Steering Committee

Susan is an Associate Professor in Development Practice in the Discipline of Geography, School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin. Her research interests are in international development ethics, policy, and practice, issues in governance and justice, human rights and climate change, and gender and social inclusion. She am the Principal Investigator of GEOFORMATIONS: the geographies of dynamic governance assemblages in development cooperation civil society spaces, funded by the European Research Council (ERC-2022-STG), and research group leader for the Climate Justice in Development Research Group. Susan is also Chair of the Research Ethics Committee, School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College; a member of the Department of Foreign Affairs Audit Committee (2021-2027); and a Scientific Committee Member of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network International Conference on Sustainable Development (ICSD since 2014). Previously, she served as Chair of Trinity International Development Initiative (2013-2020); UCC External Examiner for BSc in International Development (2019-2023); Chair of the Board of Trustees - Oxfam Ireland (2016-2023) & Board of Supervisors, Oxfam International (2018-2021); BISA Ethics and World Politics Co-conveyor (2019-2023) and steering committees of Future Earth Ireland and COALITION 2030.

Susan completed her Ph.D. at University College Dublin researching the politics and ethics of international assistance (2008-2012). Following completion of an MA in Politics and International Relations (1996) Susan spent several years teaching political theory and the philosophical foundations of human rights. She then spent ten years in industry working as a Manager with Accenture. Her research and teaching bring to bear almost thirty years of research and professional experience in academia and industry.

Brian is a qualified Chartered Accountant with over 25 years post qualification experience. He has worked entirely in the not for profit sector with extensive experience both nationally and overseas in Africa, Asia and Europe. He has a particular interest in the disability sector and holds a law degree from University College Cork. He is currently the Finance Manager for Christian Blind Mission Ireland.

Catherine Corcoran has worked in the development sector for over 30 years with in Ireland and Africa, at management, policy and community levels with CONCERN Worldwide and also in academia at the Technological University of the Shannon. She has led and advised organisations on strategic and community-led planning and provided leadership, research, technical support and advice within challenging contexts, developing and leading consortia and partnerships at an International level. Her PhD research focuses on community-led planning and resilience building.

Is a lectures in Social Science at ATU Sligo. She has a background in art and
community development, with three decades of experience in cross-community art projects. She has
a keen interest in the symbiotic relationship between the social and natural environment. In 2020
she established the Social Health & Community Engagement (SHaCE) Research Network, to explore
ways for local communities to sustainably support health and wellbeing. As part of this she
developed Ireland’s first HEA accredited Social Prescribing course which teaches students how to
address social issues such as loneliness through sustainable activities such as community gardening.
Natalie’s PhD (2017) and book (2019) explore the metaethical issues that emerge at the intersection
of competing fields of knowledge and how these can impact people’s embodied experiences. Her
current field of interest explores ways of synthesizing elements of design, social science and health to
critically evaluate social and political structures, with the aim of identifying how these systems can
be made fairer and more sustainable

Dr. Eilish Dillon is an Assistant Professor at the Maynooth University Department of International Development. Eilish has been actively engaged in global and development education in Ireland for over 30 years. She has 10 years second-level teaching experience and 20 years’ experience in programme design, curriculum development, co-ordination and teaching in higher education. She has been an active contributor to civil society global development and education projects during this time through work with Comhlámh, Amnesty International, Banúlacht and the Irish Development Education Association (IDEA). She completed doctoral research in adult and higher education and has published widely on global and development education and communications in peer reviewed journals and books has engaged in supporting ethical global development communications in Ireland for many years, acting as an advisor to Dóchas on its working groups on the Dóchas Code of Conduct on Images and Messages (2010 - 2016) and on its Worldview Research Project (2020 - 2021).

Connell Foley recently retired from Concern Worldwide, where he spent the last 16 years as Director of Strategy, Advocacy and Learning, leading a team comprising technical programme specialists, advocates and development educators.

He spearheaded the drive for programme quality, results and evidence and led the development of an action-research portfolio of programmes and engagement with researchers. 

He served on the Steering Committee of DSAI in its early years, served on the Dóchas Board and was Co-Chair of the Executive Committee of the Scaling Up Nutrition (SUN) Movement, a global movement aiming to reduce all forms of malnutrition, for three years leading up to his retirement.

Dr Sheila Long is a qualified social care worker and experienced educationalist with expertise in international children’s rights education, specialized in early childhood education and care, child participation and child protection and adult education with practice experience in Ireland and East Africa and 12 years’ experience in academia and early years teacher training. She has published in the area of children’s rights education and initial early years teacher education.

Keitumetse Mabole is a PhD student at Department & Adult & Community Education, Maynooth University with a passion to grow knowledge and skills that can benefit the wellbeing and livelihoods of our communities. A recipient of the Irish Research Council  Government of Ireland scholarship for his research ‘The impact of indigenous knowledge in enhancing lifelong learning amongst the marginalised communities: The case of the San communities in Botswana’, his research explores elements of indigenous knowledge that can inform more sustainable strategies of development from the Global South. The research incorporates an ecological, interdisciplinary approach, drawing in insights from adult education, sustainable development, and ecology. Keitumetse has14 years of experience working with different communities on Adult Education programmes in Botswana, in a role that involves refining and repositioning the education programmes to better meet the needs of adult learners and to empower them in a community-based sustainable manner. He holds a Masters in Educational Leadership from the Botswana Open University (Botswana) and  Bachelor of Arts In Education from the University of Pretoria ( South Africa). 

Patricia Wall is Programme Operations Lead, Regional Director - Great Lakes, East Africa, West Africa, & Bangladesh. Previously she has worked in Ireland setting up and managing the Training and Learning Programme for the Development Sector at the Kimmage Development Studies Centre, and for 25 years she worked in Africa including Namibia, The Gambia and Ethiopia, DRC and Cameroon in a variety of leadership roles. Patricia undertook primary research on community water resources in a rural community in Namibia as part of an MA programme in Geography and is currently undertaking further post graduate studies in Applied Social Science at UCC.

 Is lecturer in World Languages at University College Cork and author of Rwanda after Genocide: Gender, Identity and Posttraumatic Growth (Cambridge University Press 2018) and co-author, with Claver Irakoze, of Transmitting Memories in Rwanda: From a Survivor Parent to the next Generation (Brill, 2023). She is the co-editor of Representing Gender-Based Violence: Global Perspectives (Macmillan, 2023). Williamson Sinalo’s latest research focuses on multilingual news media narratives of infectious diseases (Covid and Mpox) across the African continent. She spent 2024-2025 in Malawi working in collaboration with the Malawian Ministry of Health and Malawi Institute of Journalism to organise the country’s first ever national Health Promotion conference, held in May 2025.

Professor Owen Worth is the Head of the Department of Politics and Public Administration at the University of Limerick. He works, teaches and publishes in the wide areas of International Political Economy and Global Politics and has published on class, hegemony, resistance, political movement from both the right and left and on International Relations (IR) theory. He is the author of 4 books, a co-editor of a number of collections and has published in several journals throughout his career. He has also been a visiting academic at a number of universities across Europe and North America and has sat and continues to sit on the board of a number of networks and academic committees. He is the Managing Editor of the long-standing journal Capital & Class, which is published by Sage.