University of Birmingham

Recently graduated with an MA Applied Linguistics with TESOL (Distinction) from Birmingham University. I think reducing the suffering of animals worldwide (particularly due to factory farming) and tackling climate change are among our most pressing ethical imperatives, so some of my research, including my MA dissertation, has been aimed towards making a contribution here.

Areas of knowledge & interest:

•             Psycholinguistics (especially relationships between language and thought, belief, behaviour; embodied cognition; situation models; metaphor)

•             Other areas of applied linguistics including discourse analysis and corpus linguistics

•             Teaching, particularly TESOL as I’ve worked as an ESOL teacher for over a decade (mostly at universities in China)

•             Music (previously worked as a musician and as a guitar teacher; enjoy songwriting and production); games (tabletop and digital); philosophy; Effective Altruism; Sentientism.

I am an Educational Psychologist at Cheshire East Council.  My professional interests and areas of specialism include supporting children and young people who have social, emotional, and mental health (SEMH) needs, particularly those that have experienced trauma, and promoting equality, inclusion, and diversity within education. I particularly enjoy working with the adults and the system(s) around children and young people, for example by completing whole school projects, working collaboratively with other agencies, and delivering training to school staff. 

In August 2022, I was awarded a Doctorate in Educational Psychology from the University of East Anglia. My research interests include veganism, inclusive education, identity development, and the social and environmental factors that influence children’s social and emotional well-being. My doctoral thesis consisted of a qualitative study exploring the educational experiences of vegan young people aged 11-18 in England. My thesis can be found here: https://ueaeprints.uea.ac.uk/id/eprint/89352/

The findings suggest that being a vegan young person in England has a varying amount of influence on social and emotional well-being. The vegan young people interviewed identified challenges, such as: questioning whether – or to what extent - they should reveal their vegan identity, while feeling a burden to raise awareness and educate others on topics relating to animal cruelty and the climate crisis; managing the emotional impact of being a vegan young person in a world and education system that often presents non-vegan stimuli (e.g., fish dissection);  experiencing micro and macroaggression from staff and peers, with some young people reporting severe bullying; and, managing interacting with non-vegans, dependent upon the levels of acceptance or tolerance the vegan and non-vegan young people have for one another. I am keen to conduct further research in this area to promote inclusion and well-being of vegan children and young people within education. In line with my professional views, pupil voice is essential, so I aim to employ qualitative methods where possible to ensure that vegan children and young people’s voices and views are heard.

Dr. Maureen O’Sullivan is Chairperson of the Research Ethics Committee of University of Galway where she specialises in industrial and intellectual property law, animal rights and legal issues related to veganism and vegetarianism. Maureen is introducing an undergraduate module called "Animal Law" next year (2023-2024) and this will be the first UG module on animal law in a School of Law in Ireland. She is also introducing a PG course for the LLM students and this will also be open to Masters students in the School of Sociology and Political Science. She completed a Ph.D. at the School of Law at the University of Edinburgh in 2017 where her doctoral studies focused on patent system reform in the area of biotechnological inventions and morality, using devices of participatory budgeting from Brazil. She published a monograph entitled “Biotechnology, Patents and Morality: A Deliberative and Participatory Paradigm for Reform” with Routledge in 2019. She has published on patenting human-animal hybrids and chimeras in the Journal of Animal Ethics and is the author of a major article on artistic copyright law, published in the Intellectual Property Quarterly in 2015. She has also published widely in the area of in free/open source and creative commons licensing in both Spanish (Libro Blanco de Software Libre en España II) and English. She holds a Research LL.M. from the University of Warwick and studied her B.C.L. and B.A. (Philosophy and English) at University College Cork. She previously taught at the University of the West of England, Bristol and at Warwick University. Maureen was Chairperson of the Vegetarian Society of Ireland from 2013–9, secretary from 2012–2013 and has been a fellow at the Oxford Centre for Animal Ethics since 2014. She became vegetarian at the age of 12 and vegan at 20. Recently she has published articles on vegetarian and vegan rights in the European Human Rights Law Review and also in the Revista de Derecho Animal which is the journal of the Animal Law Masters at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She continues to research and write on many of these areas.