Aoiffe has 22 years’ experience of working at the humanitarian research-policy-practice interface. As an academic she has worked with remote agrarian communities who are vulnerable to environmental disasters to explore how political identity, environmental conflict, and unequal livelihoods shape local knowledge of humanitarian response. Aoiffe has conducted action research in Nicaragua and Cuba working with local communities in response to major hurricanes, and policy research in response to drought in Eswatini, contributing to the development of the first national climate compatible development policy. She has worked with refugees and policy makers on community/ refugee humanitarian resource conflicts in Uganda and South Sudan, and on post conflict identity-based land rights in Rwanda. Other research contexts include India; Pakistan; Honduras; Cote d’Ivoire; South Africa; and Sri Lanka.
Aoiffe has worked with development and humanitarian organisations as a research editor, and a research and methodology coach. She has an expertise in decolonial, local, and action orientated research methodologies conducted in fragile and insecure environments. She prioritises localised research approaches and knowledge co-production and has conducted primary research in Spanish and French. She draws on her research experiences to offer training on research ethics, especially working with local knowledge producers, translators, and fixers; positionality and localised ways of knowing; emotion in the research process; and immersive research, something she first did by accident in Nicaragua, and then purposefully in Eswatini, where she and her young children lived in the communities she was researching.
She is a former UK delegate to the International Standards Organisation and led international policy making in community resilience to disasters through negotiations with representatives from 40 national governments. As a university departmental Undergraduate Director at the Humanitarian and Conflict Response Institute, University of Manchester, Aoiffe led the design and implementation of the first undergraduate degree in humanitarianism in the world and continues to consult with universities on research methods and practice-based curricula.
Aoiffe holds a PhD from the University of Manchester, an MSc from the University of Bath, and a BSc (Hons) from the University of Warwick.
To send Aoiffe an email, please write acorcoran followed by @humanitarianadvisorygroup.org
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