Dr Veronica Crosbie is an Assistant Professor in Migration and Intercultural Studies in SALIS, Dublin City University. Other roles and responsibilities include Chair of the University of Sanctuary Ireland (UoSI) network. Crosbie was instrumental in establishing DCU as the first University of Sanctuary in Ireland in 2016, which entails creating a culture of welcome for asylum seekers and refugees, and more recently she has co-facilitated the establishment of NOMADS (Network of Migration and Diversity Studies) in DCU. In 2017, she co-hosted the colloquium Asylum Narratives and co-edited a special issue related to the theme for the journal Studies in Arts and Humanities, which was published in January 2019.

Dr Crosbie’s doctoral research focused on the development of capabilities for critical cosmopolitan citizenship in higher education. She have published on this theme in international peer-reviewed journals and edited book collections, as well as giving keynote lectures on the subject in South Africa, the UK and Spain. Over the course of the past three years, she have conducted participatory action research on integration through the arts with social enterprise BlueFire. More recently her focus has turned to applying capability approach theory to asylum and refugee contexts, most notably concerning Direct Provision in Ireland, again using participatory action research methodology. Currently she investigating the university of sanctuary model as a framework for supporting and developing socially just institutes of higher education. See more details here

Julie Daniel is a PhD candidate and facilitator of the The DCU MELLIE Programme’s Visual Voices, a collaborative storytelling project promoting equality, intercultural dialogue and social inclusion. Visual Voices adopts a photovoice methodology of sharing stories, recorded through image and text, to reflect the perspectives of everyone involved, DCU and Direct Provision participants alike. It tells the experiences of the individuals behind the labels of ‘migrant’, ‘refugee’, ‘asylum seeker’, ‘staff’ and ‘student’. The projects presented focus on the themes of hospitality and hope. Daniel is in the final stages of completing her PhD research which focuses on the concept and philosophy of hospitality, to find out more read the article by Daniel, Stories of Hospitality featured in the IMMA magazine. See more details here

Janice Hough is an assistant curator with the Engagement and Learning Department at IMMA with a primary role to programme IMMA’s Residency, which aims to expand the processes and visibility of creative production by directly engaging with practices which make, research and live at IMMA. Bok Gwai, by the artist Anthony Key, on exhibition alongside Visual Voices, was made by the artist whilst on residency and was subsequently bought for IMMA’s Collection. Recent IMMA projects by Janice include a residency partnership with Grizedale Arts which gathered a collective of artists working together to bring A Fair Land to IMMA’s iconic courtyard. Janice is a co-curator on IMMA’s current Collection exhibition Ghosts from the Recent Past, IMMA’s forthcoming IMMA Outdoors project Young Fossil with Forerunner, Mark Clare’s Ping Pong Diplomacy and 2021’s A Radical Plot Residency Programme. She has worked on partnerships with international residencies such as Light Works in Syracuse, Kooshk Residency in Tehran and MMCA Ghangdong Residency in South Korea. Janice is on the board of Leitrim Sculpture Centre, Manorhamilton.

Chair: Helen O’Donoghue is the Head of Engagement & Learning programme at IMMA and a core philosophy in all her work is to create opportunities for people to access and participate in arts and culture and has developed the programme since 1991 working with a curatorial team who are committed to creating access to the museum resources for all citizens. Recently she had led out on a programme to address the growing needs of people living with memory loss and dementia in a programme titled Azure and Art & Ageing. O’Donoghue is a recent Fulbright Research Fellow, where she spend three months embedded in the Education department at the MoMA in New York to learn about current archival strategies relating to their education programme, along with shadowing a new live programme -The Platform. This will inform her thinking for future programming and the new Collections and Learning Centre that is planned for IMMA. See more details here

IMMA presents The DCU MELLIE Programme’s Visual Voices alongside an IMMA Collection work Bok Gwai / White Ghost (2005) by Anthony Key. Through contrasting processes, both projects evoke themes of hospitality, identity and displacement to address common experiences of hope, belonging and wellbeing. Presented in the Project Spaces at IMMA until 02 Aug 2021, see more details here