About the Author: Dr. Caitríona Ní Laoire is Lecturer in Applied Social Studies, and Research Associate of the Institute for Social Sciences in the 21st Century, at University College Cork. Her research interests coalesce around the themes of migration/diaspora, childhood/youth, gender, equality, rurality and identities and the use of qualitative research methods such as life-narrative and children-centred methods. Her research has focused in particular on understanding young people's lives and identities within their socio-spatial contexts, contributing to in-depth understandings of the power relations inherent in and the multiple lived realities of being young in and of contemporary Ireland.
Between 2005 and 2009, she led a Marie Curie Excellence Team project on migrant children's experiences of moving to and living in 'Celtic Tiger' Ireland. As part of that project, she explored the experiences and identity processes of children who moved to Ireland with their return migrant parent(s), focusing in particular on family and peer dynamics, negotiations of inclusion/exclusion and identities, and on relationships with place. This was set within the context of intergenerational relations within families, in particular child-parent relations, and involved the use of children-centred research methods. Previously her research explored rural youth identities in the context of changing rural realities, with particular emphasis on gendered identities, rural masculinities, farming identities and rural outmigration.
She has published widely on these themes, including the monograph Childhood and Migration in Europe (co-authored with A. White, N. Tyrrell and F. Carpena-Méndez) and articles in journals including Childhood, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, Social and Cultural Geography, Children's Geographies, Identities, Irish Geography and Sociologia Ruralis.
Dr. Allen White is Research Officer for the College of Arts, Celtic Studies and Social Sciences, University College Cork. He has over 14 years experience lecturing and teaching undergraduate and postgraduate students in Ireland and the UK and has published over 20 peer-reviewed publications [including 10 articles, 3 co-authored/edited books, 3 co-edited special issues and 4 book chapters]. He has worked on successive externally funded research projects (funded by Marie Curie Actions and NORFACE) and has taken a leading role in developing research strategy and planning in national fora and contexts. He has played a central role developing supports and assisting colleagues preparing applications for funding that have successfully drawn down millions of euro in research funding. His research interests lie in exclusion of specific transnational groups (including migrant children and youth); and the changing social and political geographies of asylum, identity and citizenship within a globalised Ireland.
Tracey Skelton is Associate Professor of Human Geography in the Department of Geography at the National University of Singapore. She was previously Professor of Critical Geographies at the University of Loughborough in the UK. The essential elements of her research career focus on people who are socially, politically, and intellectually excluded. Her early work focused on the Caribbean and issues of gender and racial inequality, feminist geographies, and methodological analysis. She has contributed to culture and development debates, particularly through her longitudinal research on the island of Montserrat. Recently, A/P Skelton returned to this field of scholarship through research with volunteers and host organizations in Cambodia as part of a major comparative and collaborative project on development partnerships. She was the principal investigator of a major comparative urbanism research project on the livability, sustainability, and diversity of four Asian cities: Busan in South Korea, Hyderabad in India, Kunming in China, and Singapore.A/P Skelton is a recognized international leader in the subdiscipline of children's and young people's geographies. In particular, her work has served to challenge the invisibility and marginalization of young people from geographic academic research at the same time as it has demonstrated the rich and varied ways in which young people live their lives both spatially and temporally alongside, but differently from, adults. Her research work has been funded by key research institutions such as the Economic and Social Research Council and the Arts and Humanities Research Council of the UK; the Faculty of Arts and Social Science Academic Research Fund and the Global Asia Institute, both of the National University of Singapore; the Australian Research Council; and the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
A/P Skelton was a founding editorial board member of the international journal Children's Geographies and has been the Viewpoints Editor since 2005 and became the Commissioning Editor for Asia in 2010. She is on the editorial boards of the following journals: Geoforum, the Singapore Journal of Tropical Geography, Geography Compass, and ACME: International Journal of Critical Geographies (open access). She has coauthored 2 books, edited 3 collections, guest-edited 2 special journal issues, and published more than 70 journal articles and chapters. She is a passionate teacher and graduate supervisor. She is committed to the politics of research dissemination in accessible formats, in particular to enable the participants in her research projects to understand and recognize their coproduction of knowledge whether through specialized small-scale workshops, translation of reports into local languages, or production of audiovisual materials.
