Máiréad Dunne (PhD, FAcSS) is Professor of the Sociology of Education appointed at the University College Cork and the University of Sussex.  She has lived, worked and engaged in research in a wide range of locations in Africa, Australia, Europe, the Pacific and South Asia. This includes several visiting research professorships in universities around the globe. Her research brings sociological theories and methodologies to explorations of the links between education, society and work.

Her particular focus has been on the social, educational and institutional production of hierarchies and difference relating to gender, sexuality and other intersecting identities (social class, race, ethnicity, nation and religion) exploring the implications for citizenship and inequalities in diverse post-colonial global contexts. This specifically relates to the intersections between SDGs 4, 5 and 8. Significantly she also engages in historical and contemporary discourses of education, modernity, coloniality and international development and the ways these infiltrate and stagnate in the mundane assumptions and social relations of everyday life.

Máiréad has addressed the above substantive and theoretical issues through a wide range of methodological approaches including statistical methods as well as a creative use of different qualitative methods (interviews, focus groups, ethnographies, discourse analysis and visual participatory methods). Her research has consistently involved collaborations with teams of researchers, practitioners, youth and other community stakeholders in contextually located, multi-dimensional explorations of policy, institutions and practices. This demonstrates her sustained interest in analytical explorations of the work of education in the production of subjectivities and social difference and highlights the experiences, perspectives and livelihoods of those marginalised and silenced in different societies around the world. Taken together her research works to underscore the reciprocal constitution of education and society and to point to the epistemic and methodological challenges of decolonisation.