CARE Principles Event

CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance - Exploring the Irish Traveller experience of research

A Big thank you to all who joined us on the 21st May 2025 for the first masterclass discussion in Ireland on the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance.

For those who could not attend, we have saved the recordings and published them below.

During this well attended masterclass, we heard from the creators of the CARE Principles for Indigenous Data Governance. Dr Stephanie Russo Carroll, University of Arizona, Dr Riley Taitingfong, University of Arizona, and Dr Ann McCartney, University of California, Santa Cruz shared insights into where the Principles originated, and how they are evolving. Dr Aoife Coffey highlighted the role of the data steward with regard to FAIR and CARE.

The Traveller community is one of the most researched groups in Ireland, with little evidential benefit to the community itself. Members of the Irish Traveller community and those researching within the Irish Traveller space were represented in this masterclass, and shared insights. Several challenges, issues, and advancements were discussed on how research is done and how research can be conducted properly with the Irish Traveller community in future.

Important questions were raised for example by Dr Sindy Joyce from the University of Limerick:

How can we do research that impact positively on communities?
How can we do research without using dominant perspectives, constructs and terminologies?
How can we minimize research that may culturally and contextually lack contingency with peoples experiences?

Mags O’Sullivan and James Furey shared their perspectives on a successful collaboration between an archivist and the Cork Traveller Women’s Network, resulting in the development of their project, the Rebel County Traveller Archive.

Thomas McCarthy was in conversation with Pádraig Mac Aodhgáin, where he shared invaluable insights into his experience of song collecting in England and Ireland. Thomas gave some important recommendations about how researchers could connect meaningfully with the Traveller community.

We also heard from Dr Edmund Gilbert regarding work done at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and the genome advancements which led to ethnicity status for Irish Travellers in 2017. Dean Watters and Ruth O’Hara shared valuable insight into how they worked with the Library of Congress subject headings to better represent the Traveller community.

Overall, this event made a significant contribution to how we think about research with the Traveller community, and the coming together of key individuals gave us a platform for thinking about how CARE principles could be advanced for research in an Irish context.