrow sentimentality proposed by de Valera while taking up this utopian idealism from a queer and trans historical perspective, envisioning Ireland’s future from our contemporary vantage point: one that is capacious, creative, and collaborative.

We are further inspired by our keynote Nat Raha, and her co-author and collaborator Mijke van der Drift’s manifesto for trans femme futures that calls for centring collective action and mutual care in our everyday lives as a means for building (trans) solidarities. Their work invites us to think of ways to exist otherwise in moments and spaces that threaten our very survival, which can feel like anywhere and everywhere in the current moment. Raha and van der Drift advocate for imagining “ways to bring futures into the present” through joy, generosity and love. While there may not be a “harmonious utopia” at the end of our realities, yet it allows us to shift how we live and create liveabilities that can breathe life into new collective ways of existing otherwise.

We ask participants to join us in dreaming of ideal and desired lives from a trans perspective. We gleefully reappropriate the dreams of past Irelands for trans purposes. We ask what our liberation looks like, what we desire, and how we can enact it in coalition with one another. What might a trans future involve, require or entail? How can we make an Ireland where people are living the life that trans desire makes possible? Has this Ireland already been here, waiting, just off the coast as Hy-Brasil?

The symposium schedule and full programme will shortly be available on our website (https://texerenetwork.com/trai/symposium/).

Both in-person and Zoom attendance is free. Please only register for in-person attendance on days you are certain you will attend, as in-person space is extremely limited. Speakers will be automatically registered.

Description supplied by the event organiser.