Steph Hanlon

Steph is the Programme Director in Social, Political and Community Studies in Carlow College St. Patrick’s, where her teaching focuses on citizenship, migration and social policy. Within the field of Border Criminology, her research interests lie in the intersections of gender, sexuality, race and class in the context of punishment, citizenship and migration control. 

Steph holds a BA in Citizenship and Community Studies and an MSc in Politics. She has over a decade of experience in the community sector, specifically in the areas of supporting refugees and people seeking international protection, advocacy, anti-deportation and anti-racism. She is committed to transformative education and Freirean pedagogy in teaching practice.

Steph is undertaking her doctoral research in the School of Social Policy, Social Work and Social Justice in University College Dublin. Her research is interdisciplinary and utilizes mixed methods to examine the regulation of marriage migration, and in particular how anticipation and discretion interact in pre-emptive attempts to criminalise marriages of convenience in Ireland. Her research interests focus on the discursive construction of criminality, bordering practices, migration governance, transnational couples, spousal migration, marriages of convenience, punishment from the Irish perspective, criminalisation across time and space, and discretion and pre-emption in profiling practices.