NORTH

TOGETHER

SOUTH

ABOUT

Welcome to our project website, where we want to share information related to, and findings from, our project: TOGETHER All Island Prison-University Partnerships: A Participatory Action Research Framework for Learning Together & Inside-Out. This project is generously funded by the HEA North-South Research Funding Programme running from  September 2022 to September 2024. 

We are a team of  researchers from Queen's University Belfast and University College Cork, working with those with lived experience of the criminal justice system.

Our aim is to develop a user-led framework for university-prison education partnerships distinct to the island of Ireland context. TOGETHER will move beyond imported UK and US models of prison-university education, contributing to improved quality of education and learning on the island of Ireland and producing an all-island toolkit for convivial learning co-produced with prison based students and university based students. 

TOGETHER seeks to mobilise the learning of the two pioneering prison partnerships, UCC/Cork Prison Inside Out and QUB/Hydebank Learning Together,  in order to develop a joint all island curriculum that can build empathy and mutual understanding between diverse communities, providing a model of best practice for prison-university education partnerships across the island of Ireland and beyond.

KEY OBJECTIVES

To develop an all-island approach to prison-university education that can contribute to building empathy and mutual understanding between incarcerated and university students from different communities.

To move beyond imported UK/US models of prison-university education, developing a model of quality prison/university teaching and learning on the  island of Ireland, transferable across academic disciplines.

To facilitate incarcerated and university students in Cork and Belfast to enter into dialogue with each other across both project sites to collaboratively create a  public catalog of learning artifacts.

Establish the first all island research and practice network on island of Ireland prison-university partnerships.

Create policy recommendations to support policy makers at a university, prison and education level.

The TOGETHER project gratefully draws on the support of an Advisory Board, which includes the following members:

  • Joe Garrihy

  • Anne Costelloe 

  • Kevin Warner

  • Edel Cunningham

  • Sinead O’ Malley 

  • Ruth Armstrong

  • Michael McCusker

  • Maria O’Neill

  • Marianne Doherty