MARSSI is the all-island Marine Social Sciences Network Ireland
We welcome researchers, policy-makers and practitioners in the marine and coastal sector. If you are based on the island of Ireland and would like to make connections with people like you who are driving the field of marine social science on the island of Ireland, we would love to hear from you. MARSSI is a network for those just starting out to those at the top of their careers and we want to create a national community, supporting articulation and communication of the complex and complicated relationship between society and the sea.
To find out more, contact the MARSSI co-leaders: Ruth Brennan ([email protected]), Anne-Marie O’Hagan ([email protected]) and Heather Ritchie ([email protected])
Dr Ruth Brennan is a Senior Research Fellow in the School of Natural Sciences, Trinity College Dublin. Ruth is a marine social scientist, policy advisor and integration expert, specialising in marine environmental governance and transdisciplinary research. She is an experienced facilitator and communicator both through her research and her former career as a solicitor with a leading international law firm in London and Paris. Ruth’s research interests include environmental governance at a variety of scales, with a focus on society-environment relations, socio-cultural values, socioecological systems and social justice. Her research offers insights into different ways in which environmental spaces are conceptualised by users, managers and through human-environment interactions, how this relates to natural resource governance challenges and what it means for community engagement. Since 2008, Ruth has worked as a social scientist on ethnographies of coastal communities and at the arts-science-policy interface. Her research experience spans national and European projects and her research has been widely published. From 2018-2020, Ruth was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Individual Fellow and Principal Investigator for the CO-SUSTAIN project – Collaborative Sustainable Innovation: co-designing governance approaches for a sustainable and innovative small-scale fishing industry in the Irish islands. Ruth has worked at universities in Ireland, the UK and the Middle East and has served as an expert advisor to the Irish and Scottish Governments, most recently as a member of the Irish Government’s Expert Advisory Group on expending Ireland’s network of Marine Protected Areas. She is a member of the teaching team on the CHARM-EU Masters in Global Challenges for Sustainability and on the award-winning PhD course Transformative Research for Global Social-Environmental Challenges. Ruth is an Associate Research Fellow at the Trinity Centre for Environmental Humanities, Trinity College Dublin, a policy advisor to an Irish Member of the European Parliament, an external expert for the European Commission and a Board Member of the Maritime Area Regulatory Authority.
Dr Anne Marie O’Hagan is a Senior Research Fellow in the MaREI Centre at University College Cork. She is currently the Principal Investigator on the Marine Institute-funded CoCoMar project on Co-existence and Co-location in shared island Marine governance and previously led the Navigate project on Ocean Law and Marine Governance (2018-2023). Until 2018, she was the Coordinator of the SIMCelt project on supporting Implementation of MSP in the Celtic Seas with seven partners from Ireland, UK and France and has since coordinated its successor the SIMAtlantic project, which covered the Atlantic area. Prior to that she worked on the legal aspects of ocean energy development, planning and management systems for offshore energy devices and their environmental effects. She has also worked on a number of multidisciplinary projects focused on aquaculture and Maritime Spatial Planning, streamlining environmental assessment, and risk-based consenting for offshore consenting (RiCORE, SafeWAVE). Anne Marie represents MaREI on a number of working groups including the IEA’s Ocean Energy Systems Agreement (IEA-OES) Tasks on Environmental Impacts of Ocean Energy and also their Consenting Processes Task; and is the Honorary Secretary of the all-Ireland Marine Renewables Industry Association (MRIA). She is an invited member of the National Stakeholder Advisory Group on Marine Spatial Planning. In 2019 she was asked to chair the sub-group on law and governance of the Government’s Expert Advisory Group on expending Ireland’s network of Marine Protected Areas. She provides guest lectures to students on the LLM in Marine & Maritime Law (Law School, UCC) and the MSc in Marine Biology (School of BEES, UCC) and supervises both Masters and PhD students.
Dr Heather Ritchie was appointed Lecturer in Planning in the School of Natural and Built Environment (SNBE) in Queen’s University Belfast in May 2023. Prior to joining QUB Heather was a lecturer in Spatial Planning and Energy Policy in the Belfast School of Architecture and the Built Environment at Ulster University since 2009. She gained her undergraduate degree in Law from the University of Dundee (2:1, LLB Hons, 2004) and then went on to gain a distinction in MSc Environmental Planning at QUB (2005) and then her PhD (2006-2011) on Stakeholder Engagement in Marine Spatial Planning from QUB. She is the Programme Director for the MPLAN in European Planning and teaches planning law and regulation across both BSc and MSc programmes in Planning and Development. She is Athena Swan Co- Champion for SNBE. Her research is on Transboundary and Stakeholder Engagement in Marine Spatial Planning. She is currently involved in 2 funded research projects CoCoMar Heather has been working with government agencies to do training on MSP with the MSP Challenge board game. Heather is a chartered Town Planner with the Irish Planning Institute and is a member of their Marine Spatial Planning Committee. She is a Co-Secretariate of the Irish Sea Maritime Forum. She is also a member of the MSP Research Network.