Two UCD researchers have been awarded European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator Grants, of €2 million each, to pursue groundbreaking research in areas of history and gender studies.

ERC Consolidator Grants are awarded to help excellent scientists, who have 7 to 12 years’ experience after their PhDs, to pursue their most promising ideas. Worth €657 million in total, the funding will go to 321 researchers across Europe, eight of these recipients are from Irish institutions. The grants will create around 1950 jobs for postdoctoral fellows, PhD students, and other staff at the host institutions.

Mariya Gabriel, European Commissioner for Innovation, Research, Culture, Education and Youth, said: “321 scientists and scholars will receive some €657 million to conduct pioneering research. Their discoveries lay the groundwork for innovation and, ultimately, for growth and economic competitiveness in Europe.”

President of the ERC Professor Maria Leptin said: “ERC Consolidator grants support researchers at a crucial time of their careers, strengthening their independence, reinforcing their teams and helping them establish themselves as leaders in their fields. And this backing above all gives them a chance to pursue their scientific dreams.”

Dr Irial Glynn, Assistant Professor at UCD School of History, will receive funding for his study entitled ‘SOS’. This project will investigate the history of boat refugees since the 1940s, asking who hinders and who helps asylum seekers on their journeys, and why.

In 2015, over one million refugees sailed across the Mediterranean, this was not the first time that people took to the seas in search of asylum. During the 1940s, Jewish boat refugees voyaged across the Mediterranean; in the 1970s and 1980s, Vietnamese boat people traversed the South China Sea; in the 1980s and 1990s, Cubans and Haitians tried to navigate the Caribbean to reach the US; and in the 1990s and 2000s, boat refugees sailed across the Indian Ocean, the Gulf of Aden and the Mediterranean in an attempt to reach Australia, Yemen, and Europe. Yet references to the past are almost non-existent in contemporary discussions. 

Dr Glynn said: “Anyone following the news lately knows that the issue of boat refugees is an urgent topic. This ERC Consolidator grant will make it possible to compare the journeys, experiences and reception of boat refugees since the 1940s. The project will draw on oral and written testimonies of boat refugees to articulate their experience and to place them at the heart of the analysis. States still dominate histories of refugees. ‘SOS’ will challenge this by humanising the refugee journey and, in doing so, show how messy and complicated refugeehood was and still is.”

The study will address several key questions, for instance, how did ethnicity, class, gender, religion, sexuality and capital influence what took place? The team will interview refugees and officials, and examine archives and media coverage, to produce the first global history of boat refugees. 

Professor Aisling Swaine, Professor of Gender Studies at UCD School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice received €2 million in funding to lead ‘GENCOERCTRL’, a project examining gender, conflict and coercive control. To date, coercive control has received little scholarly attention as a lens to understand women’s experiences of conflict. Professor Swaine’s project will address this gap. 

By developing new methodological approaches to understanding this gendered phenomenon and speaking with women across Colombia, Northern Ireland and Sri Lanka, ‘GENCOERCTRL’ will uncover the lived experience and nature of coercive control in conflict settings. 

Professor Swaine said: “This funding will push the boundaries of what we, as researchers, currently understand to characterise women’s experiences of armed conflict. There is so much more to conflict-related gendered harm than physical violence. This grant will allow us to uncover the more subtle ways that armed conflict dynamics impact women. By centering women’s own articulation of their lived experience of conflict, the project will advance not just better understanding of gendered harm, but also pathways towards better responses.”

Learn more about the ERC Consolidator grants and recipients here:  https://erc.europa.eu/news-events/news/erc-2022-consolidator-grants-results