Bio 

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

Research project 

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

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

Bio: 

After studying for her BA (English, 2017) and her MPhil (European, Latin American and Comparative Literatures and Cultures, 2018) at the University of Cambridge, Aistė completed her PhD in Italian at Cambridge under the direction of Prof. Heather Webb in 2022. In 2022, she was Research Fellow at Vilnius University and Affiliated Lecturer at the University of Cambridge. At UCC, Aistė is working on her first monograph, based on her PhD research. Her research interests include dream and visionary literature, the illuminations and illustrations of Dante’s Comedy, and the interconnections between English and Italian literary traditions. 

Research project: 

My interdisciplinary project, entitled ‘Dreams and Visions in Dante and the Italian Middle Ages,’ investigates the representation of multisensory dreams and visions in Dante Alighieri’s Vita nuova (c. 1294) and Commedia (c.1308-1320). Approaching Dante’s dream writing from the perspectives of the history of the senses and cognitive literary studies, I aim to answer the following questions: what role does the body play in dreams and visions? How do visionary literature and images convince and persuade readers? Can imaginative experiences shape and mould our waking reality? These questions remain partly unanswered in the twenty-first century, but they equally troubled late medieval writers. Situating Dante’s writing in the broader philosophical, theological, and scientific context of the Italian Middle Ages, I seek to demonstrate how Dante’s dreams fit within, and have shaped, contemporary discourses of dreaming. 

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

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

Biography

Dr Noel O'Connell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century (ISS21) and the School of Applied Social Studies, UCC. Dr O’Connell was awarded the DOROTHY COFUND Marie Skłodowska-Curie award from the Irish Research Council (2023). In 2015, he was awarded the GOI Irish Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship (2015). Author of over 20 publications, Dr O’Connell graduated with a BA in English Literature (University of Ulster, 2002), MSc in Writing and Cultural Politics (University of Edinburgh 2005), MPhil in Deaf Studies (University of Bristol, 2008) and PhD in Deaf Education (Mary Immaculate College 2013). 

Postdoctoral research project

Although over 90% of children born to deaf parents can hear (CODAs), they have to live with the consequence of deafness stigma. Despite the UN Sustainable Development Goals commitment towards the protection of children’s right to an inclusive society free from stigma and discrimination (SDG 10), the needs of CODA children are rarely considered by family services or children’s rights groups who perceive them to be part of the “normal” majority social identity group compared to deaf children. The CODA project aims to use the methods of ethnography, participant observation, film documentary and fieldnotes in order to understand how CODAs in Ireland and the United Kingdom (UK) experience the courtesy stigma (or stigma-by-association) of their deaf parents and the ways in which they use culture and shared experiences of community belonging as resources for agency, resilience and empowerment. The postdoctoral researcher and PhD student will conduct semi-structured focus group and individual interviews with CODA adults and children in order to explore how they negotiate threatened social identities in social, cultural, educational and gendered contexts. Interviews will be conducted in Irish Sign Language (ISL), British Sign Language (BSL), International Sign (IS) or English for a maximum of one-hour duration and will be video-recorded. Data collection will take place at the participants’ family homes, CODA Youth Camps, CODA Festival events, and Deaf Village Ireland. The project is supported by Dr Deirdre Horgan (UCC mentor) and Dr Gill Harold (UCC academic collaborator). The research involves working in collaboration with CODA UK and Ireland, a non-profit community-interest group established to organise events, activities and projects for the benefit of CODAs and their families in Ireland and the UK (https://www.codaukireland.co.uk). The role of CODA UK and Ireland is to provide assistance in participant recruitment, informed consent, accessing the research sites and organising CODA events.  

Dr. Elaine O'Callaghan (BCLG, PhD) works as a researcher on the  ID+ Project  at UCC, focusing on the right to inclusive education for people with intellectual disabilities in higher and further education. Prior to this, Elaine worked with Professor Conor O'Mahony in his role as the Irish Government appointed Special Rapporteur on Child Protection, contributing to multiple reports including Proposals for a State Response to Illegal Birth Registrations in Ireland (2021) and A Review of Children's Rights and Best Interests in the Context of Donor-Assisted Human Reproduction and Surrogacy in Irish Law (2020). Elaine previously worked with Dr. Kenneth Burns, Dr. Fiachra Ó Suilleabháin and Olwen Halvey on a study of social media abuse and harassment in social wor

Bio 

Extensive knowledge in the field of Climate Change and enthusiasm to work with research that aims to be inclusive and improve the quality of life of vulnerable populations. Motivated to learn new methods and am an adaptable individual with excellent problem-solving skills. 

Research 

Transferability of resilience in informal settlements (TRIS): a model for assessing climate risk and empowering women as decision-makers 

Abstract 

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

Bio

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

Research Project

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

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

Dr Claire Nolan - School of the English and Digital Humanities

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

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

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

Email: clairenolan@ucc.ie   

Gustavo Souza Marques - School of Film, Music and Theatre, Department of Music

Gustavo Souza Marques is a postdoctoral researcher for the CIPHER Hip-Hop Interpellation project; a five-year, 2-million euro study of Global Hip-Hop knowledge flows on six continents, funded by the European Research Council (ERC). Dr. Marques works as a Latin Americanist covering the Caribe and Americas (Central and South) for the project which aims to create a collaborative hip-hop platform on the Internet.

Dr. Marques main interests as a scholar is postcoloniality, critical race theory, hip-hop culture, media and performance studies 

Email: GSouzaMarques@ucc.ie

Dr Julius-Cezar Macarie - ISS21 Institute For Social Science in the 21st century

Short bio: 

As a night ethnographer and migration scholar, for the past decade Dr Julius-Cezar Macarie (or MacQuarie) has reached out to migrant nightshift workers because he is concerned with their invisibility from public debates, political agendas, and scholarly fields. He founded the NIGHTWORKSHOP and campaigns for migrants’ rights with the NIGHTWORKER CHARTER. Dr MacQuarie was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Research Fellowship to carry out this research. The project runs from Sept. 2022-Aug. 2024.

Project Outline: 

Funded under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA), PRECNIGHTS project addresses the topic of labour migration and precarity, specifically regarding women migrant nightworkers (WMNs) in Ireland. It intends to contribute with novel theory on differential inclusion of WMNs and impact related scholarly debates as well as help advance migrant workers’ rights. The primary aim is to make WMNs visible by examining precarity, migration, gender and nightwork, and how each dimension magnifies the lived experiences of the others. Project work will allow an inclusive analysis of the lack of WMNs’ ‘power and privilege’ and the forms of ‘oppression and inequality’ they face.

PRECNIGHTS is an ambitious anthropological project on labour migration and precarity, focusing on the essential, yet invisible, women migrant night workers (WMN) in Ireland. Through an innovative interdisciplinary and ethnographic approach, the research will impact scholarly debates on migration, and will inform key Irish and European stakeholders on migrant workers’ rights.

PRECNIGHTS’ objectives are to:

1. Unpack how are WMN expected to perform their gender in nightwork;
2. Explore factors that affect WMN’s responses to invisibility and precarity;
3. Examine how management practices and work culture impact WMN’s understanding and crafting of their self-presentations; and
4. Unpack the structural invisibilisation and precarisation   of WMN.

PRECNIGHTS is hosted by ISS21, University College Cork, under the supervision of Dr Caitriona Ni Laoire, whose background and expertise in qualitative multi-modal research and socio-spatial dynamics of inclusion/exclusion are at PRECNIGHTS’ core.

 Contact: 

For information on the project contact: Dr Julius-Cezar Macarie (jcmacarie@ucc.ie). Follow on twitter at: @precnights

Dr James Chetwood - School of English and Digital Humanities

Biography: 

James is a Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Digital Humanities. He completed a PhD at the University of Sheffield (2017) which re-examined the transformation of the personal naming system of medieval England between c.800 and c.1300.  

Before arriving at Cork, James taught in the History Department at the University of Sheffield, the School of English at the University of Nottingham and was Lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Hull.  

His first article ‘Re-evaluating English personal naming on the eve of the Conquest’ won the Early Medieval Europe Prize and the Paul E. Szarmach Prize. A monograph based on his PhD research is under contract with Amsterdam University Press.

Project overview:

My current project focuses on the transition between late antiquity and the early medieval world. It examines personal names of the people of southern Britain between c.350 and c.800 to add a new dimension to the ongoing debate around the adventus saxonum – the so-called ‘coming of the English’ to Britain.  

The fate of Britain and the Britons in the post-Roman period is still a topic of much debate, and much disagreement still exists between historians, archaeologists and linguists. Personal names are the perfect tool to bridge this disciplinary divide. They are linguistic items which respond to grammatical rules and are influenced by linguistic change over time. But they are also items of ‘immaterial culture’, which can be chosen, ‘worn’ and passed down from generation to generation, or discarded when they become unfashionable.  

My project will combine linguistic, historical and digital humanities methods to examine personal names through both these lenses. I will collect and analyse names of different linguistic origins, compiling them into a comprehensive database. This will allow me to conduct quantitative and qualitative analyses into the names, their chronological and geographical distribution, and the historical people who bore them. In doing so, it will answer the following research questions: 

• What was the ethnic and linguistic make-up of the Romano-British population on the eve of the adventus saxonum? 
• Where did names of non-English origin persist in early medieval England, and for how long? 
• To what extent do changes to the linguistic origin of names reflect patterns of migration or shifts in ethnic and linguistic identities? 
• What kind of people bore non-English names, and is there evidence they were seen as socially inferior or marginalised? 

A final aspect of my project will be to examine the relationship between personal names and ethnicity in this period. Recent debates have questioned the usefulness of ethnicity as a category of analysis in early medieval Europe. The data collected will allow me to explore how early medieval people conceived and demonstrated ethnicity, including the extent to which people used names as markers of ethnic identity. 

Dr Donna De Groene - School of the Human Environment: Geography, Archaeology and Classics

Donna de Groene is a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Department of Archaeology, on the INSTAR project New Pastures.  

Donna is a zooarchaeology and isotope specialist, studying human-animal relationships in prehistory. She obtained a PhD at the University of Reading, part of and funded by the ERC MENTICA project (MENTICA - The Middle East Neolithic Transition: Integrated Community Approaches (reading.ac.uk)), Her research focused on the earliest animal management and domestication strategies employed during the Neolithic Transition in the Zagros Mountains of Iran and Iraq.  

Dr de Groene is the lead zooarchaeologist on the IRC -COALESCE funded project ‘New Pastures’ led by Dr Katharina Becker, Department of Archaeology. The project is funded under Strand 1 L – Instar – by the National Monuments Service of the Department of Housing, Local Government and Heritage in partnership with the Heritage Council and supports Irish National Strategic Archaeological Research. 

Project Outline

The project ‘New Pastures’ project will address central gaps in current understanding of the 1st millennia BC and AD by utilizing the abundant data generated by the infrastructural schemes of the recent past to create new knowledge about animal husbandry practices, settlement modes and lifeways of the Iron Age. 

The cutting edge, interdisciplinary research strategy combines zooarchaeological and isotopic analysis, Bayesian modelling and Ancient Genomics to the study of the remains of sheep, goat, cattle and horse found in Ireland. This will create a completely new understanding of animal husbandry practices of the Iron Age in all their facets and address fundamental questions about the subsistence base and lifeways of Iron Age society, previously not studied in Ireland. Dr de Groene will conduct sampling for, and analysis of isotopic analyses for carbon, nitrogen, sulfur and strontium isotopes with project partner Professor Derek Hamilton of Glasgow University, and work with Professor Daniel Bradley and his team at Trinity College on the study of the ancient Genomics of Later Prehistoric and early historic herbivores  

The project is interdisciplinary and collabo

Dr Philip Murphy - School of Society, Politics and Ethics

Biography

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

Project

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

Project Outline

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

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

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

Contact Details

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

Email: philip.murphy@ucc.ie