Associate professor in Migration and Intercultural Studies in SALIS, Dublin City University. Other roles and responsibilities include: Chair of the MA in Refugee Integration (MARI) and Chair of the University of Sanctuary Ireland (UoSI) network. She was instrumental in establishing DCU as the first University of Sanctuary in Ireland in 2016, which entails creating a culture of welcome for asylum seekers and refugees, and she have also more recently co-facilitated the establishment of NOMADS (Network of Migration and Diversity Studies) in DCU. In 2017, she co-hosted the colloquium Asylum Narratives and co-edited a special issue related to the theme for the journal Studies in Arts and Humanities, which was published in January 2019.
Her doctoral research focused on the development of capabilities for critical cosmopolitan citizenship in higher education. She have published on this theme in international peer-reviewed journals and edited book collections, as well as giving keynote lectures on the subject in South Africa, the UK and Spain. Over the course of the past three years, She has conducted participatory action research on integration through the arts with social enterprise BlueFire. More recently, her focus has turned to applying capability approach theory to asylum and refugee contexts, most notably concerning Direct Provision in Ireland, again using participatory action research methodology. She is also currently investigating the university of sanctuary model as a framework for supporting and developing socially just institutes of higher education.
She welcome applications from prospective PhD students interested in: migrant and refugee studies, including reference to the sanctuary model, asylum narratives, strategies for integration; the human development and capability approach; critical pedagogies; participatory research; and cosmopolitan citizenship