People

Professor Rob Kitchin – Principal Investigator

Rob is a professor in the Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute at Maynooth University, for which he was director 2002-2013, and 2021-2022. After studying at Lancaster University (BSc Geography), Leicester University (MSc GIS), and the University of Wales Swansea (PhD Geography), he took up a post in Queen’s University Belfast in 1996, moving to Maynooth University in 1998. He is principal investigator on the Data Stories project (funded by the European Research Council, 2022-2027) and was PI for the Building City Dashboards project (funded by Science Foundation Ireland, 2016-21),the Programmable City project (funded by the European Research Council, 2013-18), the Digital Repository of Ireland (2009-2017) and the All-Island Research Observatory (2005-2017). He was Chair of the Irish Social Sciences Platform 2007-2013.

Rhona Bradshaw – Research Support Officer

Rhona is the Data Stories project Research Project Manager. She has managed and coordinated in excess of 500 National and EU funded research projects including four European Research Council (ERC) Consolidator and Advanced awards. As Research and Financial Program Manager for Maynooth University Social Sciences Institute (MUSSI), Rhona is responsible for leading the financial management and coordination of all research projects within the Institute, ensuring that the research programme and operational functions are aligned with the Institute’s strategic objectives. Rhona works closely with our principal investigator Rob to manage relationships with key stakeholders and oversee compliance and audit functions. Prior to joining Maynooth University, Rhona worked for Bank of Ireland Business Banking and ING Wholesale Banking.

Dr Carla Kayanan – Research Lecturer

Carla is the research lecturer on the Data Stories team, splitting time between working with Maynooth students and managing case studies. She teaches Critical Data Studies at the graduate level and Urban Geography and Planning at the undergraduate level in the Department of Geography. Carla brings her doctoral training in planning and past research on Irish strategic planning policies to inform her work in Data Stories. In summer 2023, Carla collaborated with the team to chart the planning data ecosystem, completing a project for Ireland’s Local Government Management Authority. In 2024 she led a case study on Ireland’s Housing Need and Demand Assessment, work that closely involved tight engagement with artist-in-resident Joan Somers-Donnelly and learning from key public sector stakeholders responsible for setting development planning policies. In 2025, she will lead the Commodity Narratives case study with artists Ella Harris and Hannah Mumby. This case will inquire into real-estate narratives and how social/green housing is commodified by private interests.

Oliver Dawkins – Creative Technologist

Oliver is Creative Technologist on the Data Stories project. This role supports the technical aspects of research-creation by leading the development of interactive data stories which utilise spatial data and creative media like gaming technologies, mixed realities and data physicalisation. These technologies are use to communicate issues related to land use and development, planning, housing, vacancy, and urban infrastructure. Previously, Oliver supported technical development and championed open data for Ireland in his role as data and training coordinator on the Building City Dashboards project at the National Centre of Geocomputation (NCG) in Maynooth University. Oliver has also worked as research fellow at the UCL Energy Institute, research assistant for the AEC Production Control Room project at the UCL Connected Environments Lab, and as a researcher with the Intel Collaborative Research Institute (ICRI) for Urban IoT at the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park in London.

Dr Juliette Davret – Postdoc

Juliette has a doctorate in geography. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Maynooth as part of the ERC-funded Data Stories project. As part of her role in the Data Stories project, she is studying the flow of data on the Irish planning system. She is conducting two case studies with a private company and a citizens’ group to gain an in-depth understanding of how data relating to the planning system is created or used in Ireland. She studies power relations by exploring data capitalism and citizen participation in governance. The project’s research-creation approach has also led her to take an interest in artistic practices to investigate her objects of study, so she is also developing art-based methodologies in collaboration with artists to study data lifecycles and explore data narratives.

Dr Danielle Hynes – Postdoc

Danielle is an engaged social researcher with a background in both media and cultural studies, and urban studies. She is particularly interested in how ubiquitous datafication is impacting urban life, and the justice implications of this. As a post-doctoral researcher on the Data Stories project, Danielle is working alongside the team to examine how data is mobilised and used by various actors, focusing critical attention on Irish planning, property and housing data. Her doctoral research explored social justice in cities, and how imaginaries of the city are shaping the present and future of non-market housing, analysing the widespread influence of neoliberalism on the Australian social housing (for both residents and the structure of social housing) and identifying more just possibilities. Danielle has co-authored academic journal articles on topics including algorithmic governance, data justice and refusal, and smart policy in regional and rural Australia. She co-led the UNSW Allens Hub Data Justice Research network throughout 2021 and 2022, and is an affiliate member of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision Making and Society.

Dr Samuel Mutter – Postdoc

Sam is a postdoctoral researcher on the project, engaging with the project artists and stakeholders to produce data stories with and about housing and planning data. He holds a PhD in politics from Birkbeck, University of London. With a background in political and digital geographies of urban infrastructure, Sam is particularly interested in questions of housing-as-infrastructure, data mobilities, and data power.

Artists

Augustine O’Donoghue

Augustine O’Donoghue is a visual artist who works across diverse media, including photography, film, painting, sound, live performance, sculpture, installation, publications, and event-based work. Her work engages in a range of local and global socio-political issues. O’Donoghue has exhibited widely throughout Ireland and internationally. Her work has been presented in exhibitions across Ireland in venues such as The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Crawford Art Gallery, Project Art Centre, Limerick City Gallery of Art, Butler Gallery, and abroad in countries as diverse as China, Brazil, Canada, the USA, France, and the UK. To date she has created interdisciplinary projects with diverse communities, including refugees, scientists, students, migrant workers, academics, members of the travelling community, and social organisations across Ireland, Latin America, and Africa. O’Donoghue was co-director and founding member of the Wexford Documentary Film Festival (2009-2020) – an annual film festival screening films that highlight social, political, and environmental issues. To date, she has been commissioned to create public artworks for The Department of Education and Skills, Kerry County Council, and the University of Wales, Trinity St. David. She has been the recipient of various awards including the Eamon Kelly Award, the Victor Tracey Award, and numerous Arts Council of Ireland Awards.

Joan Somers Donnelly

Joan Somers Donnelly is an Irish artist currently based between Dublin and Brussels. Her practice is collaborative and moves between performance, visual art, writing and organising. Previous work includes a human choir that performed for cows; an interactive fantasy for theatre about the politics of housing in Dublin; a video essay about social spaces of gig economy workers that she made with her dad; and performances and other invitations for lamp posts, zoom calls, U-bahn stations and apartments. She is primarily concerned with examining existing social rules and structures and creating not-yet-existing ones, using performance and other live situations as a testing ground for experiments in different ways of relating. Much of her recent work has focused on the creation of frameworks for playful encounter, exchange, and co-creation, such as the group improvisation practice messing, the platform for collaboration You and Me, an Anger Club, and an interdisciplinary practice-sharing space for women and genderqueer artists called In practice(s). She is also an ensemble member of experimental music and performance group Kirkos as well as of Outlandish Theatre Platform. In 2023 Joan was the recipient of a Bursary Award from the Arts Council of Ireland, and she recently received an Arts Participation Project Award for HEADSONG / when the world shifts, an improvisation-based performance project that will take place in 2025 in collaboration with participants living with acquired brain injuries.

Mel Galley

Mel is an artist and writer who looks (mostly) at place, memory, and speculative futures. Through narrative and modelmaking, she builds speculative landscapes that hinge on the concept of palimpsests. A palimpsest here can refer to an object that bears visible traces of its earlier form, such as a manuscript written over. Janet Donohoe, in Remembering Places, applies this term to landscapes as a tool to think through the overlapping and layered nature of place. Mel uses this notion to research the city, ownership, housing, vacancy, and land. As part of the Data Stories project, she shared artworks and research in Allegories of the Metropolis at BETA Festival and the workshop on Vacancy, Occupation, and Commoning at Trinity College (both in 2024) and will show new work in Liquid Urbanities at the LAB Gallery in 2025, curated by Clara McSweeney. In 2023, Mel completed her MA in Art and Research Collaboration at IADT, continuing on to join the teaching staff as a tutor in digital fabrication and visualisation. She has shown and performed work across Ireland and the UK, including the LAB Gallery, Barnavave, UCC, and Signal Film & Media. Recent collaborative group projects include themes of queer ecologies (the Balcony Project at Project Arts Centre), art and the city (Fringe Was Here at Dublin Fringe), and archiving and forgetting (Memory, Loss at BASE). In 2020 Mel was awarded Young Cumbrian Artist of the Year and won second place in the practitioner category in the RIBA Eyeline Awards in 2021. Her artworks are held in the collections of the Bodleian Library (Oxford) and, more importantly, on the walls and bookshelves of strangers and friends.

Helen Shaw

Helen Shaw is a multi award-winning documentary maker whose recent work includes ‘We Only Want the Earth’, a collaborative broadcast/podcast project with the Contemporary Music Centre exploring how Irish composers are responding to the climate crisis, was awarded Gold at the Association of International Broadcasting (AIBs) Awards this November. She is a digital storyteller, created the housing project This Is Where We Live, and is developing a climate-just city model; imagining and envisioning how Dublin can reconcile its housing needs with its climate goals. With the Data Stories Project Helen’s work will draw on Dublin’s housing research and data to creatively tell a connected story bringing lived experience and planning together. Helen’s professional work identity is Athena Media and her storytelling projects include using original music, audio first person stories, poetry, archives, visual art, video and creative writing to create collaborative transmedia stories like Mother’s Blood, Sister Songs, Wilde Stories, The Family of Things, Cross Currents, Pantisocracy and Joyce’s Dublin. Helen holds a BA, MA and MSc Climate Change and is curating a creative community storytelling project in the peatland/wetland communities of Ireland’s Midlands, under the Just Transition Programme, called Tóchar Community Stories.

Sean Borodale

Sean Borodale works as an artist and writer, often using interdisciplinary, situated approaches. Output includes film, voice, staged sculptural installation, print, radio, poem-work, essay. Notes for an Atlas, a 370-page topographical poem written whilst walking around London, was adapted and directed in collaboration with actor Mark Rylance as Monument for a Witness for Southbank Centre, and raised questions about surveillance inside everyday acts of witness and the many crossing narrative paths which make the fleeting composite urban experience. Sean has four collections of poetry published with Jonathan Cape/Penguin, his debut Bee Journal being shortlisted for a Costa Books Award and TS Eliot Prize. Mighty Beast, a BBC Radio poem-doc feature about cattle markets won the Radio Academy Gold Award for Best Feature or Documentary. Other work includes a 2-year engagement with people of Liverpool on Ulysses Democracy: a city-wide recorded reading of James’ Joyce’s novel and a series of recorded conversations around themes of family archive, politics, ethnicity, racism, political resistance, now lodged as an audio archive with Liverpool Central Library. As inaugural writer-in-residence at the Portiuncula University Hospital at Ballinasloe, Sean established Sólás, a hospital-wide project exploring dreams and realities of solace with staff, nurses and patients over a period of 3 months. Sean’s poetry is internationally acclaimed, widely anthologised and features on a number of higher education/ third level teaching and research programmes in environment, situated writing, nature, ecology. His teaching includes the Slade School of Fine Art and Trinity College Dublin.

Ella Harris

Dr Ella Harris is a digital creative and creative researcher. She specialises in using interactive, digital arts based methods to investigate ‘crisis cultures’ (cultures that emerge from and narrativise crises), with a focus on housing crisis and urban precarity. Ella’s notable works include leading the participatory production of the interactive documentary The Lockdown Game, funded by a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship. In this project, Ella worked with a diverse group of Londoners across a series of online workshops to document their lockdown experiences and co-design the i-doc. This built on experiments with interactive documentary as method during Ella’s doctoral research. Funded by the AHRC, Ella created The Temporary City to examine how web-based documentary can help to interrogate imaginaries of urban space-time and their politics. Ella’s wider work with arts-based methods has included the production of board games, card decks and interactive, digital thinking tools. She is interested in how creative practice can activate collective thinking while holding space for difference. Ella has published sole author and collaborative books including Rebranding Precarity (Zed Books, 2020), Encountering the World with i-Docs (Bristol University Press, 2025), Reconstructing the American Dream (Intellect Press, 2025, with Mel Nowicki, Tim White and Cian Oba Smith) and The Growing Trend of Living Small (Routledge, 2022, with Mel Nowicki and Tim White).

Hannah Mumby

Hannah Mumby is an artist and creative facilitator. She specializes in using creative processes to surface hidden stories and disrupt conventional ways of making meaning. Hannah’s practice combines illustration and design with interactive experiences and facilitated exploratory workshops. These various practices explore participatory approaches storytelling, and can help groups find more playful, surprising ways to interact and collaborate with each other, while engaging with important topics and questions. As an illustrator, Hannah brings in psychoanalytically-informed approaches to anchor her practice in an attentiveness to the specificity of language. She works with techniques that illuminate subjective insights embedded in texts, whether that be stories from lived experience, or narrative concepts that are constructed to engage publics with research and data. As a trained facilitator, Hannah uses creativity as a tool to help people communicate across disciplines and meaningfully integrate different, conflicting perspectives and voices. This practice is grounded in the principles of co-production which emphasises tolerance and curiosity about the mess and complexity that can arise in collaborative projects, while foregrounding an engagement with power-sharing. Hannah works with a wide variety of clients and stakeholders, most often in participatory research projects across disciplines.

Data Stories

Telling stories about and with planning and property data