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Explore the Future Humanities Institute

The Future Humanities Institute (FHI), a UCC Futures Institute, is an ambitious and interdisciplinary research community dedicated to understanding and shaping the human dimensions of today’s most pressing global challenges. We advance this mission through our Radical Humanities Laboratory, which supports innovative and exploratory approaches to contemporary questions, and through our interdisciplinary research clusters, which focus collective expertise on key areas of cultural, social and environmental concern. Through applied imagination, methodological innovation and engagement with communities, policymakers and partners, we develop ideas that open pathways to more just, sustainable and creative futures. A key pillar of UCC’s Futures Framework, the FHI serves as both a development catalyst and an advocacy hub. It champions the bold, creative thinking that underpins the culturally impactful and socially transformative research of UCC’s arts and humanities community. Our researchers are internationally recognised for their excellence, global networks and sustained success in securing competitive funding. Their work informs public policy, enriches cultural life and drives real‑world change, ensuring that arts and humanities perspectives are actively shaping Ireland’s futures.

Our Research Groups

The Future Humanities Institute comprises the Radical Humanities Laboratory, and a range of research groupings that synergise within and across disciplines.

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The Future Humanities Institute (FHI), is an ambitious, interdisciplinary research community dedicated to understanding and shaping the human dimensions of today’s most pressing global challenges

Prof Yvon Bonenfant

Future Humanities Institute Director

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The arts and humanities perform a key leadership role within the research ecology at UCC. I hope you enjoy exploring this small sampling of this work and achievements from 2024-2025.

Prof Yvon Bonenfant

Director Future Humanities Institute

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Working with members of villages in China’s multi-ethnic Southwest, ECura seeks out ways to empower communities to adopt digital technologies to become curators of their traditional music and dance.

Dr. Lijuan Qian, PI, ECura Project

Everyone’s a Curator:
Digitally Empowering Ethnic Minority
Music Sustainability in China

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The CASCADE team is excited to be partnering with some of the leading experts in text and cultural analytics and machine learning from across the UK and Europe.

Dr James O’Sullivan, PI, CASCADE

Computational Analysis of Semantic Change Across Different Environments. An MSCA Doctoral Network.

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MIGMOBS is a huge and ambitious project on the root of global inequalities: on the neo-colonial relations implied in a world of selective borders which dictate who can be mobile and who is excluded.

Professor Adrian Favell, PI, MIGMOBS

MIGMOBS - The Orders and Borders of Global Inequality: Migration and Mobilities in Late Capitalism

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News

Dr Louise Firth oversees the Living Seawalls in Cork expantion to Paddy’s Point, Ringaskiddy
24 Sep 2026

Second Living Seawall installed in Cork Harbour

A second Living Seawall has been installed at Paddy’s Point, Ringaskiddy, building on the first installation at Kennedy Pier, Cobh, in September 2025. After one year, the Cobh installation is showing increasing colonisation by marine life, providing an opportunity to track how biodiversity develops on these novel coastal habitats.
Read on ucc.ie
Pictured at the launch of NorseMap are internationally acclaimed Norwegian musician Einar Selvik, founder of Wardruna, and Professor Tom Birkett, Principal Investigator of NorseMap and Senior Lecturer in Old English and Old Norse at UCC. Image: Clare Keogh.
21 Sep 2026

Launch of the iViking heritage collection app

Norwegian musician Einar Selvik helped the NorseMap Project to launch their pioneering iViking app.
Read on ucc.ie
18 Sep 2026

CASCADE Project ESR Training Camp takes place at the University of Sheffield

The fourth and final CASCADE Training and Research Camp took place on 1st September at the University of Sheffield. In the impressive surrounds of the Sir Frederick Mappin Building, the CASCADE ESR cohort and their PhD supervisors convened to engage together in a programme of activity focused on the theme of ‘Working with Industry and The Public’. 
Read on horizoncascade.net
01 Sep 2026

What do data sound like?

As the sheer mass and complexity of data generated globally continues to increase at a rapid pace, researchers are exploring new ways to reveal hidden patterns and implications that are not easily discovered through graphs or text. In a new interview with *IEEE Spectrum*, Dr. Stephen Roddy (Digital Humanities & RHL) discusses how sound and music can reveal these patterns through a process known as sonification. 
Read on spectrum.ieee.org

Future Humanities Institute

Institiúid na nDaonnachtaí Feasta

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O'Rahilly Building (ORB) 2.20, University College Cork,

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