On Oideas as Artistic Research: Songing as Decolonial Method

This project frames amhránaíocht as a site of epistemic resistance, confronting colonial hierarchies of knowledge and reclaiming conceptual sovereignty. It advances oideas (healing-based education) as an artistic research methodology emerging from the endangered conceptual world of Gaelic oral epistemology. Grounded in the practice of amhránaíocht (unaccompanied Irish-language song), it argues that songing is not merely cultural expression but a living research paradigm through which knowledge is generated, tested, and transmitted.

Drawing on vernacular concepts including dúchas (relational indigeneity), seanchas (epistemic inheritance), dinnseanchas (land-knowledge), aisling (sound-vision), and casadh (turning/encounter), the project demonstrates how Gaelic song traditions enact a circular, session-based methodology in which ontology, epistemology, and axiology are inseparable. Within the ceremonial space of the session, research unfolds through embodied listening, repetition, variation, debate, and collective attunement. Knowledge is produced relationally—between singer and listener, ancestors and descendants, land and voice.

Situating this paradigm in dialogue with Indigenous and decolonial methodologies, the project challenges Anglo-modern separations between method and meaning, archive and performance, research and ceremony. It critiques the folklorization and epistemic exteriorization of Gaelic knowledge under Anglo-modernity/coloniality while proposing oideas as a transferable methodological orientation attentive to healing, accountability, and communal continuity.

By foregrounding Irish-language conceptual tools as methodological resources rather than objects of study, the project makes audible the epistemic violences concealed within Anglo-modern knowledge systems. Re-centering oideas as a healing-based research orientation, it contributes to broader debates on epistemic sovereignty and the role of artistic research.