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Steph Hanlon

Programme Director SPCS & Lecturer in Peace & Conflict Studies, Programme Coordinator Politics and Society

Biography

Steph Hanlon is the Programme Director for the BA (Honours) in Social, Political and Community Studies and Programme Coordinator for the HDip in Politics and Society. 

Steph lectures across several different modules of Politics and Social Sciences in Carlow College, including: Sociology, Social Policy, International Peace and Conflict Studies, Social movements, Activism and Social Change and Dissertation Seminar. 

She has extensive experience in the Irish electoral process which has included coordinating constitutional referendum campaigns and managing election campaigns at a local, national and European level. She delivers workshops on political education and works in a variety of non-governmental and community settings in Ireland and internationally. 

Research Interest

Steph is primarily interested in the relationship between citizenship and human rights, and the dialectic of inclusion and exclusion in the context of migration policy. 

Steph is currently undertaking a PhD in the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice in UCD, where her PhD topic is bordering practices, penal power and the regulation of marriage migration. Steph regularly presents in the areas of practitioner-led and activist-orientated social movement studies, the politics of peace and conflict, and political sociology.  

Other Research Interests 

  • Public Policy Analysis 
  • Feminism and Gender  
  • Irish and European Migration Policy 
  • Critical Linguistics, and Discourse Analysis 
  • Disinformation 

Publications

Conference Presentations 

Hanlon, S. (2023) Penal Contradictions in Postcolonial Ireland: Towards a Conceptual Framework for the Examination of New Peripheries of Punishment. Third International Conference ‘Punishment in Global Peripheries’. Global Criminal Justice Hub. Oxford Centre for Criminology and Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Mumbai, India (July, 2023). 

Hanlon, S. (2023) Time and Punishment: The Pre-emptive Turn in Marriage Migration Control. Migration and Societal Change Conference. Utrecht University. (June, 2023). 

Hanlon, S. (2023) Enabling Praxis in Practice: The Role of Academics in Educating, Agitating and Mobilising for Social and Political Change. In-person Presentation. Hope into Action: Social Sciences Impact Conference. University of Oxford Social Sciences Division (March, 2023). 

Hanlon, S. (2022) Locating the Gothic – Liminality and Temporal Citizenship in Contemporary Irish Migration Policy. Conference Paper. Haunted Hibernia: Conjuring the Contemporary Irish Gothic Conference. Carlow College St Patrick’s. (November, 2022). 

Hanlon, S. and Elwood, G. (2022) Harnessing Freirean Pedagogy: Agency and Empowerment in Irish Education from a Practitioner Perspective. Online Presentation. II Freire Conference: Building the bridge between popular education and university. Cambridge Latin American Research in Education Collective (CLAREC) and Universidade Emancipa (October, 2022). 

Hanlon, S. (2022) Brides and Borders: The Rhetoric of Exploitation in NGO Policy on Marriages of Convenience. Conference Paper. Newcastle University (September 2022) 

Hanlon, S. (2022) Policing Love: The Securitization of Marriage Migration in Europe – The Irish Perspective. Coordinating Special Workshop on Marriage, Pluralism and Human Rights in Europe (IVR World Congress. Dimitrie Cantemir Christian University. Bucharest, Romania. (July, 2022). 

Hanlon, S. (2022) The Anticipatory Criminalisation of Marriage Migration in Ireland. UCD Graduate and Postdoctoral Researchers Summer School. UCD College of Social Sciences and Law (May, 2022). 

 Hanlon, S. (2021) Neoliberal Individualism and Reflexivities of Discomfort. Conference Paper. Irish Working-Class Studies Conference. Liberty Hall, Dublin. (November, 2021). 

Hanlon, S. (2021) Future-Proofing the Nation. Victims and Villains in Irish Law and Policy on Marriages of Convenience. Legal Diversity and Regional Encounters: Plural Understandings of Law in Localised Contexts. Aleksanteri Institute, University of Helsinki. (October, 2021).  

 

Peer-Reviewed Book Chapters 

Pine, E., Haughton, M. and McAuliffe, M. (2021) ‘A Woman’s work is never . . . Speaking of IMELDA on Continuing Legacies of Resistance’, in Legacies of the Magdalen Laundries: Commemoration, Gender and Systems of Abuse, ed. by Emilie Pine, Miriam Haughton, and Mary McAuliffe, M. Co-authored as part of Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A. Manchester: Manchester University Press.  

Kinna, R. and Gordon, K. (2019) A Radical Feminist Diaspora: Speaking of IMELDA, Reproductive Justice and Ireland. in The Routledge Handbook of Radical Politics, ed. By Ruth Kinna and Uri Gordon. Co-authored as part of Speaking of I.M.E.L.D.A. Chapter 2. pp. 24-41. New York: Routledge.  

 

Peer-Reviewed Publications: 

Hanlon, S. (2021) Shifting Sands: Discursive Techniques Adopted by the Immigrant Council of Ireland on Marriages of Convenience, Special Edition of Discovering Discourses. TEANGA, Journal of the Irish Association for Applied Linguistics, 12, 47-71.  

 

Invited Presentations 

Hanlon, S. (2023) Sites of Contestation and Resistance Five Years On: Denying justice by delaying safe access zone legislation. In-person Presentation. Schools of Social and Political Sciences. Lincoln University of Lincoln. (June, 2023). 

Hanlon, S. (2023) Presentation to the Joint Committee on Children, Equality, Disability, Integration and Youth. Integration & Refugee Issues. 21/02/23. Available here. 

Hanlon, S. (2019) Civil Society Report submitted to the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination (CERD) for its Consideration of the Combined Fifth to Ninth Periodic Reports of Ireland, (CERD/C/IRL/5-9), November 2019. 

 

Conferences and Roundtables Organised 

The Class Politics of Repeal, Irish Working-Class Studies Conference. Roundtable. Liberty Hall, Dublin (November, 2021).  

Ireland 2019: Voices from Direct Provision and the State that we are in. Carlow College St. Patrick’s Public Lecture, Conference.  

 

Community Outreach 

  • National Convenor of Le Chéile Civil Society Coalition. 
  • Media Spokesperson for Epilepsy Ireland. 
  • Irish/European Ambassador for the No Hate Speech Movement. 

 

Qualifications

  • BA (Hons) Citizenship and Community Studies (Carlow College)
  • MSc Politics (University College Dublin)