I am a Senior Lecturer in Applied Social Studies, having joined the School in 2012. I teach across a range of programmes in the School and am currently Director of the Doctor of Social Science programme. I have been active in UCC's Institute for Social Science in the 21st Century (ISS21) since its establishment.

My research interests lie in the areas of migration, childhood/youth and gender equality, and I have published widely in these areas. I am a Research Associate of ISS21 and coordinator of the ISS21 Migration and Integration Research Cluster.

I joined UCC in 2003, and directed the all-island Narratives of Migration and Return research project  from 2003 to 2005, which involved collecting life narratives of Ireland's recent return migrants. In 2005, I was awarded a Marie Curie Excellence Grant to lead the Migrant Children project from 2005 to 2009 - a team project which explored the experiences of children who migrated to Ireland during the boom years. Between 2013 and 2017, I was Scientific Coordinator in UCC of GENOVATE - an EU action-research project on gender equality in research and innovation.

I completed a PhD on Irish rural youth migration at the University of Liverpool in 1997, and after that took up academic posts in Edge Hill University College (as Lecturer in Urban Policy Studies) and in Queens University Belfast (as Lecturer in Geography). I subsequently took up a Postdoctoral Fellowship at the National Institute for Regional and Spatial Analysis at NUI Maynooth, during which I conducted research on young farmers, identities and change in rural Ireland.

My research interests coalesce around the themes of migration/diaspora, childhood/youth, gender, equality, rurality and identities and the use of qualitative research methods such as life-narrative and children-centred methods.

My research has focused in particular on understanding young people’s and migrants' lives and identities within their socio-spatial contexts. Throughout my research career, I have sought to contribute to in-depth understandings of the power relations inherent in and the multiple lived realities of being young or being migrant, in and of contemporary Ireland. 

I have made contributions in the following areas:

In-depth understandings of the socio-spatial worlds of migrant children and youth;

New conceptualisations of migration decision-making; 

Critical evaluations of host-newcomer dualisms and of adult-centrism in migration research and policy, with particular emphasis on return migration; 

Theoretically-informed approaches to addressing gender inequalities in academia and research;

Understandings of rural youth identities in the context of changing rural realities, with particular emphasis on gendered identities and rural masculinities;

Understandings of migration, home and belonging

Intergenerational relations in migrant families 

Between 2005 and 2009, I led a major Marie Curie Excellence team project on migrant children's experiences of moving to and living in 'Celtic Tiger' Ireland, in which we highlighted the importance of children-centred perspectives in migration research. As part of that project, I explored the experiences and identity processes of children who moved to Ireland with their return migrant parent(s), focusing in particular on family and peer dynamics, negotiations of inclusion/exclusion and identities, and on relationships with place. This was set within the context of intergenerational relations within families, in particular child-parent relations, and involved the use of children-centred research methods.

Throughout my research career, I have had a keen interest in issues of equality and gender in academic labour markets, with a particular focus recently on action research on addressing gender inequalities in academic and research careers, while in the past I have conducted research on the casualisation of the academic labour force and on the gendered nature of the discipline of Geography in Ireland. From 2013 to 2017, I was Scientific Coordinator in UCC of GENOVATE, an FP7-funded European project on gender equality in research and innovation.