The lists below represent the events and activities organised in UCC on topics that relate to Equality, Diversity and Inclusion.*  These complement the events coordinated by the Equality Committee, the EDI Unit, the Athena SWAN Project and the University of Sanctuary Committee as part of Equality Week and Refugee Week, as well as other events throughout the year, such as the President's Athena SWAN Symposium.

If your event is not on this list but should be, please contact ediunit@ucc.ie

*N.B. compilation of this list commenced in autumn 2018.  We would welcome information on events that predate this.

March 2022

March 1 - Centre for Global Education & Praxis (UCC Development and Global Citizenship Education Project) invite you to a seminar titled: Development Education and Social Justice.  This event has been organised to present and debate the content of Issue 33 of the Centre for Global Education’s bi-annual, open access, peer reviewed journal Policy and Practice: A Development Education Review. The theme of this issue is ‘Development Education and Social Justice’ which takes stock of one of the cornerstones of development education, social justice, at a time when it is being assailed by the triple interlocking global threats of inequality, the COVID-19 pandemic and the climate emergency.

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March 2 - Dept. of English Research Seminar Series, Spring 2022 presents Kathryn Laing, MIC, University of Limerick: Looking in the wrong places: Fictions of the Ladies’ Land League, Late-Nineteenth-Century Popular Print Culture and Hannah Lynch’s ‘Irish Girl Rebels’

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March 7 - Launch of Cocoon Nights - "Why not join us in The Hub Shtepps, as we launch the first of UCC’s Cocoon Nights! This is an informal open mic event series that aims to raise awareness of the concerning and growing numbers of femicides in Ireland, as well as providing a space to grieve and process the emotions that arise from such experiences.  Cocoon Nights facilitates a space for our UCC community to come together, to showcase, and support each other’s creative responses to femicide, and indeed all forms of gender-based violence. We welcome all forms of creative response including, but not limited to, music, song, poetry, paintings, sculptures, podcasts, performances, and videos. Responses are welcome, indeed encouraged, in any language!"

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March 8 - Launch of 5th Rejuvenate programme by the Food Institute in UCC.  Rejuvenate was awarded the Best Diversity and Inclusion Initiative at the Irish Institute of Training & Development (IITD) National Training Awards 2020, recognising an outstanding and innovative initiative focused on ensuring full access to and participation in the workplace for all. The Rejuvenate team currently has plans to build on Rejuvenate’s success in supporting other vulnerable groups wishing to return to employment. Ageism, in particular, is our next target. Most recently, we were delighted that national policy, Food Vision 2030, the new ten-year strategy for the Irish agri-food sector, highlighted Rejuvenate at  UCC as an example of the type of programme required to increase female participation in the agri-food labour force, and promote and improve gender balance at all levels, if Ireland wants to become a world leader in Sustainable Food Systems over the next decade. 

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March 9 - HR Staff Wellbeing present Bríd O'Meara, Director of Services with Aware, to speak on 'Women and Mental Wellbeing: Let's Talk about Emotions.

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March 10 - The Department of Spanish Portuguese and Latin American Studies (@uccsplas) and the Assemblea Nacional Catalana a Irlanda (ANC) invite you to the following event: Multilingualism and Minority Languages in Contemporary Legal and Media Landscapes. Catalan Journalist and creator of news outlet Vilaweb, Vicent Partal, and Law and Irish lecturer Dr Seán Ó Connail from UCC will engage in a conversation on Multilingualism and Minority languages, from both a media and legal perspective. The conversation with be moderated by Dr Helena Buffery (@uccsplas).

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March 11 - The Violence, Conflict and Gender research cluster in the Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures (CASiLaC), together with Women’s Studies, invites you to join is for the next event in our Global Feminisms seminar series. This Friday, 11 March, at 12 midday, join us as we welcome Lisselot Martín Plaza, Erasmus visiting scholar and cluster member, to deliver her talk entitled: ‘The Representation of Transgender Characters in Contemporary British Female Fiction: Its Evolution from the Late 20^th Century’.

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March 15 - On Tuesday, March 15^th, UCC’s Global Speaker Series will welcome back Mike O'Sullivan and Prof. Andrew Cottey for an in-depth discussion on the tragic events unfolding in Ukraine. With the invasion of Ukraine by Russia on February 24^th, globalisation, multilateralism and the international world order changed fundamentally. Prof. Andrew Cottey (Department of Government and Politics at UCC and EU Jean Monnet Chair in European Political Integration) is an expert in international relations, security and defence. Mike O'Sullivan (TED Speaker, Forbes Contributor and Author of "The Levelling") is an expert on international banking, finance, economics, history and politics. In the next edition of the Global Speaker Series, Mike and Andrew will discuss the implications of the current crisis on international security and defence, and international trade.

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March 16 - Dept. of English presents Edel Hanley, University College Cork - “In body weak, but spirit ever stronger”: Nurse Poetry of the First World War. This paper examines the portrayal of women as nurse-veterans of a kind in First World War poetry to show that nurses, like combatants, struggled to overcome symptoms typically associated with post-traumatic stress. It explores women’s position both as civilian and war writer, bystander and participant, having experienced war on two fronts, at home and in war zones. The poetry of civilian women and nurse writers such as Vera Brittain, Mary Borden and May Sinclair also makes claim that although women’s mourning began during the war, it continued into the postwar period, casting women in the role of ghost-survivors. As this paper considers both experimental and more traditional Georgian modes of writing, it suggests that women poets rely on modernist strategies to articulate women’s war experience, an experience which dramatically resisted conventional literary representation.

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March 21 - On World Down Syndrome Day, the Quad was lit purple, the colour of Down Syndrome Ireland.

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March 23 - Launch of the DISCs - Disciplines Inquiring into Societal Challenges project resources launch. The aim of the project was to support the development of teaching for social justice across any and all higher education academic disciplines in Ireland and it was lead by Dr Karl Kitching, ex-UCC.  The resources include practitioner and sectoral guidance on teaching for social justice in Ireland. The latter guidance recommends the closer integration of Learning & Teaching, and EDI Units, amongst other things.

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March 28 - Start of new microcredential in Equality, Diversity & Inclusion Awareness for Health, Social Care and Education Professionals in Adult Continuing Education. This module explores issues relating to equality, diversity, and inclusion. Informed by first person accounts from people who experience inequality and exclusion, it encourages participants to explore the reality of discrimination, inequality, and barriers to inclusion for various cohorts of people. Inequalities related to race, gender, sexuality, and disability will be considered. Participants will be invited to critically reflect on how these issues shape the experiences of the people that they work with and to consider how their own practice can be developed to support enhanced agency and advocacy around these issues.

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March 29 - UNIC Engaged Research Best Practice Seminar.  As part of the UNIC European University alliance, this seminar is the second of a best practice series being delivered under the UNIC for Engaged Research (UNIC4ER) programme of work.  Engaged research is an umbrella term that describes research approaches that have a common interest in collaborative inquiry with society. It assumes knowledge, insight and expertise that comes from a variety of sources - researchers, citizens, policy makers, practitioners - and that research outputs are concerned with the process of co-production of knowledge through partnership for societal impact. The best practice seminar series exchanges practical learnings and practice insights from exemplars across Europe - for research that is not only for society but also with and within society.

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March 31 - Dept. of Government and Politics present ‘The case for starvation as a security issue’, Dr Caitriona Dowd, UCC-Defence Forces Lecture Series – on-line lecture, Thurs 31^st March, 6.30-8.00 p.m.  Violent conflict is recognised as the main driver of food crisis for over 100 million people globally, while recent food security forecasts predict that almost 50million people worldwide are at risk of famine. While the human security consequences of conflict for hunger are well-documented, there is far less consensus on how – and under what conditions – food resources are actively and strategically leveraged by armed actors in conflict. This talk will present the case for understanding conflict-driven food crisis as a fundamental security concern. 

February 2022

February 1st: Imbolc & St. Brigid's Day: Fire, Fertility and the Increaing Light Join UCC's Bus Stop Chat, conversation led by Dr Jenny Butler, lecturer in the Study of Religions, CACSSS, moderated by Dr Brian Turner, Lecturer in Economics, College of Business and Law.  Dr Jenny Butler discusses the significance of St. Brigid's Day and says "February 1st is associated with the Celtic festival of Imbolc and with the goddess Brigid, Christianised as St Brigid, whose feast day falls on the same date. It marks the traditional start of spring and stirrings of new life in nature and the increasing daylight after the dark winter. Brigid's emblem is fire, and flames and light feature in many traditions connected with her. Both goddess and saint are associated with human and animal fertility, healing, and prosperity. This bus stop chat explores themes of renewal, regeneration, and hopefulness."

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February 1st: The Personal is Political: Being a Historian of Gender with Professor Lindsey Earner-Burne, hosted by UCC Women's Network, Mná@UCC.  Lindsey Earner-Byrne is the SALI Professor of Irish Gender History at the School of History, UCC. She believes in the contribution history makes to understanding who we are and how we got here, and that this enlightenment is crucial to imagining a better future. She has sought to throw light on the gendered dimensions of our past starting with a study of the history of Irish motherhood and maternity policy in 2007. Most recently she co-authored a history of Ireland’s abortion journey with Professor Diane Urquhart of Queen’s University Belfast. She is currently working on a gender history of modern Ireland.

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February 2nd: "The fit is momentary": Narrativising Disability in Shakespeare with Susan Anderson, Sheffield Hallum University, hosted by the Department of English.  When Macbeth reacts in horror to the appearance of Banquo’s ghost in act 3 scene 4, Lady Macbeth tries to cover up her embarrassment at his peculiar behaviour in front of their guests. She tries to reassure them by saying that her husband is having some kind of “fit” – a period of behaviour that is strange and alarming, but that is discrete and will pass. In this paper I will be exploring the valences of the term “fit” in Shakespeare and his contemporaries, showing that Lady Macbeth is drawing on an established range of meanings to create a plausible story for onlookers. The paper will outline how this instance fits into a broader pattern whereby the explanatory power ofdisabilityis deployed to try to control the reaction of on-stage audiences, and will consider what implications this has for our understanding ofdisabilityin drama then and now.

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February 3rd: Home, Illuminated by Sounds with Lei Liang, as part of the Department of Music's 2021-2022 FUAIM Lecture series.  Chinese-born American composer Lei Liang is the winner of the Rome Prize, the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Koussevitzky Foundation Commission, two National Endowment for the Arts grants, a Creative Capital Award, and the Goddard Lieberson Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His concerto Xiaoxiang for saxophone and orchestra was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 2015. His orchestral work, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 2021.

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February 7th: Female Monasticism in Medieval Ireland: An Archaeology (publication) by Tracy Collins, UCC alumna.  Review: As a very readable, thorough, and effective study of the archaeology of medieval Irish female monastic houses and their occupants, the book makes a valuable contribution to the fields of medieval Irish archaeology and history. The likely readership of the book would encompass academics and interested readers in the fields of: early and later medieval Irish history and archaeology, including specialists in Gaelic and Anglo-Norman Ireland, landscape archaeology, theoretical archaeology, and ecclesiastical history and archaeology; Continental and British monasticism; and Women's Studies.  Anne Connon, Department of History, Ohio Dominican University.  This book is the first to explore the archaeology of female monasticism in medieval Ireland, primarily from the twelfth to the sixteenth centuries. Nuns are known from history, but this book considers their archaeology and upstanding architecture through perspectives such as gender and landscape. It discusses the archaeological remains associated with female monasticism in Ireland as it is currently understood and offers insights into how these religious communities might have lived and interacted with their local communities. 

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February 8th: Mental Health and the COVID-19 Pandemic - A Global and National Perspective with Professor Ella Arensman, hosted by the School of Public Health as part of their 2022 seminar series.

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February 14th-18th: Bystander Intervention Week 2022 aims to highlight the issue of gender-based violence and sexual harassment both on and off university campuses.(more information here: https://ucc.workvivo.com/news/45417)

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February 15th: Eco-Artin Pursuit of a Sustainable Planet with Kathy Kirwin as part of the CGD lunchtime seminar series on the theme "The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on the SDGs and Global Development’.  This seminar focuses on a systemic approach to interconnecting concepts of sustainability with people and place. Two case studies are shared reflecting the interconnected nature of our collaborations through the lens of Eco social art. Eco social art attends to social and environmental concerns. Such practices tend to interconnect art, non-art, many ways of knowing from art, eco-philosophy, eco-pedagogy, science and traditional and local knowledge and practical experience (adapted from Fitzgerald, 2018). This Eco social Art seminar aims to share the collaborative experiences of interweaving the UN Sustainable Development goals and The Earth Charter (which focuses on values-based education) towards personal, community and planetary wellness.

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February 16th: Who or what is the working class, and what is wrong with the situation that members of thisclass share? with Dr Lillian Cicerchia (Free University Berlin), hosted by Department of Philosophy.  In her article "Why Does Class Mater", she argues that class divisions impose a unique harm for a diverse and interdependent group within capitalist societies both inspite and because of differences among group members. Class matters not just because it createseconomic groups in which some are rich and others are poor, but because competition createsconditions that militate against solidarity, toward cleavage and conflict. Class is a constraint oncollective self-determination and, therefore, a source of domination.

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February 17th: The Goddess Babalon and the Construction of Femininities in Western Esotericism with Dr Manon Hedenborg White, hosted by the Study of Religions.  In the early twentieth century, the British esotericist Aleister Crowley reimagined the biblical Whore of Babylon as the goddess Babalon — a symbol of sexual liberation and passionate engagement with existence. Tracing the different ways Babalon has been interpreted by esotericists from Crowley until today, this talk will explore the shifting stakes of femininity, sexuality, and queer identity in modern esotericism.

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Febryary 23rd: Margaret Moloney from Glin, Co. Limerick - “Only female harbour-master in the world”:Translocal approaches to a story through different media and narratives with historian Sharon Slater, part of the ICTS Spring Webinar Series.  We are delighted to welcome local historian Sharon Slater and two international performative artists, Angie Smalis and Colin Gee, to discuss how their current projects open new perspectives on a Limerick woman, born in 1868, who embarked on an exceptional career but has been largely forgotten about: .  The webinar will provide students, teaching staff, researchers, and others who have an interest in history, civic engagement, cultural studies, visual and performative arts with rare insights into very different approaches to historical narratives, places, figures and questions of memory.

January 2022

January 12th: Agency, Onto-Epistemology and the ‘more-than-human’.  The University College Cork Eco-Humanities Research Group is delighted to host an online inter-disciplinary workshop to explore diverse notions of the agency, ontology and epistemology of the non-human, or ‘more-than-human,’ in the context of contemporary ecological crisis.  The full programme can be accessed here: https://www.ucc.ie/en/eri/research/eco-humanities-research-group/eco-humanitiesresearchgroup-events/#d.en.1461227  Workshop Description: Multiple and interlocking environmental challenges require a reconsideration of the different types of agency non-human - or more-than-human - beings, entities and objects may have, including non-human animals, plants, mountains, rivers and oceans, ecosystems, land, and even matter or materiality itself. How do variant and diverse forms of agency relate to ontology, epistemology and ethics? What forms of relationship exist, and are possible, between humans and non-human communities, beings and entities? How do humans participate in wider non-human communities and multi-species societies? Drawing on a range of perspectives, the workshop will examine the close, even inextricable, relationship between being, knowing and ethics which seems to emerge when we think through notions of distributive agency. We particularly encourage approaches which draw on and utilise indigenous and decolonising epistemologies that acknowledge and attempt to move beyond the cultural specificity of the predominant western techno-scientific worldview which has attributed agency only to human beings while simultaneously denying it to non-human beings and entities.  Relationships between bodies, sound and language will be a particular focus of the workshop. Can the language of nature (and/or natural entities) be heard and understood? Can we interact with the language of animals, insects and birds, or with rivers, mountains, seas and land? To what extent might nature, the land or the world itself be seen as a communicative presence “capable of dialogical congress with us” (Freya Matthews (2003) For Love of Matter) and what are the ethical implications of this?  The workshop aims to explore how such diverse notions of distributive agency can help us in thinking through, and responding appropriately to, the multiple ecological crises which we face today. Does re-conceptualising or thinking about notions of agency, ontology, epistemology and ethics in a much broader and more interconnected way facilitate more productive or helpful responses and modes of action in relation to climate crisis, biodiversity loss and other environmental problems in the contemporary world?

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January 17th: Free English Language Courses UCC Language Centre are offering free-of-charge English language classes at three levels: Pre-Intermediate (A2 level) online; Intermediate (B1 level) onsite; Upper-Intermediate (B2 level) online.  These general English courses cover all four skills (speaking, listening, reading, and writing) as well as grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation and useful everyday English expressions. The courses are taught by supervised trainee teachers (BAWL or CELTA). 4 hours per week till 14th April 2022.

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January 26th: Philosophy of Interdependence (short course in ACE)  This course will explore some examples of interdependent thought in indigenous and Celtic peoples, Zen Buddhism, Hinduism and the writings of Irish philosopher John Moriarty. Classes will be largely discussion based and involve applying newly learned ideas to real world examples. Upon completion participants will have acquired both a grounded appreciation of interdependence and the ability to argue for this view within their respective areas of interest and concern.

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January 26th: Chick Flicks and Strong Female LEads: Women and Storytelling from Hollywood to Netflix (short course in ACE)  This course aims to take seriously popular female-centred Hollywood movies and television series, such as “chick flicks”, and to examine how, often, these film and TV series made for and marketed to women surpass their reputation as trivial or superficial. In such female-centred popular culture, there is often interesting dialogues happening with feminism, and these screen texts often crystallise the state of gender relations of the time. On the other hand, those films and shows that are celebrated for their innovation and feminism often fail feminismat a closer look. With close viewings of a wide range of female-centred US and UK films and television series, from Hollywood screwball comedies of the 1940s to the formatiJanuary 31st: ve TV series Sex and The City, and more recent screen texts, we will explore how these conceptualise female desires and expectations for femininity, while considering the broader social context of gender politics from which these screen texts emerge. Participants will gain tools and perspectives for a critical appreciation of these texts as we address questions of pleasure, identification, feminist critique, questions of diversity, and the championing of feminism in the 2010s.

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January 31st: Adapting cognitive behavioural interventions for autistic people Applied PSychology Research Seminar: Speaker Dr Ailsa Russell, Dept. of Psychology, University of Bath, UK.  High rates of mental health problems including anxiety and depression co-occur with autism.  Cognitive behaviour therapy (CBT) is recommended as first line treatment for anxiety and depression.  However the threatment materials and protocols have not been developed with autistic people in mind, who often have differences in cognition and emotional awareness.  CBT has been shown to be effective for anxiety ad anger, if adapted to meet the needs of autistic people.  There has been less consideration of treatment for depression, particularly in adults.  In this talk, I will describe the main adaptations to CBT that are recommended and how these have informed the development of a cognitive behavioural intervention for depression. 

December 2021

December 1st: Shakespeare's Badass Moms on Screen: Prospera and Volumnia with Edel Semple, UCC, hosted by the Department of English as part of their seminar series.  This paper examines the portrayal and significance of aging mothers in the films The Tempest (Taymor, 2010) and Coriolanus (Fiennes, 2012). In a regendering of Shakespeare's famous magician, the first film stars Helen Mirren as the powerful sorceress Prospera, while the latter film presents Vanessa Redgrave as a patrician and army veteran in a Balkan city in turmoil. I argue that these materfamilias characters offer interventions in current debates on women in power, working mothers, and female aging. As both of these Shakespearean mothers is played by a senior doyenne of stage and screen, casting and celebrity will be explored in relation to the films’ interrogations of contemporary perceptions of maternity and female aging.

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December 2nd: Mná@UCC are pleased to invite you to the following 3 hour workshop: 4 Strategies to Find Your Voice, Communicate Your Value & Thrive at Work - with Award Winning Personal Transformation Coach, Maeve Lankford. When? Monday 2nd December 2 - 5pm (a three-hour workshop). Spaces are limited so please register at this zoom link as soon as possible.

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December 2nd: Blacksound and the Making of Popular Music in the 19th Century with Dr Matthew D. Morrison as part of the Department of Music's FUAIM Lecture Series.  Through the concept of Blacksound, this talk will explore the making of popular music and notions of intellectual property in the U.S. and UK in the 19th century. At the center of this exportation is the legacy of blackface minstrelsy, the first form of popular music in the U.S. that was developed during slavery and traveled abroad to the UK during the Victorian era.  Matthew D. Morrison, a native of Charlotte, North Carolina, is an Assistant Professor in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Matthew holds a Ph.D. in Musicology from Columbia University, an. M.A. in Musicology from The Catholic University of America, and was a Presidential music scholar at Morehouse College, where he studied violin and conducting. His research focuses on the relationship between (racial) identity, performance, property, copyright law, and inequities within the history of American popular music and beyond.

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December 6th: Fanon and Ireland Workshop hosted by CASiLaC. Fanon and Ireland’ on Monday December 6^th. This event, which marks the coinciding of the 100^th anniversary of the foundation of the Irish Free State and the 60^th anniversary of the death of the anti-colonial activists and thinker Frantz Fanon, will explore the relevance of Fanonian theory to understanding the construction of race, the coloniality of culture and the competing narratives of history in Ireland.

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December 8th: Exploring the extent of Modern Slavery and Human Trafficking between Ireland and the United Kingdom; through the lens of Organised Crime.  Modern Slavery is pervasive, hidden and widely spread crime in both jurisdictions, with a host of different guises, and targets, often aligning for one cause, and that is to reap the rewards of a crime often seen as low risk, and high reward, the majority of which goes undetected. The recognition that slavery has a modern dimension, linked with but not totally the same as human trafficking, has resulted in a greater recognition that people are commonly being exploited and commoditised in a multi-billion pound criminal industry, active on both of these islands. Serious organised crime networks often capitalise on and exploit individuals vulnerability. This discussion seeks to explore the role of such groups, on these islands, to demonstrate the nature and type of activities, that these crimes hide behind and bring some insight to this widespread but often hidden crime.  Join online on the 8th December @1400hrs.  To register, click here.

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December 9th: The Sound of Inequality: Multilingualism and School Success with Katherina Brizić, a Sociolinguist and Professor of Multilingualism Studies at the University of Freiburg, hosted by MA Applied Linguistics.  At the heart of the challenges of late-modern societies is SOCIAL INEQUALITY. The term refers to the academic success or failure of large migrant populations in European schooling systems. My study approaches inequality from a sociolinguistic angle and investigates primary schools in Vienna, Austria. In my presentation I will focus on parents’, teachers’ and children’s multilingual VOICES, i.e. on their manifold ways to make themselves successfully ‘heard’.  However, schools are institutions and as such restrict those manifold voices aiming for success. Moreover, the voices of parents, children and teachers often clash. And yet, in this seemingly chaotic concert of voices, there are also ways to OVERCOME INEQUALITY, leading to adequate chances for all parts of society. I will show some of these successful patterns, concluding with important implications for linguistic studies, for teacher training and education policies in times of migration and war.

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December 14th: Why Citizen Participation Succeeds or Fails: Participatory Budgeting and the Future of Democratic Innovation with Dr Matt Ryan, University of Southampton (& UCC alumus), hosted by the Department of Government and Politics.  Dr Matt Ryan is Associate Professor in Governance and Public Policy at the University of Southampton. He is Co-Director of the Centre for Democratic Futures, Policy Director at the Web Science Institute, and a Turing Fellow. His research focuses on democratic innovation, participation in policymaking, and improving social research methods. He is Principal Investigator of the Rebooting Democracy project and chairs the central research team for the Participedia project. His monograph Why Citizen Participation Succeeds or Fails was published by Bristol University Press in 2021.

November 2021

November 3rd: Department of English Research Seminar Series 3-4 p.m. presents Sara Martín-Ruiz, University of the Balearic Islands, Fiction as Counter-Narrative: Asylum-Seeking and Refugee Authors in Ireland.  Ireland, the country of the welcomes… Or is it? Drawing from Critical Race Theory, this talk proposes to read the fictional texts written by Marsha Mehran, Ifedinma Dimbo, and Melatu Uche Okorie as examples of counter-narratives against the Irish hegemonic anti-immigrant discourse, as epitomised in the system of Direct Provision. Combining a literary and a sociological, activist-informed approach, this session will explore how systemic racism against international protection applicants in Ireland is reflected in their editorial marginalisation; as well as the political power that these fictional accounts may have in the fight for social justice.

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November 3rd: FáilteRefugees UCC, as part of REF-EU-GEE, a month-long fundraising and awareness campaign, and several key events. will host a conversation panel every Wednesday for the first three weeks of November, each of which will focus on a different aspect of EU-Refugee relations. A conversation with Refugee Rescue (NGO): Wednesday, November 3rd , 18:00, Kane B_10_A This collaboration with UCC International Development Society will focus on humanitarian work and human rights.

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November 4th: “Korean Men Just Ruin It For You”: Understandings of Race, Class and Gender within the Western K-drama Fandom with Rebecca Chiyoko King-O'Riain, Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at National University of Ireland Maynooth, online at 16:00

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November 4th: The next in the series of presentations in our Study of Religions Departmental Research Seminar will be on Thursday 4 November 2021 from 4-5pm with a presentation by Prof. Crawford Gribben, historian of early modern religion, Queen's University Belfast, titled: “The Fall and Rise of Christian Ireland”

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November 4th: The Mná@UCC Committee is pleased to invite you to our Annual General Meeting which will be held at 1pm on Thursday 4^th November 2021. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, this meeting will take place virtually on Teams. 

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November 6th: THe UCC Indian Alumni Community dance team is performing for the Festival of Lights at UCC on the 6th of Nov.

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November 9th: TRANSforming the Curriculum in Higher Education as a part of the VITAL Week conference in UCC, Dr Fiachra Ó Suilléabháin & Vanessa Lacey will highlight HE initiatives to ensure inclusion of sexual and gender minority students.  Despite the socio-legal changes that have signalled greater acceptance of sexual diversity and gender expansive identities in the 21st century, worldwide studies highlight the enduring targeting of those with a sexual and/or gender minority status. Even with the constitutional and legislative changes since 2015 (marriage equality and gender recognition), LGBT+ youth face a myriad of social, familial, community, educational and healthcare challenges in Ireland. While public perceptions of greater social inclusion exist, sexual and gender minority students hear negative comments about trans people and transphobic remarks in educational settings, including from teachers and staff members This session focuses on university-wide initiatives which can TRANSform the higher education landscape for students, staff, academics, and researchers.

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November 9th: Centre for Global Development lunchtime series on the theme ‘The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on the SDGs and Global Development’: Tuesday Lunchtime Online 1-2pm, 9^th November, 2021 ‘The Circular Economy: Shifting the Paradigm for SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production) by Dr Paul Bolger, a Manager of the Environmental Research Institute at UCC.  ABSTRACT: Our economy and society depends on an uninterrupted flow of natural resources and materials, including water, crops, timber, metals, minerals and energy carriers. In the next 20 years, the total demand for these limited resource stocks will be over 300 percent of the Earth’s total carrying capacity. There is increasing recognition within business that that systems of production and consumption need to be fundamentally transformed to an economy and society that lives “well within the limits of our planet”.  This talk will discuss the circular economy concept which aims to keep products, components and materials at their highest utility and value at all times, and progressively decouples economic growth from the consumption of finite resources. The talk will explore how circular economy is shaping future innovation agendas for new technologies, processes, services and business models, changing how we produce and how we consume.

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November 10th: A two-day Annual Critical Perspectives Conference organised jointly by staff from, the Schools of Applied Social Studeis nd Nursing & Midwifery, ‘Creating Safe Spaces in Mental Health Systems’, Keynote speakers confirmed: Jacqui Dillon, author, campaigner and activist; Jennifer Hough, ex- journalist with the Irish Examiner, will be talking about her and her sister’s experiences of the Irish mental health services; Eoin Gorman, an Occupational Therapy lecturer with self-experience, will be talking about creating safe spaces with students; Ole Andreas Underland and Siv Rydheim will be talking about introducing a drug/medication-free mental health unit in Norway. In addition, there will be 2 sessions of concurrent presentations.

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November 10th: FáilteRefugees UCC, as part of REF-EU-GEE, a month-long fundraising and awareness campaign, and several key events. will host a conversation panel every Wednesday for the first three weeks of November, each of which will focus on a different aspect of EU-Refugee relations. Medicine on the borders of Europe: Wednesday, November 10th , 18:00, Venue TBC This collaboration with UCC Medicine Sans Frontiers will focus on the right to health, and the experiences of medical practitioners.

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November 11th: The next guest speaker in our Study of Religions Departmental Research Seminar Series (4-5 p.m.) is Dr Jonathon O'Donnell on: "Demons of Imperial Decline: Demonology and Sovereignty in the Contemporary USA" Across America today, a growing number of conservative evangelicals have made belief in—and the struggle against—demons a core part of their spiritual life. Often aligned with reactionary political forces and viewing demons as operating behind the scenes of US public and political life, such evangelicals have identified a demonic hand behind forces as varied as LGBT rights, immigration policy, terrorism, and protests against police brutality. Looking at developments of evangelical demonology since the start of the US ‘War on Terror,’ this talk unpacks the ways demons reflect anxieties over the changing social fabric of America and fears of the decline of US imperial hegemony.

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November 16th: Centre for Global Development presents on the theme: ‘The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on the SDGs and Global Development’: ‘Global Migration in an Era of Climate Change: Are Agenda 2030 and the SDGs fit for Purpose?’ by Dr Piaras Mac Éinrí Tuesday - online 1-2pm, 16th November, 2021.  ABSTRACT: International migrants currently constitute only about 3.5% of the global population, although the figure is growing. Migration is nowhere mentioned in the UN’s 17 SDGs, yet in another sense it is the phantom at the feast. If well managed, it can act as a key driver for at least ten of the SDGs. Badly handled, it will exacerbate a wide range of negative outcomes. Now, climate change looks set to become a potential game-changer. Recent research demonstrates that, over the coming 50 years, 1 to 3 billion people are likely to find themselves living in intolerable climate conditions. This seminar will consider the adequacy or otherwise of Agenda 2030 and the SDGs in addressing this central challenge.  PROFILE: Piaras Mac Éinrí lectures in migration studies in the Department of Geography. His most recent funded research in 2015-2018 was as participant in an EU Horizon 9-country study of migration between different European regions. In 2012/13 he was PI in a major IRC-funded survey of emigration from Ireland after the crash of 2008 - a follow-up study is currently under way. He has published extensively on migration and integration issues. He is a member of Cork City of Sanctuary and actively concerned with services and policies for migrants, refugees and asylum seekers. A former diplomat, he served in Brussels, Paris and Beirut.

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November 16th: ISS21 Poverties, Social Justice & Inequalities Research Cluster invites you to the seminar: Researching and Responding to Homelessness with presenters: Joe Finnerty, Margaret Buckley and Mark Cullinane, School of Applied Social Studies, UCC and Fr Peter McVerry, Founder of the Peter McVerry Trust, Tuesday 16th November 1:30-15:00 Abstract Homeless persons are vulnerable to infectious diseases such as COVID-19 due to inadequate shelter and, in many cases, poor health. Ironically, general public health measures, such as stay-at-home rules, restriction of services, and social distancing requirements which restrict access to accommodation, to health and to other supports, to friends and family, and to public spaces, potentially worsens the vulnerability of this already marginal population. Homeless services potentially play a key role in mitigating their heightened vulnerability. In this seminar, a research team from UCC will present findings from a study of a leading Irish homeless service provider in its responses to the challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic from March 2020 through August 2021. Research methods comprised: semi-structured interviews, in July/August 2020, and then again in July/August 2021, with regional HSE Social Inclusion managers, Local Authority managers responsible for homelessness, and regional managers of the homeless service provider; and semi-structured interviews with service users in June/July 2021.Following on from the research presentation, Fr Peter McVerry will give his perspective on the housing and homelessness crisis. He hopes to guide the audience of academics, students, and researchers as to how they can best provide evidence to policy makers. This will enable a discussion of the subject of homelessness and housing from a social justice perspective. 

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November 17th: FáilteRefugees UCC, as part of REF-EU-GEE, a month-long fundraising and awareness campaign, and several key events. will host a conversation panel every Wednesday for the first three weeks of November, each of which will focus on a different aspect of EU-Refugee relations. Fortress Europe - Frontex and the Politics of borders: Wednesday, November 17th , 18:00, Venue TBC This collaboration with UCC Government & Politics Society will bring together academic experts in UCC who will present their knowledge on the increasing militarisation of EU borders at the treatment of migrants and refugees.

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November 17th: DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH Research Seminar Series, Autumn 2021, 3-4 pm online - Sophie Corser, University College Cork: Subtle Forms: Women Reading in Contemporary Fiction.  How can the myriad effects of reading be communicated in written form? Women’s writing forges innovative ways of inscribing the act of reading and the experience of women’s reading. During my IRC postdoctoral research fellowship at UCC, I’ll be considering these stylistic experiments through a cross-genre comparative analysis of contemporary works of Anglophone women’s writing. This research will describe reading as a practice which offers solace, challenges prejudice, binds people together, or provides valuable privacy – and as an act of rethinking, unravelling, making strange, or queering. Drawing on one particular strand of my project, in this talk I will look at playful manipulations of intertextuality, narrative, and structure in representations of reader characters within fiction.

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November 18th: You are warmly invited to attend a book talk by Prof. Tudor Parfitt on Hybrid Hate: Conflations of Anti-Semitism & Anti-Black Racism from the Renaissance to the Third Reich (2021, Oxford University Press), hosted by the Study of Religions Department in conjunction with UCC Race Equality Forum at 4-5pm, Thursday 18 November 2021.  Hybrid Hate is the first book to study the conflation of antisemitism and anti-Black racism. As objects of racism, Jews and Blacks have been linked together for centuries as peoples apart from the general run of humanity. In this book, Tudor Parfitt investigates the development of antisemitism, anti-Black racism, and race theory in the West from the Renaissance to the Second World War.  Parfitt explains how Jews were often perceived as Black in medieval Europe, and the conflation of Jews and Blacks continued throughout the period of the Enlightenment. With the discovery of a community of Black Jews in Loango in West Africa in 1777, and later of Black Jews in India, the Middle East, and other parts of Africa, the notion of multiracial Jews was born. Over the following centuries, the figure of the hybrid Black Jew was drawn into the maelstrom of evolving theories about race hierarchies and taxonomies. Parfitt analyses how Jews and Blacks were increasingly conflated in a racist discourse from the mid-nineteenth century to the period of the Third Reich, as the two fundamental prejudices of the West were combined. Hybrid Hate offers a new interpretation of the rise of antisemitism and anti-Black racism in Europe, and casts light on contemporary racist discourses in the United States and Europe.

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November 19th: A Conversation with Krudxs Cubensi (rescheduled!) Join us today​, November 19th, 5.00-6.30pm Irish time for a discussion around feminisms, hip hop, queer rights, diasporic identity, vegan politics, and more with queer Cuban hip hop collective, Krudxs Cubensi.  Krudxs Cubensi are a queer feminist hip hop collective from Cuba, representing the rights of queer and trans* people, women, migrants, people of colour and ‘intersectional beings’. Since 1999, members Odaymar Cuesta and Oli Prendes ‘have been working uninterruptedly offering art and knowledge as performers, composers, artivists and educators with over two hundred original songs, more than five hundred performances and more than two hundred workshops and talks in more than one hundred and fifty Schools, Colleges, Universities and Cultural Centers. This is why Krudxs are here on this planet, to leave a mark, to improve their environment, to contribute to the development of humanity, to denounce injustices and to propose more equitable ways for all of us to coexist gracefully and in harmony with all the life around us.’  This event will be bilingual English/Spanish and translation will be provided.  This event is funded by the Department of Spanish, Portuguese, and Latin American Studies; the Department of Music; CIPHER Hip Hop Interpellation; the Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures (CASiLaC).

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November 19th: Intersectionality as a Navigational Tool in Research for Understanding Hidden and Marginalised Experiences with Professor Claudia Bernard.  Lunchtime Keynote Lecture 1.05 - 2.10pm Friday 19 November as part of the Online Symposium for Social Work PhD/Doctoral Students in the Island of Ireland - All welcome.  Claudia's presentation will explore the ways in which an intersectional theoretical perspective can be used as a navigational tool to critically analyse how race, gender, class, sexuality, age, disability and other axes of structural inequalities manifest for groups in subjugated social locations. Intersectionality allows us to ask new questions about lesser heard voices to critically engage with the everyday experiences of service users belonging to marginalised groups. The argument is made that intersectionality is therefore valuable for social work research because it provides a means for analysing data in ways that enable a more nuanced understanding of day-to-day experiences that are significantly impacted by systemic inequalities.

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November 22nd-26th: The Department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American studies warmly invites you to the UCC Basque Week 2021 in celebration of the International Day of the Basque language, Euskara. It will take place in the week commencing November 22 and will include events such as Basque language tasters, an online conversation with poets Beatriz Chivite and Siobhán Ní Dhomhnaill, and an online talk with writer and translator Eneko Aizpurua.

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November 23rd: Centre for Global Development lunchtime series on the theme ‘The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on the SDGs and Global Development’ Online 1-2pm, 23^rd November, 2021 ‘Micro-financing in the Developing world: the Case of Sierra Leone’ by Ted O’Sullivan, Centre for Cooperative Studies, UCC.  Sierra Leone has made great strides since the end of its civil war. It has climbed from the position of poorest country in the world to 35^th from the bottom (UNCTAD). But it has a long way to go as more than 60 percent of Sierra Leoneans live on less than $1.25 a day (2018)  The UNCDF (UN Capital Development Fund) estimate that less than 15% of the population of Sierra Leone have access to formal financial services.  ‘For Profit’ financial service providers have no interest in providing services to these people. So they have to do it for themselves.

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November 23rd: You are cordially invited to the Department of Government and Politics research seminar of Tuesday November 23rd.  We're pleased to announce that Dr Marisa McGlinchey will join us on the day to present her latest research on dissident Irish republicanism.  Please find further details on the seminar below.  Title: The contemporary landscape of "dissident" Irish republicanism.  Date: Tuesday November 23rd 2021.  Time: 3-4pm  Presenter biography: Dr Marisa McGlinchey is an Assistant Professor of Political Science at Coventry University. She is the author of 'Unfinished Business: the politics of 'dissident' Irish republicanism', winner of the 2019 Brian Farrell book prize. Marisa is Vice-President of the Political Studies Assocation of Ireland and has been a commentator in various TV and print media including the BBC, ITV, Al Jazeera, Sky News, The Guardian and The Belfast Telegraph.

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November 23rd: The transformation of exploitation into profit: a sticky point in Marxist economics with Nathan Hill, Sam Lam Professor in Chinese Studies and as the new Director of the Trinity Centre for Asian Studies, on campus at 16:00

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November 23rd: FáilteRefugees UCC, as part of REF-EU-GEE, a month-long fundraising and awareness campaign, and several key events. will host a conversation panel every Wednesday for the first three weeks of November, each of which will focus on a different aspect of EU-Refugee relations.  The final week, students will have the opportunity to engage in debate.  Should the European Union be charged with crimes against humanity? Tuesday, November 23rd , 18:00, Venue TBC This collaboration with UCC Law Society will give students the opportunity to apply the knowledge they gain throughout the month to a motion based on the work of lawyers Juan Branco and Omer Shatz who have accused the EU of causing the needless deaths of thousands of Libyans attempting to cross our Union’s borders.

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November 25th: Fáilte Refugees are hosting a vigil next Thursday evening (25^th Nov) at 5pm in the amphitheatre to conclude our month-long event series, Ref-EU-gee. So far this month we have heard from NGO’s and academics about the perilous situations unfolding at the borders of Europe, and we felt that it would be appropriate to remember the human cost behind these conversations by hosting a vigil in solidarity.  Some students will perform poetry and music at the vigil and we welcome anyone who wishes to speak, perform, or remember in silence.

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November 25th: The Department of Italian warmly invites you to the online launch of our colleague Dr Chiara Giuliani’s new monograph Home, Memory and Belonging in Postcolonial Literature (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2021) on Thursday 25 November at 5.00pm via zoom.  The volume will be launched by Dr Emma Bond (University of St Andrews).  The book examines the meaning of home through the investigation of a series of public and private spaces recurrent in Italian postcolonial literature. The chapters, by respectively considering Termini train station in Rome, phone centres, the condominium, and the private spaces of the bathroom and the bedroom, investigate how migrant characters inhabit those places and turn them into familiar spaces of belonging. Home, Memory and Belonging in Italian Postcolonial Literature suggests "home spaces" as a possible lens to examine these specific places and a series of practices enacted by their inhabitants in order to feel at home. Drawing on a wide array of sources, this book focuses on the role played by memory in creating transnational connections between present and past locations and on how these connections shape the characters’ sense of self and identity.

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November 25th: On Thursday, November 25th, Culture Day, we will come together internally & celebrate our 50+ different nationalities and cultures spanning Tyndall.  This year’s topic is Folklore and is one of the oldest and most fascinating media to preserve our history. Staff have been asked to share a folk tale or superstition from their childhood or home.  Culture day this year will be in a hybrid format online and in person.  If you want to share your favourite fairytales and folklores with all of Tyndall, send the details to edi@tyndall.ie and express your piece of folklore in the form of a poem, a reading, a song, a dance, in pictures, video or any other way.  Furthermore there will be a fun quiz held for idiomatic expressions, such as “The early bird catches the worm” or “You must take the small potato with the big potato”.  Watch the vdeo from the day here.

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November 26:  African 'transgender', resisting the public secret and precarity, a talk by Charles Ngwena, from the Centre for Human Rights, University of Pretoria, organized by UCC’s research cluster on Violence, Conflict and Gender, in the Centre for Advanced Studies in Languages and Cultures (CASiLaC), UCC in partnership with the Women Studies MA, UCC.  The talk will take place on Friday 26 November at 11:30.  Please register for free here.

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November 27-28th: Department of Film and Screen Media are delighted to announce that the video talks of the Women’s Auto/biographical Cinemas: The Gendered Story Symposium, to be held online on 27 and 28 November, are now published on the symposium website: https://www.ucc.ie/en/fmt/film/symposium/event2/  The following talks are available for viewing: Dr Laura Busetta (University of Messina): ‘Everything Speaks about Us: Autobiographical Writing and Collective Memory in Italian Women’s Documentary Making’ / Dr Brenda Hollweg (University of Leeds): ‘The Political Work of Mourning: Personal Essay Films by Women’ / Dr Rahat Imran (University College Cork): ‘Locating the Storyteller in Sabiha Sumar's Silent Waters: A Tale of Shared Histories and Divided Identities’ / Prof. Bill Nichols (San Francisco): ‘Precarious Bodies’ / Prof. Lizzie Thynne (Sussex University): ‘Narrative Voices in a Documentary Biopic: Independent Miss Craigie’ / Dr Kiki Tianqi Yu (Queen Mary, London): ‘Maternal Love and Mother-Daughter Relationship in Contemporary Women’s Cinema in the PRC’.  We look forward to discussing these papers with their authors in an online live Round Table to be held on Sunday 28 November 2021, 5.00–7.00 p.m. The Symposium also includes a live conversation between artist Penny Siopis and Professor Sarah Nuttall to be held on Saturday 27 November at 5.00–6.30 p.m. GMT, UTC +0. Three films by Penny Siopis – My Lovely Day, 1997; Obscure White Messenger, 2010; and The New Parthenon, 2016 – are already available for viewing on the symposium website.  More information here: https://www.ucc.ie/en/fmt/film/research/symposium/event1/  The symposium is organized as part of the H2020 MSCA-IF project, Locating the Storyteller: Muslim Women’s Auto/Biographical Cinema from the Muslim World.

October 2021

Below is a list of EDI-related events that took place in UCC during October 2021

October 6th: The Department of English's research seminar series welcomed Ariane Balizet, Texas Christian University to speak on "Fair Women, Red Hands, Black Will(s): Domestic Tragedy’s Racial Logic".  This presentation considers the relationship between blood, race, and the genre of domestic tragedy, focusing on Thomas Middleton’s A Yorkshire Tragedy (1608) as well as the anonymous Arden of Faversham (1592) and A Warning for Fair Women (1599). In these plays, whiteness comprises domestic identity based in racial logics of innocence, purity, and lineage. Spectacles of domestic disorder in bloodstains, dumbshows, or staged violence articulate the racial logics at work in early modern ideals of home and family.

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October 7th: The Gender Study Group of Development Studies Association Ireland (DSAI) organised a webinar on the topic: Do Women in Afghanistan Need Saving?  Speakers: Dr Nasrin Khandoker (NUIG): Do Afghan Women Need saving?, Dr Paola Rivetti (DCU): Beyond false binaries: Neo-imperialism in Afghanistan, and Chair: Prof Eileen Connolly, DCU

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October 14th: Launch of a monograph by Carlos Garrido Castellano of the Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies Department, Art Activism for an Anticolonial Future, which explores the many ways in which antiracist and anticolonial thought and creativity can be approached to make sense of our present. 

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October 14th: As part of Community Week, the Glucksman wass pleased to host an online talk with artist Bríd Murphy today 14 October at 1pm. Bríd’s current work as part of our offsite Graft project is a thoughtful provocation about affordable accommodation and Ireland’s ongoing housing crisis.

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October 15th: On October 15th, Developmental Language Disorder Awareness Day, the UCC Quad lit up in purple later today to support this. DLD affects about 1 in every 14 people. It is a lifelong and often hidden condition. There are students in your lectures who have DLD, many of whom may not know about it, but are struggling with oral and written language. It can affect their academic work, as well as their social and emotional wellbeing.  For more information on the condition - see www.radld.org.

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October 19th: Mná@UCC, the UCC Women’s Network, held their first speaker event of 2021/22, "‘You’ll never work in this town again…" with UCC alumna Dr. Mary Favier.  Dr. Favier discussed her journey through medicine and medical politics starting with her role in the junior doctors' strike of 1987, via her beginnings in North Kerry, through Doctors for Choice, Repeal, President of the ICGP and her current role on NPHET.

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October 20th:  Global Ethics Day webinar from University Ethics Committee presented "Research Ethics for our Times: Addressing Ethical Issues that Arise from Big Data and Data Sharing"

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October 21st: Two Cork teachers, Annelies Verbiest and Claire Droney, M.Ed., who also lectures in UCC, have published a new book about autism which promises to help school staff and parents to better understand autism: "The Everyday Autism Handbook for Schools."  Containing over 60 easy-to-read guides, ‘The Everyday Autism Handbook for Schools’ (Jessica Kingsley Publishers) focuses on being easy-to-read, and jargon-free, with lots of simple theory and explanation, practical strategies and practical illustrative case-studies.  ‘Our main aim was to increase understanding of autism among school staff and parents. The challenge was to do it in such a way that’s entertaining and easy-to-understand,’ says Claire Droney, one of the authors.

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October 21st: Launch of "The Secret Police and the Religious Underground in Communist and Post-Communist Eastern Europe" (Routledge, 2021) edited by James Kapaló and Kinga Povedák, one of key outputs of the Hidden Galleries ERC project that was hosted in the Study of Religions Department at UCC from 2016-2021.  This book addresses the complex intersection of secret police operations and the formation of the religious underground in communist-era Eastern Europe. It discusses how religious groups were perceived as dangerous to the totalitarian state whilst also being extremely vulnerable and yet at the same time very resourceful. It explores how this particular dynamic created the concept of the "religious underground" and produced an extremely rich secret police archival record. In a series of studies from across the region, the book explores the historical and legal context of secret police entanglement with religious groups, presents case studies on particular anti-religious operations and groups, offers methodological approaches to the secret police materials for the study of religions, and engages in contemporary ethical and political debates on the legacy and meaning of secret police archives in post-communism.

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October 21st: The Department of Music is pleased to welcome UCC PhD candidate Clare Geraghty, PhD candidate in the department of Spanish, Portuguese and Latin American Studies at University College Cork, as the first speaker of our 2021-2022 FUAIM Lecture Series.  The lecture: "Queer feminist hip hop: ‘Intersectional beings’, Krudxs Cubensi"  Abstract: Cuban hip hop collective, Krudxs Cubensi, represent queer people, women, migrants, and ‘intersectional beings' with their ‘fierce feminist hip hop and Afro-Cuban flavours’. Krudxs Cubensi disrupt popular representations of marginalised identities by using performance as means of expressing queer joy. This presentation explores the ways in which their music and activist work engages with points of conflict in feminist studies and activism.

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October 22nd: 8th National Child Protection and Welfare Social Work Conference (SWCONF21) with keynotes and contributors: Dr Helen Beckett, Safer Young Lives Research Centre, Professor Jill Duerr Berrick, University of California, Berkeley, Gerard Brophy, TUSLA, Child and Family Agency, Professor Anna Gupta, Royal Holloway, Claire McGettrick, CLANN Project / Magdalene Names Project / UCD, Professor Conor O’Mahony, School of Law, UCC / Special Rapporteur for Child Protection, Sinead Quinlan, Stand Up Comedian / The Den, RTÉ, Harry Venning, Writer and Cartoonist.  This conference was a collaboration between @UCCsocialwork, School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork, TUSLA, the Child and Family Agency and the Irish Association of Social Workers (Southern Branch SIG).

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October 25th: The Humanitarian Action Study Group of Development Studies Association of Ireland continued with the Afghan Women’s Series to discuss strategies and experiences of engaging with issues relating to women’s rights in contemporary Afghanistan.  Speakers are Wazhma Frogh, Peace and Conflict Practitioner and Mediator, Kevin Schumacher, Deputy Executive Director, Women For Afghan Women (WAW), Jelena Bjelica, Co-director & Senior Analyst, Afghanistan Analysts Network, Dr. Ludwika Wlodek, Lecturer, University of Warsaw.

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October 26th: Centre for Global Development THEME: ‘The UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs): Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on the SDGs and Global Development’ Tuesday Lunchtime Online 1-2pm, 26th October, 2021 ‘RIPPLE AFRICA’: An NGO with a difference - Tackling Conservation, Education and Health Projects in Malawi’ by Pam Haigh.  ABSTRACT: Ripple Africa is a UK charity working in Malawi whose ethos is “providing a hand up and not a hand-out.” We run large scale conservation projects and local education and health projects. We work in partnership with local communities to find simple, cost-effective solutions to their problems. Ongoing support is the key to our success - we’re in it for the long term. I will talk about the links between our projects and the SDGs and also talk about how we differ from other NGOs in the way that we work and how that affects our ability to secure aid funding.  PROFILE: Pam Haigh is an experienced business and charity manager, who has been working with ‘Ripple Africa’ since 2014 and has been their UK General Manager since January 2016. Ripple Africa has a small UK based team who support the 140 Malawian staff - led by Country Director, Force Ngwira - who manage the day to day operation of the projects. Pam’s role covers the overall management of the charity, strategic planning, fundraising and project management. She visits Malawi twice a year (normally!) to meet with the Malawian team, monitor project progress and help plan new projects.

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October 27th: The UCC Department of Asian Studies is happy to invite you to our A s i a n S t u d i e s L e c t u r e S e r i e s E v e n t : Nationalism, Identity and Chinese Martial Arts Films; Speaker: Dr. Zhouxiang Lu, Associate Professor in the School of Modern Languages, Literatures and Cultures at National University of Ireland Maynooth on Wednesday, 27th October 2021, 4 p.m.  Wushu, also known as Kung Fu, is a traditional Chinese martial art. It also symbolises the strength of the Chinese and their pride in their history. Wushu came to be associated with Chinese nationalism after China’s various defeats at the hands of foreign imperialist powers at the turn of the twentieth century. This relationship has been further strengthened through martial arts films. In the first half of the twentieth century, martial arts films helped to construct national identity among the Chinese. They also facilitated the development of Wushu, making it a symbol of indigenous virtue and strength. From the late 1960s, influenced by a defensive strain of nationalism, Chinese film-makers began to adopt a new approach to the portrayal of Wushu. Martial arts films were endowed with political and cultural significance, and evolved as a unique representation of Chinese nationalism. Several decades later, martial arts films still retain at their core a sense of ‘Chineseness’. From Bruce Lee’s Fist of Fury to Donnie Yen’s IP Man, Chinese martial arts films have demonstrated not only the important place of Wushu in Chinese nationalism, but also the influence of nationalism on Chinese cinema.

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October 28th & 29th: UCC’s Disability Support Service offer midterm training workshops on strategies and Assistive Technology (AT) to support secondary school students with literacy difficulties. Cost: € 30 for a one day workshop (10am to 3.30pm)

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October 29th: Madan Sara: Pouvwa Fanm Ayisyen (The Power of Haitian Women); a documentary film by Etant Dupain.  Online screening and Q&A with the film's editors and community activists and Dr Kate Hodgson (UCC Department of French).  FRIDAY 29 October at 4pm (11 Eastern Time).  If Haiti has continued to resist and exist, it is in large part because of the persistence, discipline, and vision of valiant Haitian women.  Haitian filmmaker Etant Dupain has profiled a particular group of women whose work is at the heart of Haiti's informal economy. Who are they? They are known as the Madan Sara - the namesake of the film. The new film tells the story of the Madan Sara's tireless work, day in and day out, as they ensure that food in Haiti makes its way to market. Despite facing intense hardship and social stigma, Madan Sara manage to put their children through school, provide housing for their families, and ensure a better life for generations to come.  Learn more at www.madansarafilm.com

September 2021

Below is a list of EDI-related areas that took place in UCC in September 2021.

During September, Human Resources Staff Development ran two of their regular Trans Awareness: The Basics training sessions for all staff.

On September 10th, a webinar ‘From Academia to Pandemia?: Reflections on the pivot to remote learning and its implications for Higher Education’  was held, the aim of which was to initiate a dialogue about the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated ‘pivot’ to remote or blended education on the academic community, with particular focus on staff and student well-being and the core university missions of teaching and research. The seminar will commence with three 15-minute presentations by academics working in this area, followed by discussant contributions representing a student, a digital education, and a union perspective. Speakers included Professor Kalpana Shankar, School of Information and Communication Studies, UCD, Dr Karl Kitching, School of Education, University of Birmingham, Dr Darren Webb, School of Education, University of Sheffield, Asha Woodhouse, President, UCC Students’ Union, 2021/22, Sarah Thelen, Instructional Designer, Office of the Vice-President for Teaching and Learning, UCC and Frank Jones, General Secretary, Irish Federation of University Teachers, facilitated by Dr Laurence Davis, Department of Government and Politics, UCC.

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During the week of September 20th, UCC Quad was lit in blue for International Week of Deaf People.

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On September 22nd, Dr Vittorio Bufacchi in Philosophy chaired a 'meet the authors' event on this very important book on the Magdalene laundries: "Ireland and the Madalene Laundries: A campaign for justice".  The authors in question were: Mari Steed, Co-Founder Justice for Magdalenes and Co-Founder Adoption Rights Alliance, Assoc. Prof. James M. Smith, Boston College, Claire McGettrick, Irish Research Council Doctoral Scholar, UCD School of Sociology, Katherine O’Donnell, Asoc. Prof. History of Ideas, UCD School of Philosophy & Dr Maeve O'Rourke, Irish Centre for Human Rights, NUI Galway 

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The School of Religions kicked off the new academic year's Study of Religions Departmental Research Seminar on Thursday 23 September 2021 from 4-5pm with a presentation by Alice Ahern on her PhD research titled: "The Reclamation of Feminine Wisdom in the Irish Neo-Shamanic Milieu".

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On September 29th, The Glucksman shop took part in the Children's Books Ireland campaign Free To Be Me in partnership with KPMG Ireland!  Free To Be Me celebrates diversity, representation, and inclusion in books for children and young people aged 0–18, to ensure equity and visibility in both school and public libraries, bookshops, and shelves in the home.  The project showcases the rich diversity of modern Ireland and amplifies lesser-heard voices in children's literature. The Free To Be Me: Diversity, Inclusion and Representation Reading Guide contains over 360 expert book recommendations, all chosen for their portrayal of diverse themes and characters.  https://www.glucksmanshop.com/search/freetobeme/

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On September 30th, Joe Finnerty in Applied Social Studies was involved in the launch of the Simon Communities of Ireland research reports "Sustaining the Accelerant: The response of Simon Communities to Four Waves of the Covid-19 Pandemic.' and 'The Experiences of  Simon Community Service Users During the Pandemic'. These reports are phase 2 &3, of an examination of the frontline response to COVID.  The research was undertaken by Joe Finnerty, Mark Cullinane and Margaret Buckley of the School of Applied Social Studies at UCC.  The first report 'Systems Accelerant' by Joe Finnerty and Margaret Buckley was published earlier this year.  The panel included (chair) Wayne Stanley, Head of Communications and Advocacy, Simon Community of Ireland, Joe Finnerty, School of Applied Social Studies UCC & Ruth Owen, Deputy Director Feansta.

Archive

2020/21

2019/20

2018/19