This report covers the entirety of the project, completed over the course of 24 months (2018-2020) in the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities, School of Histories and Humanities at Trinity College Dublin. Throughout the entirety of the project, the emergent findings were contextualised and disseminated in written outputs, through public speaking and through a series of short visits to the European Parliament to attend PECH Committee meetings and to relaunch a European women in fisheries network. The research has been presented internally and externally at conferences, symposia, public lectures and to different disciplines: political ecology, cultural anthropology, human geography, physical geography, marine social science, environmental economics, ecological economics and environmental history. Further dissemination has continued since completion of the project. During the project, critical engagement with peers and mentors from different disciplines has been invaluable in interrogating and reframing the research questions and in developing and maturing the written and creative outputs of the work. Dissemination and exploitation of the results have included both popular science writing in well-subscribed fishing industry publications, submissions to several policy consultations on Ireland’s national marine planning process, advising the Irish Government as a member of the Expert Advisory Group on the expansion of marine protected areas, providing expert advice to the Irish Government’s sub-committee on fisheries, peer-reviewed publications (including a collection of research poetry) and a short animation on the project’s findings produced through an art-science collaboration. The primary output of the project is a detailed policy report with thirteen policy recommendations. The objective in this regard is to provide guidance towards equitable governance of Irish fisheries and coherent governance of the marine environment in the broader context of Ireland’s National Marine Planning process.
In pursuit of the training objectives implicit in the DoA, discipline-specific skills have been developed through close mentorship, participation in seminars, colloquia and policy forums, and guest-lecturing. To further professional development and to maximise dissemination impact, a number of courses focusing on women in leadership, advanced presentation skills and teaching and learning have also been completed. One tangible output of this has been the co-founding by the researcher of an Irish marine social sciences network for the island of Ireland designed to create a national community, supporting articulation and communication of the complex and complicated relationship between society and the sea by raising the profile of the marine social sciences and by connecting researchers, policy-makers and practitioners in the marine and coastal sector on the island of Ireland within a broader, international marine social sciences network. In 2020, the researcher was the recipient of a Trinity Research Excellence Award for profound engagement with the public.
