Maynooth University School of Law and Criminology academic Dr Lynsey Black has been awarded a prestigious Irish Research Council (IRC) Starting Laureate worth €378,292. The IRC Laureate Awards aim to enhance frontier research in Irish universities, supporting exceptional researchers across all disciplines. Lynsey was one of four researchers at Maynooth University to receive Laureate funding (two at Starting level and two at Consolidator level). The CONSPACE project is affiliated with Maynooth University Social Science Institute (MUSSI).
The Award funds a four-year research project examining issues of criminal justice and security at the Northern Irish border. 'CONSPACE: Penal Nationalism and the Northern Ireland Border’ will foster a new understanding of the state and its limits, and in the post-Brexit era it represents a timely opportunity to reimagine both jurisdictional and conceptual parameters within criminology.
CONSPACE takes Northern Ireland’s border/s as an organising concept; it investigates successive phases of penal nationalism, each of which has been distinguished by the centrality of the border – a border which has been a locus of penality and crime control since its inception a century ago and which achieves greater urgency following the Brexit referendum of 2016. CONSPACE will approach its investigations under three research strands (Border Lives, Sovereignty, and Immigration), while making broader contribution to the discipline of criminology including in the reimagining of key theories and concepts of border criminology and penal nationalism. CONSPACE works from an explicitly interdisciplinary base, drawing on historical enquiry and sociological analysis of the contemporary world, encompassing extensive archival, documentary and participant research across a wide range of research areas. CONSPACE will see the recruitment of a PhD researcher for four years and a postdoctoral researcher for two years.
Lynsey joined Maynooth in 2018 and has published widely in the areas of gender and punishment, and the death penalty. Her monograph, Gender and Punishment in Ireland, was published in 2022 with Manchester University Press. In 2022-23, she is Acting Head of Criminology in the School.