I am an anthropologist of art, music, and performance who teaches popular music and social theory at Dundalk Institute of Technology. I received my PhD in social anthropology from Queen’s University Belfast in 2018, and held a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship at Dublin City University from 2019 to 2022. My current research examines private, extracurricular, fees-based rock and popular music schools, and their relationships with identity, globalization, and capitalism.

My first book, The Cracked Art World: Conflict Austerity, and Community Arts in Northern Ireland, was published in Berghahn’s Material Mediations series in 2022. I also edited a major international special issue on creative ethnography for the Irish Journal of Anthropology in 2019, and my creative ethnographic work has also appeared in Etnofoor. I am a member of an international, multilingual feminist anthropology collective whose collaborative work explores creative and alternative modes of writing; this group’s work has appeared in Feminist Anthropology and Borderlands. In addition to creative writing, I am beginning to explore the ethnographic possibilities of creative and collaborative songwriting and recording practices.

I  began practicing and teaching creative ethnographic writing while still a PhD student at Queen’s, and am especially interested in the possibilities of science fiction and literary fiction for creative practice. I am regularly invited to give guest lectures on ethnographic writing and creative ethnography, throughout Ireland and beyond, an in 2022, taught an international online workshop series on ethnographic poetry for the World Anthropological Union. At the foundation of my teaching praxis is the belief that creative ethnography, when thoughtfully and intentionally engaged, is a radical feminist and decolonial practice.