Democracy Initiatives

The Trinity Long Room Hub has been pioneering Arts and Humanities approaches to democracy research for almost a decade.  

Our democracy projects draw on the unique strengths and expertise of the Arts and Humanities: long-term perspectives, critical analysis, and imagination. We put questions related to identities, societies and cultures at the centre of our work, respond to the importance of lived experience, and recognise the role of the ‘human factor’ in technology, media communication, and political administration.  

Key initiatives to date include the CHCI-Mellon Funded Global Humanities Institute on the Crises of Democracy (2019), Community Engagement Praxis for Research in the Arts and Humanities (CEPRAH), Rethinking Democracy in an Age of Pandemic (2020), and the Democracy Forum (2021-24). The Trinity Long Room Hub also hosts the Trinity Centre for Resistance Studies and supports researchers involved in the Critical ChangeLab, an EU-funded democracy education project. Find out more below. 

We’re working out what the next phase of our democracy programme will be. Get in touch if you’re interested in collaborating. We’d love to hear from you. 

The Democracy Forum (2021-24)  

The Democracy Forum brought together Arts and Humanities researchers and media practitioners to interrogate questions relating to media, technology, and democracy. Working with media practitioners and civil society organisations, the Forum aimed to translate research into real-world practice and to reach new audiences.  

Podcast: The History of the Future (2023) 

How do we prepare for the future in an era when the only constant is change? In this series, Democracy Forum Media Fellow Mark Little and Coordinator Ellie Payne go on a journey along the interface of media, technology, and democracy. Each episode brings together leading Arts and Humanities researchers and media practitioners to discuss critical themes around how we navigate tomorrow. Listen now.

Media Fellow  

The Media Fellow programme was designed to bring a practitioner into the university environment to co-create innovative research and engagement initiatives. Mark Little was the Democracy Forum Media Fellow.  

Events  

The Forum hosted and co-hosted a number of lively public events around the theme of media and democracy. Highlights include:  

• Addressing 'Democracy, Governance and Education' Today (November 2023)  
• AI and music – a ‘history of the future’ conversation (September 2023) 
• Censorship, media, and conflict: the case of Northern Ireland panel discussion, co-hosted with Boston College (December 2022) 
•  Ukraine President Zelenskyy’s address to students in Ireland and post-broadcast discussion, co-hosted with TriSS (November 2022)  
• ‘Ukraine – changing how we bear witness to war’ panel discussion (April 2022)  
• Facebook whistle-blower, Frances Haugen in conversation with Jess Kelly (Newstalk), co-hosted with the School of Law’s Technologies, Law and Society Research Group  (March 2022)  
• 'New Year, New Media'?  virtual discussion (February 2022) 
• ‘Media for Humanity – a brief history of the future of journalism’  talk by Mark Little (September 2021)  
• ‘Revisiting the Fourth Estate: does the media still serve democracy?’ panel discussion (April 2021)  

CHCI-Mellon Global Humanities Institute (GHI) on the Crises of Democracy (2018-19) 

What is it in the world today that is making populist and authoritarian approaches to government more attractive than democracy?  This was the core question at the heart of our 18-month Global Humanities Institute funded by the Consortium of Humanities and Centres institutes and the A.W. Mellon Foundation involving five international partners and producing an open access multi-modal curriculum.

Rethinking Democracy in an Age of Pandemic (2020) 

A six-part series which ran across April and May 2020 exploring the impact of the pandemic on democracies worldwide organised in partnership with the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities at Columbia University. A free online curriculum and three podcast episodes were released in December 2020.

Related Initiatives

Critical ChangeLab (2023-26) 

Critical ChangeLab is an EU project funded under the Horizon Europe programme which aims to develop innovative, transdisciplinary, youth-led approaches to democracy and global citizenship education. The Trinity Long Room Hub is partnering with researchers from Trinity School of Education, who are part of a consortium using participatory action research (PAR) with civil society organisations in ten EU countries to create a new model of democratic pedagogy.  

Trinity Centre for Resistance Studies  

The Centre for Resistance Studies fosters interdisciplinary research in Trinity College Dublin in relation to the various types and forms of resistance and its cognate notions, including opposition, dissent, resilience, protest, and non-conformism. 

Community Engagement Praxis for Research in the Arts and Humanities (2021-22) 

Community Engagement Praxis for Research in the Arts and Humanities (CEPRAH) is a project led by the Trinity Long Room Hub in partnership with AONTAS and funded by an Irish Research Council New Foundations Grant (Strand 1a). An open access portfolio documenting the key findings of the CEPRAH project was launched on 15 June 2022.