COMDEL: Deliberation for Climate Action

Professor Jane Suiter is the Director of DCU Institute for Media, Democracy and Society (FuJo). She is a social scientist whose research interests focus on the public sphere. Her present research is focused on the social, political and communicative aspects of citizen participation, empowerment and direct and participative democracy. She has a particular interest in the potential of deliberation and how worked on and researcher a number of real world deliberative assemblies including We the Cit...

Dr. Lorin Sweeney is a Postdoctoral researcher who completed a PhD in computer science, specializing in memorability---the likelihood that something will be remembered. While their PhD focused on memory research, their current work applies state-of-the-art computational methods to the subject of climate communication. Leveraging advances in deep learning, Dr. Sweeney is conducting novel research to analyze and map communication flows and narratives in the context of climate discourse. Their inte...

Fionna is currently a PhD Candidate working on citizens' assemblies in policymaking. She was previously Project Manager for the French speaking parliament of Brussels for two years....

Rabhya Mehrotra is a Mitchell Scholar, one of twelve Americans selected to study in Ireland by the US-Ireland Alliance. At DCU, she is pursuing a Masters' in Political Communication. She graduated from Yale University in December 2022 with degrees in computer science and political science. Using her hybrid academic background, she hopes to research how democracy reform can address democratic backsliding and empower citizens. At Yale, she served as the co-director of the Yale Politics Initiative ...