Rosie Meade is Senior Lecturer in the School of Applied Social Studies, University College Cork. Through her research, writing and teaching, she engages with and analyses ‘collective action’, a term that incorporates a wide range of practices and processes, including protest politics, social movement activism, DIY cultures, community development and community arts. Her work interrogates how communities and movements seek to negotiate, claim and reconstitute power and resistance in political, social and cultural spheres.    Rosie is interested also in the manifold discourses, tactics and structures through which people express and prefigure their democratic agency.  Additionally, the politics of cultural representation - including how communities and movements are represented in/through the arts and media, and how they seek to represent themselves - has been a central theme in her work.  Recent works have explored the constitution and circulation of ‘squeezed middle’ and ‘mom and pop landlord’ discourses in Ireland. Other key areas of interest include cultural democracy, penal abolitionism, theories of the state, the politics of and resistances to neoliberalisation, territorial stigmatisation, and the politics of ressentiment.     

Rosie greatly enjoys collaborative working and over the course of her career she has benefited in innumerable ways from research and learning partnerships with colleagues within and beyond the School of Applied Social Studies.  She is a former joint editor of the Community Development Journal (CDJ) – with Órla O'Donovan. Alongside Mae Shaw of Edinburgh University and Sarah Banks of Durham University, Rosie established and edited the Rethinking Community Development Series published by Policy Press/Bristol University Press. To date, nine books have been published as part of the series, involving writers from across the globe.     

Working with UCC colleagues, Órla O'Donovan , Fiona Dukelow and Heather Laird, Rosie is  an editor of the Síreacht: Longings for Another Ireland Series  published by Cork University Press.  The series publishes short, topical and provocative texts on controversial issues in contemporary Ireland.     

With her international colleague Professor Marcelo Lopes de Souza (Department of Geography at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil), Rosie is editing a special issue of the international open access journal AMBIENTES: Revista de Geografia e Ecologia Política, that brings together authors from the Global South and Global North to document and analyse contemporary forms of necropolitics at different scales and in diverse contexts.  

Collaborating with UCC colleagues Elizabeth Kiely  and Katharina Swirak, Rosie has been researching the necropolitics of imprisonment in Ireland and exploring the potential for civil society and community groups to advance abolitionist alternatives to penalty and punishment. 

Rosie’s interest in cultural democracy and DIY cultures is reflected in a commitment to independent/alternative media.  In 2022, she and Niamh McCrea (South East Technological University) created the Múscailt podcast with the generous support and encouragement of Tony Groves of Tortoise Shack.  Niamh and Rosie are co-hosts of the podcast, which involves interviews with scholars and writers who are raising important questions about Irish society through their research.

Rosie is currently a member of the BSocSc and DSocSc Programme Teams in the School of Applied Social Studies, and she teaches and/supervises students on the DSocSc, BSocSc, BSocSc (Youth and Community Work), MSocSc Social Policy and Social Justice (Online), Higher Diploma in Social Policy Online and Masters in Voluntary and Community Sector Management  programmes.