Órla O’Donovan

Órla O’Donovan is an intradisciplinary feminist scholar working at the intersections of bioethics, social studies of science and medicine, death studies, and community and social movement studies. She is a senior lecturer in the School of Applied Social Studies and a research associate with Collective Social Futures / Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century. She is Vice-Head for Research & Innovation and Director of the Bachelor of Social Science degree. She is also one of the founders and convenors of the Living Well with the Dead Research Collective, a UCC-based crossdisciplinary and international medical humanities network. 

Much of her current research is concerned with institutional reckoning with histories of colonial and medical violence and use of the disenfranchised dead as teaching and research resources. In addition to troubling conventional understandings of the dead and human remains, this research attends to how histories of extractive colonialism continue to resonate in contemporary material, relational, epistemic, and affective university environments. Collaborating with colleagues from a range of disciplines within UCC and internationally, her research involves searching for ways of working with legacy medical collections that enable us to live well with the dead whose bodies were used to craft them. This approach recognises that histories of hurt cannot be undone and searches for modes of reckoning without expectations of resolution. She is particularly interested in working with historical collections of medical wax moulages, many of which were crafted using the bodies of incarcerated people.

Her collaborative research projects include Re-imagining care of and for university legacy medical collections (Collective Social Futures, 2025), Living Well with the Dead in Contemporary Ireland (Wellcome, 2019), Qualitative review of complaints received by the Medical Council 2008—2012 and doctors’ responses (Medical Council, 2015), European Patients’ Organisations in Knowledge Society (EU FP7, 2009-2012) and Patients' Organisations in Ireland: Challenging Capitalist Biomedicine? (Royal Irish Academy, 2006). 

Her research has benefited from awards of research residencies at the US Yale-Hastings Program in Ethics and Health Policy (2013) and the Swiss Brocher Foundation for the study of the ethical, legal and social implications of medical technologies (2019, 2023).

Together with Rosie Meade, from 2017 until 2022, she was co-editor of the Community Development Journal (Oxford University Press). She is a co-editor of the Cork University Press series Síreacht. Longings for Another Ireland, jointly with Rosie Meade, Fiona Dukelow and Heather Laird.

Institutional reckoning with histories of medical violence; decolonisation and anti-capitalist movements; medicine and necropolitics; politics of health-related knowledge production; epistemologies of ignorance;  patients' organisations and health-related social movements; democratising the production and use of science and technology for public purposes; feminism and strategies of resistance; the commons. 

SS2025 Social Movements and Health

SS3019 Science, Technology and Public Controversy

SS6028 Public Health and Critical Social Science