Kathleen Lynch

As both an academic and an activist, my work is guided by the belief that the purpose of scholarship and research is not just to understand the world but to change it for the good of all humanity. To this end, I played a lead role in establishing the UCD Equality Studies Centre in 1990 and the UCD School of Social Justice in 2005. The aim was to create safe academic spaces that would develop emancipatory teaching and research practices. Outside of the university, I have worked over many years to challenge inequalities and promote social justice with community groups, non-governmental organisations and statutory bodies, both nationally and internationally,

My latest book (2022) Care and Capitalism (Cambridge: Polity Press) explores how neoliberal capitalism morally endorses and institutionalizes forms of competitive self-interest that jettison social justice values, and how it is deeply antithetical to love, care and solidarity. One of the major aims of this book is to highlight the importance of affective justice in political life. It is reclaiming the language of love, care and solidarity intellectually so that it can inform politics and public discourse in ways that challenge the carelessness of capitalism. It is a follow up book to Affective Equality: love, care and injustice (2009) which has now been translated into Spanish and Korean.

I am working on a new book on education titled: A Critique of Human Capital and Carelessness in Education: From Capitalocentrism to Carecentrism. It will be published by Routledge in 2025 . It is a follow-on project to Care and Capitalism, and to New Managerialism in Education: Commercialization, Carelessness and Gender (2012, 2015, co-authored with Bernie Grummell and Dympna Devine).

I was appointed as a member of the Irish Human Rights and Equality Commission in 2020 for a five-year period.