Catherine Conlon

Biography

After completing a BA in Law, Sociology and Politics at NUI Galway 1990-1993 I took the advice of mentor Dr Anne Byrne and went to Women's Education, Research and Resource Centre (WERRC) in University College Dublin to undertake an MA in Women's Studies 1993-94. My minor dissertation was an innovative analysis of the first 100 Irish women referred by the Irish Family Planning Association to the British Pregnancy Advisory Service in an attempt to make Irish women's need for abortion services visible through research. In 1994 I joined the Department of Sociology, Trinity College Dublin as part of an interdisciplinary team commissioned by the Minister for Health to carry out a ground breaking, qualitative inquiry into Irish women's responses to pregnancy entitled 'Women and Crisis Pregnancy' (co-authored with Evelyn Mahon and Lucy Dillon, 1996). This project was a career changing experience for me providing unparalleled research training under Dr Evelyn Mahon and a unique insight into the place of social research in the policy making process as well as furthering my commitment to researching social and cultural conditions under which women encounter their fertile and sexual bodies. Since then I have gained extensive experience carrying out policy research in an academic setting progressing from Research Officer to Principal Investigator. Between 1999 and 2000 I crossed over into the policy terrain to serve as Research Officer at the National Council for Ageing and Older People but returned to academia in pursuit of the unique conditions for carrying out research it offers. I was delighted to return to WERRC in 2000 to work with both Ursula Barry and Ailbhe Smyth who mentored me in my role as Research Co-ordinator there until 2006. During that time I secured over 500,000euros of policy research commissions from diverse statutory bodies including the Crisis Pregnancy Agency, the Combat Poverty Agency and the Equality Authority. In 2006, my fascination with a research project carried out for the Crisis Pregnancy Agency/HSE West concerning women concealing pregnancy forged my decision to embark on a PhD. I received joint awards from UCD's Ad Astra Research Scholarship (2006-2010) and the Crisis Pregnancy Agency Doctoral Scholarship (2007-2010) for this research and was supervised, mentored and supported by Ursula Barry and Patricia Kennedy in this work. I continue to engage with the ontological, epistemological and theoretical learnings from my doctoral thesis, most recently through collaboration with Prof of Music Composition Evangelia Rigaki, TCD and Prof of Poetry and Creative Writing at Newcastle University W.N. Herbert to translate the research into Opera. In July 2011 I joined the School of Social Work and Social Policy TCD where I work with another inspiring mentor Prof Virpi Timonen. Between 2011 and 2013 we worked together on Changing Generations (in collaboration with Prof Tom Sharf and Dr Gemma Carney, NUI Galway) a study of intergenerational relations in Ireland using Constructivist Grounded Theory. Currently I am PI on a research project funded by the Crisis Pregnancy Programme exploring how parents communicate with their children aged 4-9 years about their bodies, sexuality. My extensive experience in policy research and qualitative methodologies makes me a social scientist engaged in innovative, interdisciplinary research, publishing in high impact peer reviewed outlets and developing courses based on the principles of research-led teaching. My work has generated interest and collaboration from renowned international feminist scholars including Prof Kathy Charmaz and Prof Patti Lather. My commitment to developing a social science of engagement is evident by a practice of quality, innovative empirical research disseminated through policy reports; conference, seminar and workshop papers targeting key stakeholders and; high impact public engagement in national print and broadcast media.

Research Interest

I have established a strong national and emerging international track record in empirical research on topics including: women's fertile bodies; socio-cultural surveillance of women's sexual and reproductive bodies, intergenerational relations and issues of social justice in relation to gender, poverty and migrant/ethnic status. My current research project concerns parents accounts of talking with their young children (aged 4-9) about sexuality, the body and growing up. This focus on 'sexual socialisation' from parent's perspectives continues my interest in sexual subjectivity, discourses of heterosexuality and sexuality and reproduction as practice. My research inquiries are undertaken under conditions of on-going interrogation of ontological, epistemological and methodological concerns raised by post-structuralist, post-humanist and 'post-qualitative' theories. This involves a social research inquiry praxis interrogating what constitutes as knowledge for social science/policy and what constitutes as data-for-knowledge.