Fiona Donson is a graduate of Leicester University (LLB 1988), Queen's University, Canada (LLM 1989), King's College London (PhD 1997). She is currently Co-Director of the Traveller Equality and Justice Project.
Fiona's publications include Parental Imprisonment and Children's Rights (with Dr Aisling Parkes - eds. Routledge, 2021), Law and Public Administration in Ireland (with Dr D. O'Donovan, Clarus Press, 2015) and Legal Intimidation: A SLAPP in the Face of Democracy (Free Association Books, 2000). In addition, she has published articles on human rights, administrative justice, access to justice, equality, prisons and protest. She is currently Visiting Research Fellow at the School of Human & Health Sciences, University of Huddersfield. 
Fiona is Co-Director of the Traveller Equality and Justice Project (TEJP) focusing on access to justice for Travellers in relation to denial of access to goods and services. The project received funding from the EU (2021-2023) under the Citizenship, Equality, Rights and Values programme, and the Council of Europe (2024). She has also collaborated on projects funded by the Irish Research Council, the British Government, the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the Commission for the Support of Victims of Crime. Her current research includes work on access to justice, the rights of children of incarcerated parents, and Administrative Justice. In addition, she is co-chair of the Action for Children and Families of Prisoners with the Irish Penal Reform Trust. She is part of an interdisciplinary team - Child and Family Prison Research - undertaking a range of research and evaluations focused on the impact of imprisonment on families and interventions supporting them. 
Fiona's teaching falls into the areas of Administrative Law/Justice, Penology, Courtroom Ethnography and Traveller Rights. She welcome's PhD candidates in these areas as well as parental incarceration.
Before joining UCC at the end of 2007 Fiona worked as a child rights advocate for a number of years in Cambodia including developing child rights training for lawyers for UNICEF and running a major child rights project funded by the European Commission. She has taught at a number of Law Schools in the UK including Leicester and Cardiff.

My research falls into the following areas: a) discrimination (Traveller Equality and Justice Project), b) children of prisoners and c) administrative justice. These three strands establish my expertise across interlocking areas of law, research methods and conceptual approaches. My particular skills in community oriented, participatory research exploring the lived experience of legal marginalisation are central to my work and are built on innovative research methods (mixed, ethnography, participatory) adopting a socio-legal and interdisciplinary approach that is innovative and ambitious.
i. Traveller Access to Justice - The  Traveller Equality and Justice Project is an ongoing project working in partnership with the Traveller Community in Cork and Kerry developing a vital data set around Traveller experience of discrimination and engagement with the legal system and access to justice. The research forms part both of an action oriented approach to the provision of legal information to support access to justice along side important research on the operation of the equality system in Ireland. The project has received funding from the Irish Research Council (2019), EU (2021-2023) and Council of Europe (2024). It has also prompted further activities including the development of Trauma Informed Clinical Legal Education (TiCLE) with UCL and University of Glasgow.
ii. Child rights and parental incarceration with Dr Aisling Parkes on child rights and parental incarceration. We are recognised as leading international scholars in this area and have worked collaboratively co-creating publications, innovative research, and providing policy and practice initiatives at a national and European level. This interdisciplinary work engages a variety of research themes including child rights, prisons and criminal justice. The research involves a series of collaborations both domestically and internationally; working with academic colleagues across Europe within a European network (Children of Prisoners Europe), and in Ireland (Dr Daragh Bradshaw, UL) and Dr Aisling Parkes (UCC). 
iii. Administrative Justice – this area cuts across all my work but also provides a foundation for my most recent research initiative. Previous research in this area has included my collaborative textbook with Dr Darren O’Donovan Law and Public Administration in Ireland, (Clarus Press, 2015) alongside peer reviewed articles and chapters on the Irish Ombudsman, Oireachtas Inquiries, and most recently a chapter in the prestigious Oxford Handbook on Administrative Justice on Public Inquiries.

Fiona's teaching interests cover a range of areas including Criminal Law, Administrative Law (Administrative Justice and Judicial Review), Penology, Criminology.

2024-2025 modules:
Undergraduate
LW2263 Law of Public Administration
LW2264 Administrative Law: Grounds of Judicial Review
LW3376 Traveller Equality and Justice Project Clinic
LW3377 Courtroom Ethnography: Theory and Practice
Postgraduate
LW6545 Penology
CR6012 Critical Perspectives on Criminology

She has also previously taught: Criminal Law, Jurisprudence, Research Methods, International Children's Rights.

Fiona is an experienced doctoral supervisor and was previously head of Graduate Studies in the Law School. She welcomes expressions of interest for supervision from prospective PhD researcher in her areas of interest with particular reference to administrative justice, access to justice, children experiencing parental imprisonment, and penology. She strongly encourages the development of innovative research methods in the context of socio-legal research including ethnographic research.