Zoe
O'Reilly

Zoë is a researcher and visual ethnographer currently working as a postdoctoral researcher on ‘MobiliseCare’, a project funded by Taighde Eireann and led by Professor Mary Gilmartin. Zoë completed her PhD in 2013 with the Departments of Geography and Media in Maynooth University. Her thesis explored experiences of people living in the ‘Direct Provision’ system in Ireland, through a collaborative visual project with people living in the system. She is author of a book on this subject, entitled The In-Between Spaces of Asylum and Migration: a participatory visual approach (Palgrave 2020). She is a member of the Scottish Irish Migration Initiative, recently developing a project entitled ‘Building an Ethical Research Culture’ with colleagues in University College Dublin and the University of Edinburgh. She is also a member of the research team of UCD Earth Institute-funded project ‘IE-NARR’, mapping narratives of energy transition in Ireland. Previous work includes ‘Transcultural Research’, a collaboration with TU Dublin and Rua Red Gallery and Civic Theatre, Tallaght. Her research interests include ethnographies of displacement, migration, asylum and cultural diversity. She is interested in the continued overlaps between extractivist thinking which has resulted, on the one hand, in racism, slavery and colonisation, and, on the other, in the exploitation of land and resources. She also has a particular interest in visual, sense-based and collaborative methodologies. Much of her work has been through photography, but she has also collaborated with artists to use storytelling, theatre and map-making in exploring identity, place, culture and subjective experience. She is excited by collaboration – across disciplines, across art forms and across communities, and between academic and non-academic settings.