While the negative impact of child‐raising and caring on women's career progression in academia is well‐established, less is known about the role of academic women's lived experiences of maternity leave as an institutional practice. This article presents the findings of a qualitative study of the lived experiences of female academics and researchers in an Irish university. The analysis intrinsically links organizational structures and problems with the lived and felt dimensions of work. The findings point to the need for better structural accommodations for maternity leave which address the relationship between caring and career disadvantage within academia. The article adds to existing literature on the intersection of motherhood and academia by unpicking the specific role of maternity leave as both a lived experience and an institutional practice that can reinforce gender inequalities in academia.

This paper seeks to contribute to current debates about the effectiveness of different types of gender equality interventions in the academic context. We present an argument for the need to move beyond an individual-structural dichotomy in how such interventions are perceived. The paper draws on an action-research casestudy, the Through the Glass Ceiling project, to challenge the idea that 'individual'/single-actor interventions serve only to reinforce underlying inequalities by attempting to 'fix the women'. We suggest that actions that support women in their careers have the potential to achieve a degree of transformation at individual, cultural and structural levels when such actions are designed with an understanding of how individuals embody the gendered and gendering social structures and values that are constantly being produced and reproduced within society and academia. The casestudy highlights the benefits of supporting individuals as gendered actors in gendering institutions and of facilitating the development of critical gender awareness, suggesting that such interventions are most effective when undertaken as part of an integrated institutional equality agenda.

The Belfast Agreement is currently being addressed in light of a number of issues: freedom of assembly and the right to protest; international models of peace and reconciliation; reinventing government; devolution; and the decommissioning impasse. However, the implications of the Agreement for feminist politics and women's organisations in civil society are not clear. Historically, feminism is a tangible and observable set of ideologies and form of politics in Northern Ireland. Contemporary women's groups occupy an extensive political space in civil society. Activists in grassroots organisations, where women are concentrated, are as central as elected representatives in the drive towards a negotiated settlement. ‘Doctrinal’ interpretations of the Peace Process simplify feminist politics and occlude diversity and conflict both within and between different groups of women. This paper explores how a conflict approach to feminist politics can pose alternative questions about the Peace Process.

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This article provides a detailed analysis of conflict-related rapes and sexual assaults perpetrated in the period covering the Irish Civil War and its immediate aftermath. The impact transgressive sexual violence had on individual women attacked, their families and communities, and the direct involvement of the army and government in investigating these cases, is examined. Both the cover up and non-prosecution of heinous attacks on women between 1922 and 1923 raises provocative questions about ethical remembrance and 'forgotten' war crimes, in a moment of national commemoration.The Irish Civil War was an internecine conflict that followed the War of Independence (1919)(1920)(1921) and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty in December 1921. The Civil War commenced on 28th June 1922 and was declared to be over by the Republican side on 24th May 1923, though violence did not immediately dissipate. 1 The conflict was waged between two opposing groups, the pro-treaty Provisional Government and the anti-treaty Irish Republican Army (IRA). 2 Many of those who fought on opposing sides in the Civil War conflict had been on the 'same side' during the preceding War of Independence. The Civil War is to be commemorated and remembered in 2022-2023 as part of the Irish State's official 'Decade of Centenaries' Programme. 3 According to Kissane, fatalities in the Irish Civil War were less than 1500 peoplemuch smaller than the later Spanish Civil War (1936)(1937)(1938)(1939) or the Finnish Civil War of 1918, for instance, where: 'Almost 2000 people died in the battle for the industrial town of Tampere (fought between 22 March and 6 April 1918), more than the entire Irish Civil War. The population of both states was comparable.' 4 Nonetheless, the question of scale has not diminished the production of detailed scholarship on the wider social, political and cultural impact of the Civil War, including in the domains of violence, memory, trauma, commemoration and as an influence on the prevailing political cleavages in the Irish political party system to this day. 5 In particular, the transgressive violence that Irish men perpetrated against each other as combatants was considered to have had a longstanding impact on Irish communities and families for decades. 6 The conflict became particularly ruthless after the pro-Treaty leader Michael Collins was shot dead. Dreadful atrocities were committed on both sides. 7 Irish society was ' … stained with violence and remained bitterly divided long after hostilities ended in 1923.' 8