Position research at the heart of Trinity: Lorraine Leeson, Nina Shiel and the TORCH project
CHARM was established in 2020. Its member universities across Europe - University of Barcelona, Trinity College Dublin, Utrecht University, the University of Montpellier and Eötvös Loránd University Budapest - work together to design and create a new university model of good practice to increase the quality, international competitiveness and attractiveness of the European Higher Education landscape. The consortium decided that they wanted to put together a proposal for a sister project, TORCH, that would focus on research and integrity. TORCH (Transforming Open Responsible Research and Innovation through CHARM) is a three-year programme that began in 2021.
Leeson (pictured left) was serving as Associate Dean of Research when the TORCH project was established, and the then Vice Provost Jürgen Barkhoff invited Leeson to take on the role of project director role, with responsibilities focusing on research integrity. Due to her original role as one of the first sign language interpreters in Ireland, she “had a very strong affinity for European projects, because I’ve seen how transformational they are.” After a Masters and PhD in the linguistics of ISL, she set up the Trinity Centre for Deaf Studies, eventually becoming the centre’s director of research. When she accepted the role of project director she had also been engaging closely with the Trinity Library on a process of “opening up scholarship in Trinity on issues of inclusion, taking a transdisciplinary and multidisciplinary perspective.”
Leeson explains that TORCH was established because they were aware that there would be a gap if CHARM only focused on the teaching and learning side. “We wanted evidence that was informed and research-led. But we didn't have a parallel research arm, which was seeking to be equally cutting-edge and equally informing the agenda as much as being informed by it. Thankfully the European Commission agreed, and gave us three years to try and build up a framework for operation around the research piece for a pan-European university.”
Meanwhile, Shiel’s background and interest in research ethics, interdisciplinary research and gender equality led to her work as Research Fellow on CHARM-EU. After receiving a BA and MLitt in Trinity’s Department of Classics, under the supervision of Professor Christine Morris, she attended DCU for an MA and PhD in comparative literature, focusing on topics such as gender, equality and diversity. Her Irish Research Council-supported PhD was her first experience of funding, and was instructive in showing her “what it means to be funded by an institution, and what bearing that has on your own research.” She then moved into research support roles, including a position on the DCU Research Ethics Committee and Interdisciplinary Research Development Officer at the University Lancaster. She was working as a research programme officer in the Trinity Long Room Hub and had already secured the Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions initiative Human+ when she joined the TORCH programme in 2021. With TORCH, she notes, “it was really nice to be able to bring the various aspects of my research career together and work on something that was a European project, making a difference to not only our own institution, but to all the other institutions in the Alliance.” (Nina is pictured right holding her award, alongside Prof. Brian Broderick and Dr Siobhán O'Callaghan.)
Shiel and Leeson worked together closely on TORCH, with Leeson highlighting that “Nina has been front and centre in terms of driving this work forward. The different roles that we've had, the different sort of academic and professional roles have really helped us to come together and work collaboratively in TORCH, both in terms of learning from our European colleagues and then moving back into the work that we're doing in college.”
The TORCH project began in January 2021, during the Covid pandemic lockdowns in Europe, when much of their international coordination had to be conducted over Zoom. Conor Spillane, their project manager, was hugely influential in running everything and “keeping spirits high.” At this time, the European Commission was also starting to put in place new requirements for research funding, which included gender equality goals. The next 18 months, then, saw the group exploring what universities needed to achieve these goals. They spent this time forging relationships across the alliance and beyond it, including conducting conversations with another pan-European group, IcARUS, to explore gender equality plans. This work enabled TORCH to advance in their understanding and focus more on intersectionality, meaning they are currently at the forefront of documenting institutional approaches from a research perspective.
In the second half of the project, in comparison, they moved their work back to campus: this enabled them to have more formal open forum meetings. In 2022 they were in Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, and in 2023 there was a hybrid even in Trinity in March, and another again in Budapest in October.
Shiel explains that TORCH’s aim in the first phase was to “see who's doing what and explore how various support areas can be connected. And maybe help them be inspired and informed by other practices elsewhere.” Rather than an exercise in judgement, they wanted to increase awareness across the alliance. This enabled them to work on ways to improve supports, “not just within one institution, but across the whole alliance.” Now, in their second phase, they are putting all that material together: they’re developing research policies and strategies for the alliance, which CHARM is intending to address. “We have been running pilots during this year in each institution. And we have a number of action plans also developed. We would hope to see these take place in the future, but obviously all of these things are subject to funding.”
Throughout the project, Leeson and Shiel worked with an extensive team, including people from the library, people from communications and the Office of the Dean of Research, and academics from various areas. There was also a lot of overlap between the management teams in TORCH and in CHARM; this was ultimately helpful because it meant that the two projects were talking to each other. Shiel points out that “one of the difficulties we had to begin with is that, because we are funded by two different schemes, we had to make sure that activities and expenditure were kept separate. That was something of a balancing act. But I think that we were able to use that as a positive thing, because we had to learn how to integrate these separate things within both projects and talk to each other. Even between those people who were not involved with both. So I think that it became a strength more than anything else in the end.”
Alongside showcasing their work at the 2023 European Researchers’ Night event in Trinity, Leeson and Shiel held a Trinity community event on Gender and Sex in Research and Innovation on St Brigid’s Day in February 2023. Hosted by the Office of the Associate Vice Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, in collaboration with the Trinity Long Room Hub Arts and Humanities Research Institute and START European Researchers’ Night, its aim was to share awareness, knowledge and experiences, for which they brought together a panel of interdisciplinary researchers. “One of the things that we've been doing was to map various practices relating to EDI and gender in different institutions,” Shiel explains. In order to do this, they teamed up with Doireann Wallace from the Research Development Office and held a two-hour session on “what it means to be gender aware in your research, and what it means when funders talk about it, for instance, in terms of European Commission requirements.”
Leeson adds that, “it was wonderful to have that pan-European view that Nina could present, based on TORCH research. We had colleagues from across facilities who talked about some of their own work. I was very struck by Prof. Cliona O’Farrelly who has done a lot of work in immunology, and Prof. Brian Caulfield who spoke about men’s and women’s experiences engaging with the built environment and the transport systems in different ways. Professor Gillian Wylie from the School of Religion talking about work with people in refugee and other migrant contexts. They were talking about what the European Commission expects, what the Irish research funders expect. As well as what it looks like from the lens of an individual researcher, thinking about inclusivity.” It was experiences like this, she notes, that they built into Trinity’s successful Athena Swan Silver applications in 2023.
Summing up their thoughts on their time with TORCH, they both focus on community. Shiel highlights the huge number of collaborators they have across the college, specifically from the Research Development Office, whose interests often align with TORCH in supporting their institution to “produce as good research as possible by making sure that researchers feel as comfortable and supported as possible.” Both of them add their appreciation for Professor Brian Broderick, who stepped in to take over the second half of the project when Leeson’s term ended, as well as TORCH’s research fellow, Dr Siobhán O’Callaghan, who came on board for the last eight months. Leeson notes that “We had colleagues from right across the institution coming together, whose paths wouldn’t have crossed otherwise.” In her current role as Associate Vice Provost for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion, the TORCH project has helped her to “think locally:” everything they learn they “bring it back to the university, and make sure we’re embedding the footprint of TORCH in everything we’re doing locally.”
Looking back at their experiences, it is evident that Leeson and Shiel have positioned research at the heart of Trinity, and in doing so have set the stage for further and bigger opportunities. As Shiels concludes, “a lot of us feel that TORCH is an indication of something that could happen at a larger scale. When different offices in different departments start talking to each other, we really get the sense that we're all working towards the same aims.”
“And it was TORCH that shone a light on that,” Leeson laughs.
- Article written by Dr Sarah Cullen