ASHA – Achieving Sustainable Housing Affordably
Abstract
Housing and sustainability are key national and global challenges facing our interconnected communities. In 2021, the residential sector was responsible for 11.4% of Ireland’s carbon emissions, highlighting the need for sustainability-focused adaptations to Ireland’s housing stock, and for sustainable housing usage. Housing's sustainability problem is further compounded by the costs of sustainability adaptations, which are layered upon existing high and unequally distributed housing costs.
Legal protections for property rights, and other schemes of legal regulation, constrain the policy space, raising questions about how much state intervention is permissible in respect of private housing, and who should bear the cost of sustainability adaptations. Social and cultural attitudes influence how receptive individuals and communities are to the sustainability agenda, and to adopting cutting-edge technical and material solutions. These issues create a complicated, multi-disciplinary problem that is of pressing social concern, centred around a deceptively simple question: how do we develop and use housing in a way that is both sustainable and affordable? Problem-solving in housing scholarship and practice tends to develop technical solutions within particular skills-areas, neglecting crucial interdisciplinary dynamics: for example, engineers considering retrofitting solutions in isolation from their planning implications. Such siloed approaches undermine the operational feasibility of emerging solutions and obscure necessary systemic changes.
The Achieving Sustainable Housing Affordably (ASHA) research project adopts an interdisciplinary approach to answering the core question of how to transition to sustainable housing in a way that fairly distributes costs and benefits, ensures just procedures for decision making, and considers the need for restorative justice within and beyond communities. It will answer that question in an interconnected way using skills from engineering, law, and geography to develop technical solutions that enhance housing sustainability while respecting legal parameters for policy making, as well as the social and cultural attitudes and experiences that determine the real-world reception of such solutions. That social and cultural dimension demands greater engagement with housing stakeholders in policy formulation, to better understand their financial appetite and social capacity for change. Accordingly, each ASHA project includes consultative and deliberative dimensions, as well as an emphasis on dissemination of results to stakeholders.
In sum, ASHA will develop a pathway for mediating between affordability and sustainability in housing in a just manner, built on the mutual influence of innovative technical solutions, legal conceptions of property, growth distribution impacts, and social and behavioural aspects of sustainable housing. Figure 1 in Section 1 illustrates ASHA’s overall interdisciplinary approach.
Improving outcomes for children with cerebral palsy
Abstract
Cerebral palsy (CP) is a childhood onset condition that is caused by an injury to the brain early
in development. This leads to varying degrees of difficulty with movements, causing activity
limitations and difficulties participating in life areas.
We know that adults with CP are generally
less likely to be in employment or romantic relationships, have lower quality of life scores and
to have more associated conditions. People with CP have the same social and economic rights
as others yet there is inequity. International sustainable developmental goals of Good Health
and Wellbeing (G3) and Reduced Inequalities (G10) and the Trinity social inclusion and
equality goals guide the project to work towards increasing outcomes for people with CP. In
order to do this, we are starting in childhood and we are combining how we try to solve these
challenges by involving many disciplines including science, medicine and especially people
with this experience.Movement is often a challenge which affects many areas of peoples’ lives and treatments such
as surgery require a detailed assessment. This often involves a motion analysis in a laboratory
which is expensive, can be far from the persons home and with long waiting lists.
The first part
of this project involves developing a software programme which would allow this analysis to
happen in a person’s natural environment and could be done on one smart phone. Adults
with CP can have a number of other conditions but we know less about how this looks in
childhood. By knowing this we could intervene earlier to limit or prevent difficulties in
adulthood.
The second part of the project is a clinical assessment which will tell us if we can
already see these conditions in childhood and look at other areas such as pain and quality of
life. Sleep is important to everyone’s health and wellbeing but we know that more than one
child in seven with CP has difficulty with this.
The third part of the project will look in detail at
sleep influencers and asks parents and children their views and will create a sleep intervention.
While we know that many areas of how children’s body functions, activity and participation
can be affected by CP we have not looked at how these relate to each other particularly when
including parental priorities.
The fourth study will create a model to look at health and
wellbeing indicators in children.
Sports related concussions and legal implications for the 21st century
Abstract
It is now apparent that concussion in sport is a major problem that needs to be addressed at both a medical and societal level. While there have been major advances in our understanding of the underlying cause of concussive brain injuries, the long term consequences of repetitive head injuries in the context of combat and collision sports is still not clear. Added to this, there are now numerous on-going legal cases being taken by ex-professional rugby players seeking redress for the perceived trauma they were exposed to. Therefore, there are 2 critical, and fascinating problems emerging.- We still do not have a clear understanding of the long term
consequences of repetitive head trauma in rugby and
- How will the legal system keep pace with fast evolving scientific and clinical understanding?
Here, we will combine the unique expertise in TCD to create a PhD training program that will allow for the first ever project aimed at bridging the key scientific, clinical and legal problems the area faces. We will embed the PhD students from law, biomedical sciences and clinical medicine in immersive and continuous research meetings so they can get an in-depth understanding of the complexities of basic and clinical research related to sports concussion and key legal issues that need to be resolved in the field. It is envisioned that this program of research will serve 2 major societal purposes. It will improve our understanding of concussive brain injuries in general while also ensuring the most pertinent and up to date research data can be understood in the context of the Irish legal system.
The PhD students who graduate from this program will have the most unique perspective on the societal and legal implications of their research. They will be equipped with knowledge that will allow them to ultimately carve out their own independent careers. Added to this, we believe this program will form the blueprint for similar projects aimed at bridging the medico-legal landscape and will pave the way for significant multi/trans-disciplinary funding in the short term..
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