fdelondras

Participatory Research and PhD Study: New Chapter

Last autumn I was very pleased to go to the University of Limerick and present at their excellent conference on methodologies in law. The conference was aimed at doctoral students and there were many in attendance. I presented on participatory research: what is it? Why would you do it? What are the benefits, and the risks, of engaging in this approach to research? The organisers are now finalising an edited book coming from the conference, and I have written up my presentation as a short chapter. The chapter does not purport to tell people how to go about particular means of doing participatory research. Rather, it aims to open doctoral students’ minds to the possible benefits of doing participatory research and to the sets of questions that one might usefully work through when undertaking participatory research. The full chapter in its pre-print mode is available here, and it ends:

Originality is, of course, the Holy Grail of doctoral students. That the candidate has made an original contribution to knowledge is, at core, the basic requirement for being awarded the degree for which you have studied for at least (and often far more than) three years. Originality is also achievable in many means: there is no one right way to establish it. Certainly a well-constructed, curious, intelligent research question that pushes the boundaries of existing knowledge is more or less essential, but so is how one pursues the fundamental task of the PhD: pursuing that question through a well designed research project. In doing that, your choice of methodological approach is important, and participatory research can be an excellent framework for the acquisition of original knowledge, which is then processed, considered, analyzed and marshaled into an argument that constitutes an original contribution to knowledge. Participatory research can lend a new kind of authority to assumed knowledge, present real world heterodoxies to doctrinal orthodoxy, enrich a set of findings, and greatly enhance the originality and practicability of research findings. However, all of this can only be achieved if two conditions are met: (i) the research enquiry justifies the methodology, and (ii) the researcher engages seriously and carefully with the process and the participants.

‘The Future of the ECtHR”: Seán Lester Lecture 2015

This evening I delivered the 9th Annual Seán Lester lecture of the Irish Society of International Law at St Michan’s Church, Dublin. The lecture, entitled “The Future of the European Court of Human Rights” outlines what I consider to be three key crises facing the Court: the crisis of legitimacy, the crisis of enforcement, and the crisis of dilution. All of these, I argued, are fundamentally crises of politics, rather than crises relating to the Court per se, thus indicating that what is key to the resolution of these crises and to securing the future of the Court is political change in Council of Europe states and across the CoE itself.

One of the great pleasures of preparing this lecture was that I learned much more about Seán Lester. For a country with a tendency to make much of our forebears (not a bad characteristic, I think), the low profile assigned to Seán Lester is quite surprising. He was High Commissioner of Danzig (under the League of Nations mandate, created in the Treaty of Versailles), Deputy Secretary General of the League of Nations, and then the final Secretary General of the League of Nations. Indeed, he is arguably better remembered in Poland (particularly Gdansk, formerly Danzig) than he is at home in Ireland, and it was thus a real honour to be invited to give this lecture.

The full text of the lecture (as prepared; not necessarily exactly as delivered!) is available here.

The Labour Party #repealthe8th Proposals: An Analysis

This is cross-posted from Human Rights in Ireland

Today the Labour Party became the second party to outline its plans for repeal of the 8th amendment and the possible legislation that would follow constitutional change (the first was the Green Party, whose proposals I analysed here). The proposals seem to have temporarily disappeared from the Labour page, but the Heads are uploaded here.

I must start this post by saying that, together with nine others (Mairead Enright, Vicky Convway, Mary Donnelly, Ruth Fletcher, Natalie McDonnell, Claire Murray, Sheelagh McGuinness, and Sorcha uí Chonnachtaigh) I was involved as an independent expert in the Labour Women Commission on Repeal of the 8th Amendment. This Commission comprised a political group, a medical group, and a legal group. Our job, as the legal group, was to propose a piece of law that might act as a “model” for post-amendment legislating, listening to the views of the medical experts and feeding into the political decision-making processes of the political group. Continue reading “The Labour Party #repealthe8th Proposals: An Analysis”

Passing knee-jerk laws in the wake of terrorist attacks will not make us safer

This is cross-posted from The Conversation

Terrorism generates fear – that is its purpose. Attacks serve to make us think twice before we leave the house, to sow suspicion and fear about neighbours and friends who are different to us in some way, to make us question the core of our liberal values. Paradoxically, terrorist attacks tend to unify and to divide at the same time. Just as sorrow and sympathy unite us, fear and anxiety divide us into “us” and “them”.

In these circumstances we are drawn, quite understandably, to demands for more security, more counter-terrorism, more laws. But is “more” the right answer? Certainly the history of legal responses to terrorism indicates that legislation produced rapidly in the wake of terrorist acts can be problematic and often fails to address the core problem. Continue reading “Passing knee-jerk laws in the wake of terrorist attacks will not make us safer”