Research
The UCD School of Social Justice and its affiliated centres and networks (Equality Studies Research Centre, Women’s Studies Research Centre)and the Egalitarian World Initiative(EWI) and the UCD Network of Feminist and Gender Studies provide an intellectual home for a dynamic and strongly multidisciplinary research programme. It undertakes both theoretical and empirical research on issues of equality, gender, social justice, human rights and public policy. The originality of this work lies in its dialogical and democratic approach to both the development and dissemination of research in these fields. The work is guided by the activist tradition of the school and is strongly emancipatory in intent and practice, focusing on creating a just society and global order.
The School’s work is driven by the desire to make research accessible, and by the practice of linking feminist and egalitarian theory to action for social change. It is distinctive in balancing the production of academic knowledge with active responsibility towards civil society constituencies working for justice locally and globally. It has been engaged in joint research programmes with working class communities, women’s organisations, ethnic and racial minorities, as well as with disability rights and LGBT rights-based organisations. The research programmes have included a mixture of researcher-initiated and funded/commissioned research.
A new project launched by the School in 2012 is an on-line, scholarly, peer-reviewed, open-access interdisciplinary journal Gender, Sexuality & Feminism (GSF published by University of Michigan). The objective of Gender, Sexuality & Feminism is to publish original, theoretically innovative and methodologically diverse articles in the fields of gender studies, masculinities, sexualities and feminism.