Dr Alan Grossman

Socially engaged practice based research across a range of contemporary topics, focused on social justice, communities of place, interest and identity formation.

Dr Alan Grossman is Director of the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research (SEPR) in the School of Media, Technological University Dublin, with extensive experience over two decades supervising written and practice-based doctorates across the arts, humanities and social sciences.

He has supervised 22 PhD theses and 1 MPhil to completion; published 7 journal articles/book chapters; and co-edited 2 books. He is currently supervising 11 practice-based PhD projects.

Significant Research Achievements:

• Creation, development and academic leadership over two decades of a thematic and methodologically distinctive PhD and Research Centre in the School of Media – one nationally and internationally acknowledged for its quality of practice-based socially engaged exploration of contemporary societal topics (see Centre website, https://www.tudublin.ie/research-innovation/research/discover-our-research/research-centres/sepr/).
• Receipt of Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice (2005-2017) 1. 3M grant for Forum on Migration and Communications (FOMACS) project (2007-2011) from Atlantic Philanthropies.
• Consolidation of a new interdisciplinary TU Dublin PhD pathway in the visual and creative arts for established socially engaged practitioners, building on and expanding the universities guidelines for the PhD by Prior Publication. This programme is highly original and the only one of its kind in Ireland and beyond.
• Longstanding publications of books, journal articles, chapters and practice-based outputs (documentary films), together with invited transnational keynote addresses on the interdisciplinary utilisation of socially engaged practice-based research across the fields of social justice and migration.

Dr Alan Grossman is Director of the Centre for Socially Engaged Practice-Based Research (SEPR) in the School of Media, Technological University Dublin, with extensive experience over two decades supervising written and practice-based doctorates across the arts, humanities and social sciences.

He represented the former Centre for Transcultural Research and Media Practice (now SEPR) on the 1.3 million Atlantic Philanthropies-funded Centre-led FOMACS public media project (2007-2011), producing film, photographic, digital storytelling, radio, animation and print stories on the topic of immigration in Ireland. He was the recipient of a two-year Government of Ireland Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities and Social Sciences (2001-3) – the first award of its kind for non-fiction practice-based research at the postdoctoral level in Ireland. He has a longstanding documentary production engagement with the cultural politics of identity, migration and diasporic formations across infra and transnational contexts; from the perspective of the minority Welsh-language resistance movement in Wales, to Kurdish refugee music in Scotland in the form of a short performative documentary film Silent Song (2000, UK), to his co-directed ethnographic film projects Here To Stay (2006, Ireland) and Promise and Unrest (2010, Philippines), which address questions of migrant political agency and long-distance motherhood.

He has published in numerous refereed journals including Space and Culture, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies and Crossings: Journal of Migration and Culture, while participating in international conferences as a keynote across the fields of visual, media and cultural studies, documentary film and visual anthropology.

He co-edited publication Projecting Migration: Transcultural Documentary Practice (2008, Wallflower/Columbia University Press) – a combined book/DVD engaged with questions of mobility and displacement through the analytical prism of creative practice. He has co-edited special journal issues on the cultural politics of representation in the Journal of Media Practice (2008), together with questions of contemporary ethnographic practice in the Irish Journal of Anthropology (2013). He was external examiner (2009-12) of the MA in Radio and Television, Centre for Media Studies, National University of Ireland, Maynooth. His publications include a co-authored chapter titled 'Socially Engaged Practice: A Reflection on Values, Theory and Writing’ in Bell, D. (ed.) Mind the Gap: Working Papers on Practice-Based Doctoral Research in the Creative Arts and Media (2016, Distiller's Press), and an Irish Arts Council commissioned essay ‘Choreographing Her(selfie): Nothing Happens’ (2017) for ‘Becoming Christine’ exhibition, curated by artist Amanda Dunsmore.

He is chief editor of a forthcoming publication titled Socially Engaged Art Practice in Ireland: Contested Narratives, Places and Futures (forthcoming 2025, Cork University Press).