The Organising Committee is made up of working-class and feminist scholars currently researching and teaching in Ireland and overseas.
Emma Penney
Lead Organiser
Emma is from Dublin, lived in Wicklow a while, and is now back in Dublin. She is currently working to build the field of Irish Working-Class Studies. She is an IRC postdoctoral researcher at UCC where she is writing her monograph. She is also an at-large steering committee member at the Working-Class Studies Association (WCSA) and works closely with colleagues in the United States. She recently received a large grant from the Arts Council of Ireland to create the first working-class community writing archive. Her focus now is on organising Ireland’s first working-class studies conference and on creating an archive of writing published in community groups in Ireland over the past 50 years. This digital archive is a collaboration with the poet Sophie Meehan and will bring a lost or otherwise hidden body of literature to light.
Dyuti Chakravarty
Conference Organiser
Dyuti Chakravarty is a doctoral student in the School of Sociology, University College Dublin. Her thesis entitled “Break the Cage”: The Politics of Respectability and Desire through a Comparative Study of Women’s Movements for Bodily Autonomy in India and Ireland, explores the transnational dialogues between Indian and Irish feminist scholarships. It promises important and unique innovations through an engagement with the intertwining histories and transnational empirical comparisons of students’ movements for bodily autonomy in both countries. She is currently working as a Research Assistant on a WHO funded project on access to abortion services in Ireland.
Amanda-Rose O’Halloran
UK based Organiser
Amanda-Rose O’Halloran is a sociologist from Drimnagh, Dublin 12. In 2015 she returned to formalised education and completed her B.A (Hons) in sociology at Nottingham Trent University (NTU) following a move from Ireland to the UK. She was active in the successful movement to repeal the 8th amendment of the Irish constitution which banned abortion care and was a cofounder of ‘East Midlands Together For Yes’. She has an MPhil in the Sociology of Reproduction from the University of Cambridge. Her PhD is also at the University of Cambridge and is funded by The European Social Research Council’s Doctoral Training Partnership. She is supervised by Dr Lucy van de Wiel and Professor Sarah Franklin. Her work takes a postcolonial perspective examining the affect of shame on people from Ireland who have travelled for abortion care.
Clodagh Troelstra Heffernan
Graduate Student Member
Clodagh is a working-class scholar from Wicklow, Ireland. She is currently enrolled in a graduate programme entitled MA English: Irish Writing and Film at University College Cork. She contributed to grassroots struggle for the emancipation of women and the working-class in Ireland and abroad and is interested in listening and contributing to discussion of how class impacts upon the experiences of the working-class in academia. She takes a Marxist view of history in her approach to academic work and is particularly interested in the representation of the Irish working-class in contemporary fiction, film, and television.
Working-Class Studies 