Dr Carolina Santos - School of Applied Psychology

Bio: 

Carolina Santos is an Architect and Urban Planner with a transdisciplinary background working on artistic performances in the public spaces of contemporary cities, utilising an artistic perspective to gain deeper insights into the built environment and how it applies in daily life. Presently serving as a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Applied Psychology, University College Cork, Santos examines our surroundings and community and how they can provide a wellspring of creative resources for the collaborative development of new narratives through Design Thinking methodologies.

Research: 

Santos is a member of the Step Up project which focuses on technology-enabled self-persuasion empowerment tools to increase walking in middle-aged and older citizens This project adapts a heuristic and usability approach to the study of middle-aged and older citizens’ perceptions of using a technology application in their day-to-day lives and maintain behaviour change through a behavioural change model. The aim of the research is to empower middle-aged and older people to walk more, for functional and recreational purposes, and to do so in a way that enables them to drive and sustain the change in their behaviour. This will be achieved initially through adopting focus groups and interviews in phase 1 in order to analyse the needs of the demographic. This will subsequently be followed by co-design workshops to inform and develop a redesigned mobile application called StepUp in phase 2.

1. What are the needs and barriers of middle-aged and older people in terms of information that can motivate them to walk more?

2. What are the perceived ethical implications of collecting data through the mobile application, particularly geolocation?

3. How is the existing mobile application Step Up perceived by citizens? 

Dr Joanna Wharton - School of English and Digital Humanities

Bio:

Joanna Wharton is Principal Investigator of Lines of Communication: Telegraphy, Literature, and Security in Ireland and the British Empire, 1794-1850 (LINC), a four-year project based in the School of English and funded by the Taighde Éireann – Research Ireland Pathway Programme. Before joining UCC, Joanna lectured at the University of York and Birkbeck College, University of London, and held an Early Career Fellowship at Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Georg-August-Universität Göttingen. She earned her PhD and MA at the University of York, and her BA at the University of Leeds.

Research:

LINC explores infrastructures of secret and high-speed intelligence in Ireland and the British empire. It centres on the optical telegraph, a human-powered signalling machine that promised to revolutionize long-distance communication at the close of the eighteenth century. Taking an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary studies, cultural and social history, and history of science and technology, the project traces the deployment of this system across an expanding anglophone world.

A key focus of the project is the work of Maria Edgeworth, a major Irish writer, and the telegraph invented by her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, which was adapted for use by the British East India Company in Bengal. By emphasising the interplay between telegraphy and literature in the pre-electrical era, and by paying close attention to the crises and failures of the telegraph’s use in colonial surveillance networks, LINC aims to provide new perspectives on narratives of state security and insecurity, particularly in the context of Ireland’s complex relationship with British imperialism.

Dr Noel O'Connell - School of Applied Social Studies

Bio:

Dr Noel O'Connell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century (ISS21) and School of Applied Social Studies, UCC. Prior to joining UCC, Dr O’Connell worked in a number of postdoctoral research positions at Heriot Watt University, Trinity College Dublin and UCC. He received a number of funding awards including the DOROTHY COFUND Marie Skłodowska-Curie award (2023), Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015), and the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission Grant (2022). He has published in the area of sociology, deaf education, social justice, human rights, identity politics and deaf studies. 

Research:

He is working on a project entitled “CODA: A hidden minority amongst the majority: An ethnographic study of children of deaf adults and the negotiation of threatened social identities”. The project is funded by the Science Foundation of Ireland (SFI) and Irish Research Council (IRC) under the SFI-IRC Pathway Programme 2022 for a period of 4 years. The project is supported by Professor Deirdre Horgan (UCC mentor) and Dr Gill Harold (UCC academic collaborator). The CODA project aims to use the methods of ethnography, participant observation, film documentary and fieldnotes in order to understand how CODAs experience the courtesy stigma (or stigma-by-association) of their deaf parents and the ways in which they use culture and shared experiences of community belonging as resources for agency, resilience and empowerment. Dr O’Connell and Professor Horgan are engaged as PhD supervisor for Seda Guektasch’s doctoral research project which focuses on gendered aspects of the CODA life experiences in family, school and community contexts.  

Dr Jemima Hodgkinson - School of Languages Literatures & Cultures

Bio:

Jemima Hodgkinson received her PhD in French from the University of Liverpool, where her research compared the black-edited press cultures of New York and Paris during the 1920s and 1930s. She was awarded the 2022 Atlantic Studies Early Career Prize for her article ‘The Mediated Text: Transatlantic Circulation among Periodicals of Interwar African American Poetry’. Her latest article, ‘Pour constituer une “Bibliothèque de Littérature Nègre”’ (Francosphères, 2023), assesses the project of Jewish-American bibliophile Arthur B. Spingarn to build a library of black literature and studies the reception of his work by the Haitian Indigenist journal La Relève.

Research:

My research highlights the unique role played by newspapers and magazines in the cultural development of the transatlantic African diaspora during the 1920s and 1930s. During this fellowship, I will be preparing a monograph in which I argue that the defining aspect of the press was its dialogic form: that is, its ability to place people, cultural eras, and geographical areas in textual dialogue with one another. Taking five press titles – two African American magazines based in New York City, and three Francophone Caribbean journals based in Paris – and treating them as examples of broader trends, I consider the pioneering social visions of their editors – understudied figures including Charles S. Johnson and Maurice Satineau – and their respective beliefs in the creative arts to effect social and political change. I then discuss how these editors harnessed the dialogic form of the press in such a way as to develop new and syncretic forms of black culture, stimulating an intellectual dialectic among contributors that would help realise autonomous American and French black traditions in the modern era.

‘The Crisis’ (Image source: James Weldon Johnson Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library)

 ‘La Revue du Monde Noir’ (Image source: Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York  Public Library)

Dr Camila Tavares Pereira - School of Human Env Geog Arch & Classics

Bio: 

Dr Camila Tavares Pereira is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher in the School of the Human Environment, Geography, Archaeology and Classics. She has extensive knowledge in the field of Climate Change and enthusiasm to work with research that aims to be inclusive and improve the quality of life of vulnerable populations.  

Research: 

She is working on a project entitled 'Transferability of resilience in informal settlements (TRIS): a model for assessing climate risk and empowering women as decision-makers' 

Urban dwellers in informal settlements are currently one of the most vulnerable to climate-related risks as they lack government support and civil structures. Thus, the main aim of this project is to develop a transferable Climate Change Risk Assessment model for informal settlements in the Global South with the community, especially for women. Also, we will transfer the community-based approach to reducing climate risks to Ireland. We will use diverse methods such as fieldwork, interview, workshop, and remote sensing. In this way, it will support the achievement of SDG goals such as gender equality, community-led measures, and climate risk reduction.  

Dr Ida Larsen-Ledet - School of Applied Psychology

Bio:

Ida Larsen-Ledet has a PhD in Human-Computer Interaction from the Department of Computer Science at Aarhus University, Denmark. Her research is driven by an interest in the subtle ways that our practices and behavior towards each other are formed by how technology is designed, and the ways we adapt our use of technology to make it suit different situations.

She has studied this through qualitative inquiries into work and the role of technology in people’s work, starting from collaborative academic writing, then workplace knowledge bases, and now more generally how people use digital traces to keep track of their work.

Research: 

I’m currently an EU MSCA Fellowship postdoc in the UCC School of Applied Psychology. My fellowship project, titled TRACE-WORK, studies how people use deliberate and incidental traces of activity – such as file version names or email timestamps – to keep track of work. Although we know that traces are an important means for people to coordinate work, we don’t know much about what kinds of traces people use or how they use them. By understanding this better, I aim to develop human-centered design principles for how workplace technology can help people draw on traces. Importantly, this research will incorporate an understanding of the social implications of traces, such as feelings of pressure to perform. I take a participatory approach, in which study participants will be involved in developing the research agenda and analyzing the data.

Dr Jessica Wax-Edwards - School of Languages Literatures & Cultures

Bio: 

Jessica Wax-Edwards is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action Postdoctoral Fellow at the University College Cork. Previously an Honorary Research Fellow at Royal Holloway University of London, her research interests include memory, violence and politics in twentieth century and contemporary Mexican visual culture. She has published articles on Latin American fiction and documentary cinema, graphic art and photography and her first monograph Documenting Violence in Calderón’s Mexico: Visual Culture, Resistance and Memorialisation was published 2023. Jessica was also a selected participant in the 8-month AHRC-funded mentorship scheme Doing Women’s (Global) (Horror) Film History (DWGHFH); her resulting short film Storylines___ was published 2024.

Research:

POPAMLO is a 2-year EU funded Postdoctoral project focused on enriching and developing global understanding of the relationship between populism, media and visual culture. The project focuses on Mexico’s former president Andrés Manuel López Obrador (2018 – 2024), known as AMLO, and his adept use of different visual media – including documentary films, televised press conferences and social media – throughout his career. Alongside traditional means of scholarship, the project employs videographic methods to understand how populist personas are produced and what role the visual plays in spreading populist narratives.

Conferencia de Prensa Matutina, September 2024

Dr Brice Catherin - School of Film, Music & Theatre

Bio: 

Brice Catherin is an artist and doctor in music composition (university of Hull). He has 20 years of experience as an independent musician, intermedia artist and performance artist, and 7 years of experience as an art researcher.

His transversal and international approach to art practices has led him to collaborate with artists from all over the world. He also develops art projects and art-based PAR projects across disciplines with non-artists from the Global Majority as well as under-represented and/or minoritised populations in Europe and Southern Africa.

He is an affiliate artist of the UNESCO chair of the University of Glasgow since May 2024.

Research: 

As part of the UNICart project, I survey, assess, compare and contrast the range of methodological frameworks currently understood as being part of: ‘AR’ (artistic research), PaR (practice as research in the arts or practice-research), performance as research, research-creation,  the ‘artistic sciences’,  arts-based research,  embodied/somatic artistic research, and related, artistically -focused,  hyper-qualitative methodologies, across international territories.

Brice Catherin ©Andy Brydon

Dr Tatiana Vagramenko - School of Society, Politics And Ethics

Bio:

Tatiana Vagramenko is a Senior Postdoctoral Researcher at the Study of Religions/ Future Humanities Institute. She serves as a Principal Investigator in the SFI-IRC Pathway-funded project “History Declassified: The KGB and the Religious Underground in Soviet Ukraine” and in the British Library EAP project “Religious Minorities Archives and the War in Ukraine”. Vagramenko has held postdoctoral appointments at the University of Barcelona in Spain, Friedrich Schiller University in Germany, at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington DC where she served as a Fellow at the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies. In 2017-2019, she was a Principal Investigator in the project “Religious Minorities in Ukraine from the Soviet Underground to the Euromaidan: Pathways to Religious Freedom and Pluralism in Enlarging Europe”, funded by the Irish Research Council. She earned her PhD in Anthropology from Maynooth University in 2014. Vagramenko’s research focuses on the history and memory of state repression and cultural opposition in Soviet Ukraine, based on in-depth reconsideration of recently opened Soviet-era secret police (former KGB) archives. 

Research Project:

SFI-IRC Pathway project “History Declassified: The KGB and the Religious Underground in Soviet Ukraine” (HIDE) 

Website: https://www.ucc.ie/en/history-declassified/ 

Dr Shyamasundar Lakshmipuram Bharathanarayan - School of Film, Music & Theatre

Shyam is a Research Fellow at the Department of Music, UCC and part of the ERC CIPHER project. This project aims to revolutionize research on intertextualities, translation, and knowledge production in Hip Hop, globally. 

With a PhD earned at VTU, India, his expertise runs deep in the realms of AI and Big Data. Before linking up with the CIPHER crew in May 2023, he lent his expertise to the oil and gas industry with AIET, rolled with the future in self-driving robot cars at CSIR-4PI, comprehensive research in sentiment analysis at CMRIT and served as a lecturer at MCE, Hassan. 

Dr Claire Nolan - School of the English and Digital Humanities

Dr Claire Nolan is a postdoctoral researcher for the Ports, Past and Present project. Drawing on her academic and professional background in both archaeology and psychotherapy, her research explores the social and eco-literal value of the historic environment. It seeks to gain a greater understanding of how heritage assets directly influence individual lived experience, wellbeing, environmental awareness and climate resilience. 

Claire’s PhD research (University of Reading, UK) investigated the potential of the historic environment to support wellbeing, employing qualitative, phenomenological methods to explore the therapeutic value of the prehistoric landscapes of Avebury, Stonehenge and the Vale of Pewsey, UK in the present day. She has since published a number of papers on this topic, including the co-authored Historic England (2018) Report, Wellbeing and the Historic Environment. 

Claire’s current work is focused on: the power of cultural heritage to ground and create meaning for individuals and communities; climate heritage and the potential for reflective engagement with heritage narratives to promote environmental literacy and ecotherapy; strategies for mindful heritage engagement and learning; and collaborative community heritage. Other research interests include: the value of heritage in post-colonial/colonial societies; access to cultural heritage and the protection of ancient monuments. 

Email: clairenolan@ucc.ie   

Dr Leonora Masini - School of Languages Literatures & Cultures

Bio:

Leonora Masini was awarded a doctoral degree from Brown University in 2022, with a thesis entitled 'To Educate is to Civilize: Educational Campaigns through Cinema in British and Italian Colonial Rules (1910-1945)'. From August 2022 to June 2024, she served as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in Slavery and Public Humanities at the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice at Brown University. The Brown Office of Postdoctoral Affairs awarded her the 2024 Postdoctoral Excellence Award. She is currently working as a Research Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the Italian Department at UCC.

Research:

My book project compares works by Alessandra Ferrini and Martina Melilli (visual artists), Erminia Dell'Oro and IgiabaScego (literary authors) to demonstrate that the interior temporal dimension has a critical part in these acclaimed works investigating postcolonial Italian culture and consciousness. I show that these narratives share a sense of postcolonial time that is not the chronological way of organizing events; instead, they construct time through non-linear narratives, flashbacks, images of mixed memories, eerie presences, and encounters with ghosts.

I note that the interior temporal dimension of these literary and visual works is a constellation of fragments from the colonial period, a mix of disturbing and haunting images from the crimes committed in the colonies that have never been collectively processed and acknowledged. I observe that the images mentioned above also convey resilience, and inform a new hauntology based on a counter-ghosting mechanism that I define as a de-colonial practice.

My book engages with studies and debates in different academic disciplines, Italian Studies, Black Studies, Diaspora Studies, Gender Studies, Trauma and Memory Studies, Gender Studies, Film and Media, and, unlike previous works focusing on either literature or cinema, it takes an innovative comparative approach investigating diverse primary sources.

Dr Roberto Cibin - School of Applied Psychology

Bio:

I have a PhD in Social Sciences - Interaction, Communication, Cultural Construction from the University of Padova (Italy), and I have always been interested in citizen engagement in relation to science, technology and innovation. My current research reflection and academic production focus on the debate about the design of technology, platforms and services to support empowerment, inclusion and sustainability, with attention to gender and other inequalities. For this reason, I usually deal with research using approaches related to Participatory Design and community engagement in general. I also had five years of practical experience working within a regional public administration to support digitalisation and open innovation. 

Research:

Currently, I am a Postdoctoral Researcher at the School of Applied Psychology (UCC). I am involved in BEHAV-I-AIR (SFI), a project dealing with communication strategies to empower citizens to contribute to cleaner air in Cork. The goal is to combine technological advances in air quality forecasting with community-engaged design thinking to co-create air quality alerts and behavioural prompts with the public to impact air quality-related awareness and behaviour positively. 

Together with other colleagues, I am involved in various theoretical and practical activities. First, I am working on mapping and prioritising the needs of various community stakeholders concerning air quality communication. I am then conducting an analysis of the academic literature on the topic. Finally, I am working on creating and conducting co-creative workshops to engage the people of Cork in designing a prototype platform that would provide information on air quality, suggestions on behaviours to adopt, and tools to support people's empowerment on the issue. 

Rachel McCarthy - School of English and Digital Humanities

Bio/Project Outline:

Rachel McCarthy is a PhD researcher in the School of English and Digital Humanities, where she previously earned a bachelor’s degree in 'Digital Humanities and Information Technology'. After completing a master’s degree in 'Digital Text Analysis' at the University of Antwerp, she now focuses on computational literary studies. Her research involves using techniques such as stylometry, natural language processing, and language models to investigate authorship attribution and writing styles, and to track semantic changes in texts beyond traditional reading methods. Passionate about advancing text analysis, she aims to uncover new insights into literary and historical texts using digital methodologies.

Dr Philip Murphy - School of Society, Politics and Ethics

Bio:

Dr Philip Murphy is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Government and Politics, University College Cork (UCC). As an IRC funded scholar, his doctoral thesis researched the socialisation of political efficacy among adolescents. His publications and research interests include youth political engagement, political socialisation, political education, and deliberative practice. In a previous post as Lecturer in Government and Politics at UCC he coordinated and lectured undergraduate and postgraduate modules on; Irish, European, and international politics, research methods, political engagement, political and governance theory, democratic innovations, and dissertation/thesis management. He has supervised numerous undergraduate and postgraduate research dissertations on above topics.

Research:

Jean Monnet Teacher Training (ACTIVEUC 2022-2025) and Jean Monnet Chair in Active European Citizenship (KM-KEU 2021-2024). Both Erasmus+ projects are based in the Hub in Active European Citizenship, coordinated by Dr. Emmanuelle Schon-Quinlivan in UCC.

Project Outline

The JM TT develops tools for education on European issues. The project does this by creating training for teachers, and content for students, at primary and post-primary level. It emphasises deliberative practice to empower young citizens. It involves online and in-person engagement with students and teachers in Ireland and across the European Union.

The JM Chair develops opportunities for engagement on European issues. The project does this by coordinating and collaborating on; active citizenship projects at primary and post-primary level, deliberative teaching and events at third level, and public engagement events. It emphasises deliberative practice to empower young citizens. It involves online and in-person engagement with students at all education levels and the wider public through community events.

Research and publications on both projects focus on political efficacy, deliberative practice in political education and engagement, and the socialisation of political identity.

Contact Details

Dr. Philip Murphy, Department of Government and Politics, 2^nd Floor, O’Rahilly Building, University College Cork.

Email: philip.murphy@ucc.ie