Symposium Abstracts

PANEL 1 – UNDERSTANDING THE CHALLENGES AND POSSIBILITIES OF DEMOCRATIC FUTURES

• Report on "The Epidemiological Turn: Critical Approaches to Conspiracy Theory and Mis/Disinformation Discourse" Dr Sinan Richards

This paper introduces the one-day research symposium hosted by Collective Social Futures, the Departments of Sociology and Criminology, and the Department of French. The event interrogated the dominant “epidemiological” framing of conspiracy theory and mis/disinformation, which constructs the public as vulnerable to ideological contagion and legitimises a pastoral, expert-led power. Speakers examined the malleability of the "conspiracy theory" label, the volatility of legitimate knowledge exposed by the Covid-19 "lab leak" episode, and the slide toward informational authoritarianism. Contributions from philosophy, sociology, psychology, French studies, history, and digital humanities opened a critical perspective beyond the "diagnose and debunk" consensus.

Bio. Sinan Richards is a lecturer in French at UCC, and Visiting Research Fellow at King’s College London. He is the author of Dialectics of Love in Sartre and Lacan (Palgrave, 2023). Most recently, Sinan has published a collection (with Thomas Waller), Understanding Lacan, Understanding Modernism and (with Derek Hook) Fanon and Lacan: Decolonial Psychoanalysis (2026). Sinan has published widely in, for example: The Journal of Humanistic Psychology and Paragraph. Sinan serves as a member of the editorial boards of French Studies and the European Journal of Psychoanalysis.

• Violence against politicians in Ireland: what does it look like and how is it gendered? Dr Fiona Buckley, Department of Government & Politics, UCC.

This paper investigates the phenomenon of political violence (harassment, intimidation, threats and abuse) directed at politicians in Ireland. We ask: to what extent is it gendered in scope, form, and consequences? Our analysis finds evidence of gender differences with respect to the prevalence and nature of political violence. In comparison to men, women politicians in Ireland experience political violence more often, are more frequently subjected to psychological violence, and are more likely to be subject to violence with sexual connotations. We also find evidence of gendered consequences, with more women than men reporting that their political engagement has made them feel more afraid and less willing to run for election in future Citation: Buckley, F., Keenan, L., & Mariani, M. (2025). Violence against politicians in Ireland: what does it look like and how is it gendered? Irish Political Studies, 40(3), 340–370. https://doi.org/10.1080/07907184.2024.2442949

Bio. Dr Fiona Buckley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Government and Politics. Her research interests include women in politics and gendered aspects of political violence. This paper is based on research conducted as part of The Cost of Doing Politics: Gender Aspects of Political Violence project. The project is hosted by CMI Bergen and is funded by the Research Council of Norway. It brings together an international research team to examine if and how gender shapes political violence targeting politicians, across three different types of regimes: stable democracies (Norway and Ireland); a new democracy (Ghana); and an authoritarian system (Uganda).

• Thinking-with Memes: Digital Visual Culture & the Far-Right. Dr Evelien Geerts, Dr Yasmine Ahmed, Dr. Gema Kloppe-Santamaría

In this presentation we will discuss some of the main goals of our new SATLE award project,  "Thinking-with Memes: Unlocking Critical Digital Literacy Skills in Times of Digital Mis/disinformation and Violent Democratic Erosion," and use some examples of our ongoing research to illustrate the type of critical work we seek to generate. As the name suggests, this critical pedagogies-driven project examines the political uses and counter-hegemonic potential of digital memes, AI-generated images, and other forms of visual communication in an era of hyperdigitalisation, misinformation, and democratic erosion. Through interdisciplinary, research-led teaching and student-staff collaborative workshops, the project will enhance students' critical digital literacy and global citizenship.

Bios

Dr Evelien Geerts is an interdisciplinary philosopher and Lecturer in Gender, Women's Studies & Philosophy at UCC, where they direct Women's Studies. Interested in the digitalizing somatechnics of violence and Political Technologies co-convener, their research examines the offline-online manifestations of far-right politics and violence, with a focus on memes’ hyperexploitation. 

Dr Yasmine Ahmed is Lecturer at University College Cork. She is co-chair of the ISS21 Populism and the Rise of the Far-Right cluster under ISS21 – the institute for the Social Science in the 21st century. Her primary research focus is on the far-right , its recent developments globally and in Ireland. 

Dr. Gema Kloppe-Santamaría is Lecturer in Sociology and Deputy Director of the Collective Social Futures Institute at UCC. A sociologist and historian, her work centers on questions of violence, gender, and religion in Latin America, with particular attention to visual culture and contentious politics.

PANEL 2 UNDERSTANDING CLIMATE REALITIES AND FUTURES 

• Reimagining collective urban futures through South-South knowledge exchanges: contributions from Brazil and Mozambique. Dr Camila Tavares

This study develops a transferable climate-risk model for informal settlements in Brazil and Mozambique, combining focus group discussions, key informant interviews, and urban-typology mapping. Findings show that urban space in both territories reflects imagined futures anchored in colonial legacies. These legacies eradicated thermally efficient vernacular building practices. They also drove gentrification, pushing residents toward flood-prone areas with poor drainage systems. Despite cultural differences, intra-urban vulnerabilities converge. Residents call for women-led community organisations, more opportunities to access education and employment, and gathering spaces and green areas. Ultimately, collective action is seen as the pathway to more resilient urban futures.

Bios. 

Camila Tavares is a Principal Investigator of the Research Ireland-funded project Transferability of resilience in informal settlements (TRIS): a model for assessing climate risk and empowering women as decision-makers. She is a Senior Postdoc in the Geography Department, UCC. 

Rafael Pereira is a Research Ireland scholar and PhD candidate in Geography at University College Cork.

• Climate Realities and Futures (some ‘Deep Societal Innovation for Sustainability and Human Flourishing’ perspectives) Professor Edmond Byrne

Anthropogenic climate change is a reality with increasingly devastating consequences. Yet the world faces a multiplicity of crises. In 2024, pwc considered five megatends of: ‘climate change’, ‘technological disruption’, ‘demographic shifts’, ‘fracturing world’ and ‘social instability’, concluding: ‘There is no equivocating: Humanity is in a race against time.’ Edgar Morin saw each as deeply interconnected symptoms of a broader ‘polycrisis’, more recently described as ‘metacrisis’; a ‘crisis of meaning’. Tech insiders meanwhile declare they ‘earnestly believe AI could kill all humans’— ‘by the end of the decade’. In such futures context, infrastructural changes are insufficient without examination and expression of relational societal values (superstructure). This entails integrative, process and transdisciplinary approaches in the face of ever quickening complexity. Collective social futures are both central and critical in this endeavour.

Bio. Edmond Byrne is professor of Process and Chemical Engineering in the School of Engineering and Architecture. His research interests on transdisciplinary approaches to sustainability transformation have led him to collaborate widely with colleagues across the social sciences and humanities, including as co-editor on two books*. He is PI on the EPA funded ‘Deep Societal Innovation for Sustainability and Human Flourishing’, along with co-PI’s Professor Maggie O’Neill and Dr Ger Mullally. *Transdisciplinary perspectives on transitions to sustainability (Routledge, 2017); Metaphor, sustainability, transformation: transdisciplinary perspectives (Routledge, 2021)).

• Healthy place-making: The value and challenges of advancing health through urban planning and design Jeanette Fitzsimons & Dr Monica O’Mullane

Public health and planning disciplines share a common history in modern town planning, from the days of unhealthy industrial cities in the nineteenth century. However, since then, the disciplines have evolved separately. This paper describes a project, called Healthy Places, co-led by the Department of Planning (CACSSS) and School of Public Health (COMH), in understanding and exploring educational approaches in healthy place-making for student-centred learning across both disciplines. Findings from the project, centred on significant student appetite for co-learning across the disciplines on healthy place-making, will inform future educational curricula for creating healthy places of the future.

Bios.

Jeanette Fitzsimons MIPI is a planner, urban designer and lecturer with Irish and international planning and urban design practice experience, along with nine years of teaching experience at the Department of Planning in UCC. Her research and teaching interests include planning practice, including the skills of a planner, community engagement, challenges of densification, inclusion in planning and urban design, and the intersection of planning and public health - healthy placemaking. Jeanette has collaborated with UCC's School of Public Health on interdisciplinary learning and research between planning and public health students. 

Dr Monica O’Mullane is a Research Fellow and Lecturer working in the School of Public Health (SPH), University College Cork. She is leading two Health Research Board funded projects that are developing scientific evidence and practical resources for improving the practice and policy of health impact assessment in Ireland (HIA-IM and TRANSLATE-HIA projects). The projects are co-hosted in UCC between the SPH and CSFI. She works closely with the Department of Planning in UCC to bridge the disciplines of planning and public health in training future professionals. Monica is the Deputy Chair of WHO Cork Healthy Cities.

PANEL 3 ENVISIONING: CARING AND INCLUSIVE SOCIETAL RELATIONS

•  In Our Own Words: Lived Experiences of Employment and Social Inclusion Among People with Mental Health Challenges. Dr Calvin Swords, School of Applied Social Studies, UCC.

Employment is increasingly recognised as a key pathway to social inclusion for individuals living with mental illness, yet the lived experience of navigating the workplace remains underexplored. This paper presents findings from a co-produced, participatory research project undertaken in partnership with Shine: Mental Health Support, Advocacy, Education. Drawing on qualitative methods, including semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and material ethnography. The project captures the subjective experiences of individuals with mental illness in employment and explores how these experiences shape broader participation in society. Findings highlight the enabling and constraining factors that influence inclusion, with implications for employers, policy, and civic society.

Bio. Calvin Swords is a Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Studies at University College Cork. His research focuses on mental health recovery, social inclusion, and lived experience. He is principal investigator on a Research Ireland New Foundations project exploring employment and inclusion in partnership with Shine Ireland.

• Human Rights at Sea: Universal Health Coverage (UHC), 'seafarers' as 'persons'. Dr Patricia Kennedy, School of Applied Social Studies, UCC.

This paper introduces two connected projects: COST Action CA23103 Life, Liberty and Health ensuring universal protection of human rights at sea (BlueRights) and a Research Ireland New Foundations collaborative project with Seafarers Christian Friends Society (SCFS). While almost 2 million people work in the Maritime Industry, and global trade is dependent on their labour, they are largely invisible and experience widespread human rights violations. This paper presents some of the findings of a literature review on the relationship between seafarers' working conditions and mental health and makes a case for treating seafarers as 'persons' with rights, rather than merely 'workers', advocating for Universal Health Coverage (UHC). The second project, with Seafarers Christian Friends Society (SCFS), is a qualitative study focusing on the health and wellbeing of seafarers visiting the Port of Cork.

Bio. Dr Patricia Kenedy is a Lecturer in Social Policy at the School of Applied Social Studies. She has published widely on health policy and services with a particular emphasis on participatory research methods and marginalised/ unseen and underserved populations.

PANEL 4 ENACTING - LEAVE NO-ONE BEHIND: CREATIVE APPROACHES TO MIGRANT AND REFUGEE INCLUSION AND SUPPORT

• Addressing intersectional inequalities in local governance: the role of arts-based methods in empowering participation by women from migrant backgrounds. Dr Catherine Forde and Dr Vanessa Liston

Elected and nonelected representation and participation in central  and local government in Ireland are constrained by a persistent lack of ethnic and gender diversity. Migrant and ethnic minority groups, and migrant women in particular, remain largely absent from both Irish electoral politics and local government decision-making. This paper explores opportunities to address these gaps by examining the role of the arts in empowering and supporting migrant women’s participation in policy‑making. Drawing on findings from an experimental pilot project codesigned with a migrant women’s network, the study outlines how arts‑based approaches supported reflection on inclusion and exclusion, agency and self-advocacy, and enabled participants to develop and advance a locally grounded policy proposal. Reflecting on these findings through intersectional thinking, the paper identifies conditions that may support the emergence and sustainability of migrant women and communities’ participation in policymaking and highlights areas for future research. 

 Bios

Catherine Forde is senior lecturer in youth and community work at University College Cork. Catherine’s main research/publication interests are in the areas of community development; ecosocial work and environmental education; state-civil society relations; and children and young people's participation. She is lead editor of the book Teaching and Learning in Ecosocial Work: Concepts, Methods and Practice (Springer Nature, 2024). She is a Co-I on the Horizon Europe Project INSPIRE (2024-2027).

Vanessa Liston is CEO of CiviQ,  a company which provides public engagement software to governments and public bodies. She is a former county councillor in Kildare and the founder of the Kildare Green Forum on future and environment related issues. She publishes in the field of Political Science on deliberative democracy and citizen participation.  She is a Co-I on the Horizon Europe Project INSPIRE (2024-2027).

• Co-creating research-based interventions with migrant mothers. Dr Angela Veale & Dr Fionnuala Larkin. School of Applied Psychology, UCC.

For asylum-seeking parents, nurturing and playing with their children occurs within systems that can constrain family wellbeing. Through Forum Theatre with immigrant parents and professionals, and a PPI process with asylum-seeking parents, innovative approaches were identified to support parenting in IPAS centres characterised by chronic uncertainty and social isolation. Building on these insights, Play & Wonder offers a brief, culturally responsive, play-based and mentalisation-informed social prescribing intervention for parent-child dyads living in an accommodation centre. Complementing this work, the Lullaby Project uses interdisciplinary expertise to co-create a music-based intervention that strengthens parent-child attunement.

Bios

Angela Veale is Senior Lecturer in Applied Psychology at University College Cork and child psychotherapist (IFCAPP/ICP). Her research integrates sociocultural, critical, community and psychotherapeutic perspectives, exploring how social and institutional worlds shape psychological life, with particular interests in childhood, parenting, political violence, forced migration and possibilities for individual/collective transformation.

Fionnuala Larkin is a Senior Lecturer at University College Cork and a Chartered Clinical Psychologist. Fionnuala’s research focuses on developmental psychology and psychopathology and bidirectional influences within the parent-child relationship that shape children’s social and emotional development. 

• Syrian Women Writing-Wandering the Partitioned Mediterraneans: Displacement, Staying, Returning and the Making of Postcolonial Futures. Dr Bahriye Kemal

Drawing on a decade of collaborative work with Syrian women activists, writers, journalists and community members, this Syria case study emerged in response to concerns surrounding Kurdish communities in Rojava. Through co-produced life histories, storytelling and translation, women across Syria, Türkiye, Germany and the UK reflected on displacement, staying, return, education, activism, family separation and everyday survival. Their stories challenge simplified categories such as refugee, returnee and victim, revealing how women navigate displacement, staying and return while continually rebuilding lives across borders and shifting political landscapes. Centring women as storytellers, witnesses and knowledge producers, the project explores everyday peace, solidarity and future-making through lived experience and literary micro-geohistories that reconfigure the partitioned Mediterraneans.

Bios

Bahriye Kemal is a London-born Cypriot to refugee parents from Cyprus and a postcolonial scholar at UCC. Her interdisciplinary research explores displacement, exclusion and spatiality through literary, ethnographic and community-engaged approaches. Working with displaced communities across the Mediterranean's African, Asian, European shorelines, she examines knowledge production, storytelling and activism in response to our cruelly partitioned world.

Fozya Aldared is a Syrian novelist, journalist, scholar and women's rights activist based in Damascus. Her work explores war, displacement, gender, memory and social transformation. She is the author of The Son of Desolation (2019), Mothers of Exile (2022), The Wanderer’s Daughter (2026). She is currently completing a PhD on violence in the Syrian diasporic novel.

Khbat Abed Talas is a Syrian-Kurdish lawyer, journalist and human rights activist from Kobani, currently based in Germany. She has worked with humanitarian and peacebuilding organisations across Syria, Türkiye and Europe, publishing on displacement and human rights while supporting community-led projects focused on justice, memory and peacebuilding.

Black Abolitionists in Ireland: Affiliations, Interactions and Postcolonial Futures

Lyn Innes, Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent in conversation with Dr Bahriye Kemal and Professor Lee Jenkins, School of English and Digital Humanities

In the mid nineteenth century, hundreds of African Americans escaping slavery, violence and discrimination sought refuge in the British Isles. Some became powerful speakers against slavery and racism, touring Ireland as well as England, Scotland and Wales. This discussion begins with two of those refugees who found strong support in Ireland, William Allen and Sarah Parker Remond. William Allen had been the only Black professor in the United States and was forced to flee when threatened with lynching after falling in love with a white student. He lived in Ireland from 1856 to 1860. Sarah Parker Remond came from an activist Black family in Massachusetts, but was refused the possibility of education and came to England in 1859 as an anti-slavery speaker and then a student at Bedford College. She visited Ireland as a speaker in 1859 and 1861. Exploring their reception and experiences in Ireland, the discussion considers how these encounters shaped responses to the concepts of race, nationalism and colonialism. Their stories reveal Ireland's place within wider transnational networks connecting Black, Irish, and African experiences of empire, mobility, resistance, solidarity, affiliations and social change. Taking these lives as a point of departure, and drawing on themes explored in Fugitive Families: Making Black Lives Matter in Victorian Britain, the conversation will also reflect on questions that have animated Lyn Innes's pioneering scholarship on Black, Indian and Irish lives, displacement, archives and the British and French empires. Bringing together histories of abolition, migration and resistance, the event asks how overlooked histories illuminate contemporary debates about race, social justice, migration, activism, and inclusive postcolonial futures.

Bio: Professor Lyn Innes is Emeritus Professor of Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Kent and a pioneering figure in the development of postcolonial studies. Her scholarship has transformed understandings of race, empire, migration, and mobility across Black British, African, Irish and South Asian literary and cultural studies. The descendant of Indian and Scottish migrants to Australia, her interest in Black and Irish responses to colonialism and racism developed while teaching at Tuskegee Institute, a historically Black university in Alabama, during the 1960s Civil Rights era. She subsequently completed a doctorate dissertation at Cornell University, later published as The Devil’s Own Mirror: the Irishman nd the African in Moden Literature. and went on to teach and publish on African, African American, Black British, Australian, Irish,  and Indian literature and culture at the universities of Massachusetts and Kent. Her influential publications include Woman and Nation in Irish Literature and Society, A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, The Cambridge Introduction to Postcolonial Literatures in English, The Last Prince of Bengal, and most recently Fugitive Families: Making Black Lives Matter in Victorian Britain. Her work continues to inspire and champion generations of scholars working across postcolonial, Black, Irish, diaspora and global literary studies, and remains foundational to contemporary debates on historical justice and the continuing legacies of empire.

Public Lecture: Lessons from Fanon

Abstract: Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks is a singular and inexhaustible text, one which repeats multiple re-readings and reconceptualizations. Part of what is most impressive about Fanon’s book—aside from its ability to speak to multiple subsequent generations and standpoints—is its ability to generate new concepts, to adapt and ‘vernacularize’ philosophical and psychoanalytic concepts to critical ends. This talk will highlight a handful of such concepts (including the zone of nonbeing, Fanon’s idea of disruptive temporality, and the role of the colonial voice) with the dual aim of making them accessible and critically useful to us today.

Bio. Derek Hook is a Professor in Psychology and a clinical supervisor at Duquesne University, USA, and an Extraordinary Professor of Psychology at the University of Pretoria, South Africa. A scholar and practitioner of psychoanalysis, he is one of the editors (along with Calum Neill) of the Palgrave Lacan Series and of the four-volume Reading Lacan’s Écrits (with Calum Neill and Stijn Vanheule). He is the author of Fanon, Psychoanalysis and a Critical Psychology of the Decolonial (2025), Whiteness at the Abyss (2025) and the co-editor of Fanon, Phenomenology and Psychology (with Leswin Laubscher) and the co-editor of Lacan and Race (with Sheldon George). He maintains a YouTube channel with many lectures on Lacanian Psychoanalysis and Fanonian Decolonial Theory.