UCD College of Social Sciences and Law
Societies Sustainable Communities
Thursday December 1st 10.30am - 3.30pm
Moot Court, UCD Sutherland School of Law
The idea of sustainability is increasingly woven into public discourse, including the equitable transition to more sustainable ways of living. Much of this debate has focused on the important transition to more sustainable production and green energy systems, yet ‘sustainability’ as a concept is much broader than this.
This event will showcase how research can define, critique our understanding of sustainability and demonstrate the contribution of social science to the development of sustainable societies. It provides an opportunity for colleagues in College of Social Sciences and Law to connect and interconnect their research with wider debates on sustainability, highlighting the human, social and behavioral aspects of societal transitions, and how these need to be embedded in concerns for equality, social justice, and human flourishing.
It is especially timely given wider changes in the national research funding landscape and to ensure that the contribution and impact of the social sciences is fully reflected in funding calls and initiatives.
This event provides an informal opportunity for colleagues to meet and explore inter-disciplinary synergies and potential collaborative opportunities going forward.
Please see draft programme details below with further information to follow:
10:30: UCD/CoSSL Strategy for Sustainability
Prof Colin Scott | Principal, College of Social Sciences and Law
14.00
Prof Paul Walsh | Vice President for Education for the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN)
14.10 NexSys: Interdisciplinary Case Exemplar for CoSSL
Prof Lisa Ryan, Assoc Prof Nessa Winston, Dr Stefan Müller, Prof Aishling Reynolds-Feighan, Prof Gerald Mills, Dr Margaret Samahita | Schools of Economics, Geography, Politics and International Relations, Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice
14.25
15:25
10.40 Dr Sarah Parlane | Economics
Private Practice in Public Hospitals: Should Senior Consultants Be Prioritized?
10.45 Assoc Prof Barry Molloy | Archaeology
Environmental determinism at its best?
Contributions from social science for understanding links between climate change, sustainable practices and cultural resilience in societies of the Bronze Age Carpathian Basin.
10.50 Ms Karen Maye | Education
EDI in STEM: Changing mindsets and impacting sustainable futures in STEM: Focus on Girls in STEM
10.55 Dr Patrick Brodie | Information & Communication Studies
Digital Infrastructures, Renewable Energy, and Emerging Regimes of Extraction
11.00 Dr Maebh Harding | Law
Essential Maintenance Overdue: Ireland’s regulatory approach to Child Maintenance
11.05 Ms Megan Reynolds | Psychology
Unwanted Sexual Experiences, Mental Health Outcomes and Alcohol Use: What is the role of social support and coping strategies?
11.10 Assoc Prof Orla Doyle | Economics
Reducing the intergenerational transmission of poverty
11.15 Dr Brendan O’Neill | Archaeology
Investigating light framed architectures made from organic materials.:Cultural Landscapes and Social Spaces (CLaSS)
11.20 Dr Gabriela Martinez Sainz | Education
Voice of children for peace, justice, and strong institutions
11.25 Dr Silvia Gagliardi | Law
Climate-induced migration and displacement through an intersectional, gender and conflictsensitive perspective: Are Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) achievable?
11.30 Dr Nora Strecker | Economics
Netting It Out: Labor Income Inequality and Taxation around the Globe
11.35 Dr Aimee Smith | Education
Safe Learning Study: children’s learning, wellbeing and gender in rural Sierra Leone
12.00 Mr Michele Gubello | Economics
Weakly Progressive: Disproportionate Higher Education Attendance and the Structure of Income Taxes
12.03 Ms Maria Giulia Molinaro Vitale | Philosophy
Climate Change & Cohabitation: the Case of Military Industries
12.05 Assoc Prof Meriel McClatchie | Archaeology
Sustainable practices in foodways: past and present
12.10 Dr Olga Ioannidou | Education
Supporting student climate agency through scenario-based teaching
12.15 Dr Jeremy Auerbach | Geography
The effects of neoliberal social housing policy on individual, family, and community health
12.20 Dr Amanda Byer | Law
Sustainability and spatial justice
12.25 Dr Laura Taylor | Psychology
Developmental Peacebuilding Model: Implications for Growing up in Divided Societies
12.30 Assoc Prof Jennifer Symonds | Education Children School Lives: Sustainable Education through Children’s Experiences
12.35 Dr Orla Kelly | Social Policy, Social Work & Social Justice
4 Day Week in Ireland
12.40 Dr Egle Gusciute | Sociology
Where are the women? Gender role in sustainability
12.45 Dr Deirdre McGillicuddy | Education
CreatEd - Creativity in Education for Societal Transformation?
12.50 Assoc Prof Suzanne Egan | Law
The Role of Law in Human Rights Education for Sustainable Societies
12.55 Assoc Prof Ainhoa Gonzalez | Geography
Measuring SDG Implementation at the Local Level: The Community SDG Dashboard
13.00 Dr Rachel Farrell | Education
Expansive Learning in Cyber Resilience Education: An Evaluation of the Design and Implementation of a Pilot Junior Cycle Short Course on Cyber Security
13.05 Dr Niki Nearchou | Psychology
Developing a multisystemic framework of resilience for young people exposed to complex trauma
Dr Sarah Parlane Economics Private Practice in Public Hospitals: Should Senior Consultants Be Prioritized?
This paper proposes a normative analysis which investigates the optimal management of private practices within a public hospital. We capture the fact that private income supplementation induces consultants to attend to more patients, which reduces waiting lists and the public cost of healthcare. However, we show that it is optimal to cap the consultants’ private income, regardless of their seniority. When first-degree discrimination is possible, it is not clear whether the more productive (senior) consultants should receive a higher private income that their junior counterparts. We show that they are allowed to charge a higher private fee (and get a higher private income) when priority is given to shortening waiting lists. When discrimination is not possible, and consultants are offered the same set of contracts, junior consultants systematically get a lower private supplemental income when working alongside senior consultants. This is because the design of envy-free contracts enables senior consultants to extract rents and these rents increase with the private fee charged by their junior colleagues.
Assoc Prof
Barry Molloy
Archaeology
Environmental determinism at its best? Contributions from social science for understanding links between climate change, sustainable practices and cultural resilience in societies of the Bronze Age Carpathian Basin
Archaeology as a discipline provides long-term perspectives on the emergence, development and ultimately transformation / decline / collapse of past societies. This time-depth combined with cross-cultural research foci enables us to explore human cultural potential in diverse landscape, environmental and climatic settings. Partly in response to global challenges today, we increasingly engage with issues of sustainability, resilience, fragility and, in some cases failure, in responses to changing structuring factors shaping human choices. We have many past “laboratories” across the globe to observe the unfolding of change with varied outcomes. I address this through a case-study in the Carpathian Basin between 2000 and 1200 BC, where we have clear cycles of boom and bust in the ways people structured their resource management in a specific landscape. Engaging with foodways, climate action, responsible consumption, life on land and strong institutions, I aim to contextualise archaeological perspectives in a broader social science environment.
Karen Maye Education EDI in STEM: Changing mindsets and impacting sustainable futures in STEM: Focus on Girls in STEM
Supported by our website girlsinstem.ie and professional development investigating gender bias in the classroom, we tasked teachers and pupils to investigate Heroines in STEM: Past & present, local and international and to do that as an integral part of teaching the curriculum. Storytelling was advocated as the methodology for this project in order to access and appreciate the lives, experiences, impact, and contributions of women working in STEM and to inspire pupils to map their own STEM Journey. Pupils decided how they wanted to tell this story and we have seen an incredible variety of digital, theatrical and artistic storytelling.
Pupils connected with women working in STEM today via email, guest appearances via zoom, podcasts etc. and this enabled them to form not just knowledge of, but empathy with, these female role models. By exploring the stories of women in STEM and making an emotional bond, students became aware of the career opportunities that exist in STEM in Ireland and abroad and the contribution STEM makes to society and the students’ own lived experience.
This short talk will detail my research into the multiple forms and characteristics of extraction through digital media infrastructures during the “fourth industrial revolution” of smart, green tech. It will build on my research program into the environmental implications of data centres in Ireland to understand how these facilities and their corporate developers are impacting and enrolling a variety of industrial activities, infrastructures, and landscapes during the ostensible transition to green energy and other renewable systems. It will raise questions about three areas in particular: the growing entanglements of digital media and renewable energy infrastructures; privatised climate solutions being put forth by big tech companies with state and semi-state partners; and the consequences of global extractive supply chains for “critical minerals” and other material inputs for digital and renewable technologies. This talk will thus articulate challenges to industry-driven “sustainability,” and will conceptualise the geographical unevenness and inequalities behind who is truly bearing the costs of renewable transitions and who will benefit most from them under current regimes of tech capital.
Essential Maintenance Overdue: Ireland’s regulatory approach to Child Maintenance
Ireland’s outdated and ineffective regulation of child maintenance is currently under review, with prominent calls for the establishment of a state child maintenance agency and the implementation of a formula-based system for calculating payments.
This paper will outline the existing legal regime surrounding child maintenance in Ireland, highlighting its conceptual incoherence and associated practical and legal problems. The article will then critically examine the role taken by the state in this arena as manifested in the interaction between child maintenance and social welfare allowances. Finally, the paper will present a children’s rights-based approach to the regulation of maintenance which ensures legal coherence and equality across the three different legal arenas in which child maintenance payments are determined.
This paper calls for a coherent approach to child maintenance which takes into account the different contexts in which family maintenance issues are determined in order to ensure a sustainable system that promotes equality for child and social justice.
Unwanted Sexual Experiences, Mental Health Outcomes and Alcohol Use: What is the role of social support and coping strategies?
Unwanted sexual experiences are non-consensual and unwanted sexual acts, such as sexual harassment, sexual coercion, sexual assault and rape, and is a significant concern on college campuses. Previous research has shown that college students across Irish colleges do report high percentages unwanted sexual experiences (i.e., 29% female students, 10% of males and 28% of non-binary students) and students who reported an experience also report mental health impacts. However, no studies from Ireland have investigated the role of social support and coping strategies, which has implications for policy, practice and research.
Assoc Prof Orla Doyle Economics
Reducing the intergenerational transmission of poverty
Deprivation early in life has long-term consequences for both the individual and society. An increasing body of evidence finds that targeted, early interventions can reduce socioeconomic inequalities in children’s skills. Using a randomised trial, this study examines the impact of Preparing for Life, a pregnancy to age five home visiting and parenting programme, on outcomes in middle childhood. Providing the Preparing for Life programme to disadvantaged Irish families raises children’s cognitive scores by over half a standard deviation five years after the families have finished the intervention. The programme also raised the test scores of the high treatment group to closer to the national average, thus narrowing inequalities in school-age skills. Using insights from developmental psychology, early childhood care and education, and the economics of human development, this study demonstrates the potential for early intervention programmes to help break the intergenerational transmission of poverty.
Dr Maebh Harding Law Ms Megan Reynolds PsychologyInvestigating light framed architectures made from organic materials: Cultural Landscapes and Social Spaces (CLaSS)
From the prehistoric period to today, large numbers of people around the world make their houses from locally sourced, organic materials. These structures represent complex relationships between people (culture; society; knowledges), landscapes (places; ecologies), and materials (properties; sustainability), offering unique opportunities to consider interdependencies and intersubjectivities. Also, as intersections between local environment and the people that live and lived within them, these houses are important indicators of external pressures (i.e., climate change, mass migrations, pandemics, war).
The core objective of ClaSS is to bring together networks of researchers from inside and outside UCD with already established research collaborators from Archaeological Open-Air Museums (AOM) in Ireland, Britain, and continental Europe. Together, we aim to develop specific research strands and questions using ‘the House’ as a focal point to consider wider themes, including material/architectural sustainability, human health and well-being, causes and the mechanisms that drive change.
Voice of children for peace, justice, and strong institutions
Children and young people are more aware than ever before of the global issues we face as a society, from climate change and war to global inequality and social injustices. These are significantly complex and challenging issues to explore with children yet hearing their concerns and making sure their voice is at the core of decision-making is necessary for constructing peaceful, just and sustainable societies. This project showcases a study in collaboration with Children’s Rights Alliance and highlights methodological possibilities to amplify children’s voices in research, policy and practice about and for sustainability.
The Safe Learning Team includes: Dympna Devine, Seaneen Sloan, Ciaran Sugrue, Jennifer Symonds, Elena Samonova, Aimee Smith, Daniel Capistrano and Ryan Ó Giobúin.
Dr Silvia Gagliardi Law
Climate-induced migration and displacement through an intersectional, gender and conflict-sensitive perspective: Are Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) achievable?
I am interested in exploring the nexus between climate, migration and gender, with a specific interest in conflict settings. Research questions that I am interested in examining include: How can one achieve Sustainable Development Goals 5 (Gender Equality) and 10 (Reduced Inequalities) in the absence of 13 (Climate Action) and 16 (Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions)? Is it possible to make progress on SDGs simultaneously or does the achievement of some inevitably have to precede that of others? Taking the case study of Yemen, among others, which is exposed to a plethora of climate-change and conflictrelated challenges, I would like to examine how the latter interact with and compound each other to generate migration and displacement, using an intersectional gender perspective.
The effect of taxation and redistribution on incomes and inequality around the globe has been of high international interest; however, a detailed analysis of the changes in incomes, taxation and redistribution has previously been impossible. Using a detailed set of income tax calculators for countries around the globe, we are able to track the developments in incomes, the effect of taxation and how different assumptions on redistribution affect global inequality.
Concern Worldwide had been working in Sierra Leone since 1996 and developed the Safe Learning Model to address multiple dimensions of poverty with a particular focus on education. This presentation highlights the mixed methods evaluation undertaken by the School of Education of the Safe Learning Model implemented between 2017 and 2021 in the rural district of Tonkolili in northern Sierra Leone. The model aimed to improve access to quality education in a safe learning environment, and enhance wellbeing and gender equality in communities. Our findings show that the Safe learning Model has had positive impacts on basic literacy skills and wellbeing, and a link between the two, with particular effects for girls. However, the overall impact of the model has been challenged by the COVID-19 pandemic and related school closures. The research contributes to ongoing global debates around access to quality education and wellbeing in the context of extreme poverty.
Dr Gabriela Martinez Sainz Education
Nora Strecker Economics
This paper studies the effect of income tax progressivity on the disproportionate usage of publicly funded higher education. We develop a rational choice model showing that more progressive tax systems increase poorer households’ net fiscal benefit, making their children more likely to attend university. The model also shows that weakly progressive tax systems can determine a “perverse redistribution”, in which poorer households subsidize the higher education for richer households. With this model, we develop three empirically testable hypotheses, where
(i) countries with higher levels of progressivity have higher enrollment rate in higher education;
(ii) the parental income gradient in children’s higher education attendance is lower in countries with more progressive tax systems; and (iii) countries with more progressive tax systems have a lower perverse redistribution in higher education. The model also analyzes the role of local progressivity in higher education choice and redistribution.
Climate Change & Cohabitation: the Case of Military Industries
Philosophy
I will talk about the militarization of climate change and, parallel, of the responsibility of military industries in the climate crisis. From these extreme examples I will try to make clear that without a serious conception of “cohabitation” humans won’t be able to find the best path to avoid climate change to get worse. Earth is seen as something to preserve or to exploit while I might be more functional to see it for what it really is, that is, something we habit, that we live with. It is not a property but a place that we are familiar with. In this dialectic we can very likely get rid of the privileges connected to the wealth of the states and see the planet as something that is as alive as us, finished and cohabitated.
From these extreme examples I will try to make clear that without a serious conception of “cohabitation” humans won’t be able to find the best path to avoid climate change to get worse. Earth is seen as something to preserve or to exploit while I might be more functional to see it for what it really is, that is, something we habit, that we live with. It is not a property but a place that we are familiar with. In this dialectic we can very likely get rid of the privileges connected to the wealth of the states and see the planet as something that is as alive as us, finished and cohabitated.
The 21st century has faced with global societal, scientific and technological challenges. Global challenges, such as climate change, are characterised by a high level of uncertainty and risk. Future citizens should be adequately equipped with necessary skills to navigate the complexity of such issues. Utilising the affordances of learning in informal spaces, this study explores the use of a scenario-based teaching approach in order to facilitate students’ agency and global competencies. For this purpose, a teaching session focusing on possible positive and troubled scenarios regarding climate change was designed and delivered in a Museum of Natural History. Results indicated a statistically significant positive effect on students’ climate agency as well as a significant improvement of students’ perceived futures literacy. Moreover, students reported that they experienced positive emotions during the session. The results of the study highlight the pedagogical value of scenario-based teaching as a strategy that can support student agency and confidence in dealing with uncertainties. As a result, it offers valuable insights on effective teaching strategies aiming at students’ empowerment towards the complex challenges of the future.
Ms Maria Giulia Molinaro Vitale
Assoc Prof Meriel McClatchie
Dr Olga Ioannidou Education
Public housing agencies in the US have begun the process of state-led gentrification through contracts with private investors and developers to replace distressed public housing and to develop new mixed-income (mixed-tenure) mixed-use developments. Yet, these private investors have disproportionate power and often modify redevelopment to favor the market-rate units while receiving tax incentives, extremely low-cost, long-term land-leases, and government funds for demolition, construction, maintenance, and management. Within the process of demolition and construction, transitioned public housing residents toward modern living amenities and mixed-income arrangements—enforced through stricter economic barriers and divisions— which created a loss of community and negatively impacted residents’ mental and physical health. Our initial findings highlight how this state-led gentrification and regeneration process does not guarantee integration and higher quality of life, but rather can lead to degeneration, displacement, fragmented communities, and unhealthy residents. We argue that federal and local agencies should commit to identifying funding that ensures collaborative communitycentered plans from beginning to end.
Dr Amanda Byer LawSustainability
Sustainable societies require legal systems that are responsive to sustainability issues. This presentation will consider the role of law in achieving sustainability, particularly the use of the spatial justice paradigm to critique sustainability, as sustainability itself is culturally informed. How are locally unique people-place important to the achievement of equality, human flourishing and social justice? Based on ongoing research at the School of Law from an ERC funded project Property [In]justice. Postdoc will discuss the project and research on the role of property rights in sustainability, and PhD will discuss their research on a just transition, energy law and climate change in the Irish context.
Dr Laura Taylor Psychology
The persistence of intergroup conflicts around the world creates urgency for research on child development in such settings. Complementing the existing knowledge about internalizing and externalizing developmental outcomes, this talk shifts the focus to children’s prosocial behaviors, and more specifically, introduces the Developmental Peacebuilding Model (DPM; Taylor, 2020).
The DPM makes three main contributions. First, the DPM integrates a developmental intergroup framework and socio-ecological perspective, with a peacebuilding paradigm, to examine the target and type of children’s prosocial behavior in settings of intergroup conflict. Second, DPM outlines how children’s outgroup prosocial behaviors, which promote constructive change at different levels of the social ecology, can be understood as peacebuilding and fostering social cohesion. Third, the talk concludes with the DPM’s implications for research and global policy. This talk will discuss the DPM in light of the Helping Kids! research in five conflict-affected settings: Northern Ireland, Israel, Croatia, Kosovo and Republic of North Macedonia. This interdisciplinary work on youth peacebuilding, with a focus on policy related to the United Nation’s Youth, Peace, and Security (YPS) Agenda, has implications for Sustainable Development Goals 4 (education) and 16 (peace).
A key sustainable goal of the 2030 Agenda is to ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all. This goal aims not only to secure access to education but to work towards building inclusive and safe schools, having qualified teachers, eliminating all forms of discrimination in schools and making sure that education effectively contributes to children’s development and prepares them for the future. To effectively assess the progress Ireland has made towards this goal and the challenges that are still present, it is essential to understand how children experience school and their learning. The Children’s School Lives Study is a longitudinal cohort study of primary schooling in Ireland that explores the lived experiences of children. The CSL study uses a cross-sequential and mixed-methods design through a nationally representative sample of primary schools that represent the full spectrum of Irish school types in terms of size, urban/rural, socio-economic status, gender and school patronage.
The Children’s School Lives team includes Dympna Devine, Jennifer Symonds, Seaneen Sloan, Gabriel Martinez-Sainz, Mags Crean, Barbara Moore, Aisling Davies and Morten Greaves.
Dr
Day
Research findings on the economic social and environmental impacts of a 4 day week in Ireland.
This research considers the role of gender in transitioning to sustainable societies. The agricultural sector is of primary importance to the Irish economy. Increased efforts are being made to ‘green’ this sector, yet the share of female farmers has remained low and below the EU average. The share of female farmers has increased in recent years, yet barriers to gender equality and female farmer visibility and status remain. Greater research is needed to examine barriers to female farmers’ visibility, participation, and status and to considers the role of gender in the emerging low-carbon, bioeconomy as it applies to agriculture.
This research presents findings from the CreatEd study which explores the role of creativity in education for societal transformation. It presents findings on how educators understand and define creativity within their practices, and how this impacts and shapes the experiences of learners within our education system. Emergent from the data is the important role creativity plays in enabling more equitable and inclusive learning environments which respond to the complex challenges facing our education system now and into the future. Within this context the research identified creativity as a ‘process of change’ for schools, teacher and for our children, with broader implications across the continuum of our education system.
Assoc
Suzanne Egan Law
This research is a theoretical exploration of the potential dividends of incorporating law and legal knowledge in teaching (particularly about human rights) in schooling. Drawing on a range of theoretical frameworks, including Nussbaum’s Capablities Approach, Michael Young’s theory of powerful knowledge and research on epistemologies of ignorance, the key questions and aims of the research are to interrogate (i) How might knowledge of human rights law be valuable for teachers and students in education for sustainable societies (ii) How might legal knowledge about rights be incorporated into the curriculum?; and (iii) what reasons might account for the failure on the part of policy makers and educators to engage with legal knowledge about rights in schooling.
Assoc Prof Ainhoa Gonzalez
Geography
Measuring SDG Implementation at the Local Level: The Community SDG Dashboard Community-academic partnership for knowledge co-creation on sustainability initiatives and codevelopment of an online SDG monitoring toolkit.
This small-scale design-based (Brown, 1992; Joseph, 2004; Hall, 2020) qualitative study seeks to evaluate the design and implementation of a pilot Junior Cycle short course on cyber security, entitled Cyberwise [working title], that is being designed and implemented on a pilot basis by a cross-sectoral multi-disciplinary working group comprising members of the DECC, NCCA, CESI, Cyber Ireland and computer science and education academics. It will draw on in-depth interviews with the design and implementation team [n=10] along with participating school leaders [n=10] and teachers [n=10] across a range of subjects and school types that are involved in the pilot implementation of the short course in 2020. The study highlights the way in which the threat of cybercrime has provided an impetus for the development of democratic pedagogical partnerships (Farrell, 2021) in the enactment of cyber resilience education supported by collaborative engagement across a multi-disciplinary team underpinned by the notion of expansive learning.
Gusciute Sociology McGillicuddy Education Dr Rachel Farrell Education
Developing a multisystemic framework of resilience for young people exposed to complex trauma
This research aims to develop a resilience framework underlying multiple systems surrounding children and young people exposed to trauma. A system may be a community that has been impacted by a tsunami, the brain of child who was sexually abused, a country facing war, a forest damaged by fire. Resilience has been operationalised and studied from the lens of diverse disciplines and despite the varied definitions and approaches there has been always the same shared goal permeating any resilience research: to identify and understand processes and protective factors underpinning resilience of a system in the face of adversity so that these can be developed and enhanced to protect the system from future exposure. And while there has been significant progress in resilience empirical research in relation to trauma (of any kind), there remains the challenge of developing a comprehensive resilience framework. This project through applying a novel and synergistic methodological approach will investigate resilience as a multisystemic process that involves elements including but not limited to environmental, biological, social, psychological and organisational systems that interact and promote adaptation under stress.
