Pride in Research: Dr Jason Keegan on the LGBTQ+ Conference Supporting Trinity’s Queer Academic Community

Dr Keegan is a Zoologist in the School of Natural Sciences who is currently investigating the level of soil contamination caused by parasites in Dublin city centre parks. He has also been a member of the Pride in Research committee since its second year in 2022, after attending their first online conference the previous year. Since then, he has organised Pride in Research as it moved from an online format to an in-person event, widening its parameters by opening to researchers across Ireland. The annual conference regularly welcomes between 50 and 80 attendees, which includes researchers from University of Galway, University College Cork, South East Technological University, and Northern Ireland.

Keegan highlights how important Trinity has been for his own professional and personal journey. In the very first week of his undergraduate degree, he joined Q Soc, Trinity’s LGBTQ+ society, and made lifelong friends there. Later, when he came back to Trinity to pursue an Irish Council Research Postdoctoral Fellowship, he got involved in the LGBT+ Staff Network and Pride in Research. This gave him a good sense of continuity within the college community.

Zoology as an Inclusive Community

Additionally, Keegan found the Zoology department a very inclusive community. “When I got into Third Year of General Science as an undergraduate student I specialised in Zoology. One of the first things you notice in the Zoology building is there’s a unisex toilet downstairs. It’s always been a unisex toilet, back before toilets were headline material. After a while you wouldn’t bat an eyelid.”

“My fourth year supervisor was an out gay man, he was in the Dublin Gay Men’s Chorus, and he had really good friendships with lots of the staff. I really did feel like a member of the community.” The School of Natural Sciences, Keegan adds, enables students to organise a conference every year, giving them the experience of organising an event structured around their own niche topics. This supportive atmosphere, he suggests, may have been what led to Pride in Research happening, as the four founders of Pride in Research – Dr Sam Ross, Dr Lucy Harding, Dr Jenny Bortoluzzi and Dr Andrew Mooney – were all Zoology students!

“I also think there’s something about studying animals that makes you more open and accepting,” Keegan explains. “When I was doing my undergraduate degree I had all these fantastic influences. I was LGBT rights officer in the SU and, as part of Rainbow Week, we organised a talk from my supervisor, Dr Mark Brown, about LGBTQ+ animals around the world. I gave the talk myself a few years later, around the time of the Marriage Equality referendum, and I did a bit of canvassing for it. One day I was calling at someone’s door and the man there said, ‘If you can name one animal that engages in that kind of thing, I’ll vote for you.’ I was able to say, ‘You’re not going to believe this, I’m a Zoologist from Trinity College Dublin and there are any number of animals that can!’”

“It’s so common for animals to display same-sex behaviour, it’s just been written out of history for various religious and historical reasons. And there’s various trans lifeforms, too. Binary sexuality is common and successful, but it’s not the only way of life, and when you’re working with animals all the time you realise there’s no point in having these rigid views on animal sexuality.”

Multidisciplinarity at Pride in Research

Support from the Zoology department, then, was a huge reason he got involved in Pride in Research. However, it’s also a very broad event, open to every faculty. “The things you learn at the conference are so different to each other. But there is the common theme of us all being part of a community or producing work for the community. So everyone is on a similar level.” Presentations range right across the disciplines, addressing research into Catholic schooling and sexual identity development, through to goat domestication and the search for extraterrestrial life on planetary missions.

Pride in Research, then, provides opportunities to talk to people from completely different faculties that might need the same skills: for example, Keegan notes, “I was helping an undergraduate student who was mapping LGBT-relevant locations around Dublin. I make maps for my work, I’ve been mapping the soil samples for dog parasites. So with the skills I learnt for that I was able to help her with a project which was of personal interest to me, which was great. These connections that you don’t expect to be beneficial are there. Lots of good comes out of it, new connections and ideas actually do come from it.”

The work that Keegan himself has presented at Pride in Research recently had media attention: after his team’s research into the parasites in dog faeces found in public parks was published in PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases, the journal contacted his team to promote the paper. Meanwhile, the Trinity media team issued press releases which led to several newspaper articles. Keegan also gave an interview on NewsTalk. “It was the first time I had any media attention to a paper before. People are interested in dogs and in public parks, so I can understand why people were interested in the paper. It would be interesting to conduct further research and actually do some science to reduce the level of dog fouling in public.”

LGBTQ+ Communities Across Ireland

In the second year of Pride in Research, Keegan and Dr Lucy Blennerhassett started organising the event, and they recruited Dr Padraic Fleming and Dr Nina Shiel, who were involved in the TCD LGBT+ Staff Network, to the committee. Other members of the LGBT+ Staff Network committee, Prof. Noel McCarthy, Evan Blake and Joel McKeever, also helped make Pride in Research an annual affair with support from the Office of the Dean of Research. “The LGBT+ Staff Network has been working with other staff networks around the country to set up a network of networks,” Keegan explains, “and that’s becoming more active now, and hopefully Pride in Research will also benefit and be able to disseminate that way, and we’ll get more people to attend.”

Throughout the last few years, Pride in Research has branched out to include other activities, such as their own take on Pint of Science during European Researchers’ Night, called Cocktails with Curious Queers. “That was very successful,” Keegan says, “and maybe we’ll do that again this year. We also have a Dragademics evening. We had two academic drag kings come in in their academic costumes, and myself and Noel presented our research on posters, and then got critiqued by the drag kings and entertainingly responded to these questions, that was good fun.”

Future plans for Pride in Research include organising events outside of Trinity. BelongTo and various local community organisations from around the country are interested in collaborating, which would enable Pride in Research to hold events at other universities, where researchers could share their work with both the academic and local communities.
They are also considering online meetings for the Irish queer academic community. “This could be a way to get everyone to come together. It’s great to have in-person activities but when everyone is so disparate it can be good to give them an online version as well. We were thinking of semi-regular online meetings with one presenter, questions, and then networking afterwards.”

Pride in Research: Now and Into the Future

This year Pride in Research is changing up their format, with a later starting time to support travel to Dublin and an emphasis on facilitating more participants, as well as running a novel networking event. “We haven’t figured out what that event will be just yet, but it’s something that people have cried out for. One of our ideas is, once we get the abstracts in, to theme them and have discussion groups for each theme afterwards.”

Regarding anyone who may be interested in attending, Keegan advises, “We’re an open community, so just come. Everyone is welcome as long as there’s something relevant to the conference. It’s also free to attend, and it’s important to us to keep it free. When we’re starting to organise we try to take in everyone’s point of view. We don’t have a committee structure, but I would like there to be one in some way to sustain a committee, so maybe we’ll discuss that during our networking event. We’ll happily take on any new ideas and new energies as we’re trying to change it up every year. So get involved if you’re interested.”

Pride in Research takes place on Tuesday the 24th of June.

The deadline for abstract submissions is Friday, June 6th. Registration to attend will remain open after that.

The event is hosted by Trinity College Dublin, with the support of the Dean of Research. Thanks to this support as well as that of the TCD LGBT+ Staff Network, and the voluntary Pride in Research committee, this event is free of charge.

Tea, coffee and food will be provided for attendees over the course of the day.

You can register for Pride in Research here.

- Profile by Dr Sarah Cullen