Learning Without Limits: Identifying the Barriers and Enablers to Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion in IS Education

Inclusion in Information Systems (IS) has received significant attention in recent years, but inclusion in IS curriculum design and delivery is comparatively underdeveloped. Understanding and working with diversity in IS student groups has implications for how we prepare students for a diverse workplace and the design and development of IS systems. Although progress has been made towards inclusive higher education, institutions have not transformed into multicultural diverse organizations. This paper showcases an initiative to apply principles of Universal Design in the particular context of an IS postgraduate programme in a leading Irish business school. This initiative is set within the context of two connected research projects seeking to identify barriers to inclusion experienced by students generally, and particularly by certain student groups, in the same school. The findings demonstrate the persistence of inclusion issues in higher education, including in IS, that Universal Design principles are effective in developing more inclusive teaching and learning practices, and that small actions can have a big impact in this regard. A set of key recommendations is provided; while not exhaustive, these contribute to the wider discourse on inclusion and offer practical suggestions to educators on the design and delivery of inclusive programmes at both undergraduate and postgraduate level

Essays on migration, home ownership and social integration in Ireland

This PhD thesis explores the interactions between migration, home ownership and immigrant integration in Ireland. The thesis is presented on a paper based model, the core of which consists of three empirical studies. The first study develops a simple framework for incorporating the demographic determinants of housing demand into a standard housing-demand model. It also augments the existing time-series and cross-national literatures with a cross-county panel on the Irish housing market. The second study explores the causal links from home ownership to community engagement. In the years prior to the recent economic crisis, Ireland experienced a large increase in its foreign-born population. We hypothesise that households headed by the foreign-born are less likely to own a home, thus potentially hindering the process of social integration. But also that home ownership can be differentially effective in fostering the integration of the foreign-born. We first explore the relationship between nativity and homeownership. We then explore the linkages from both home ownership and nativity to a measure of social capital based on volunteering in line with existing literature. We discuss the limitations of the cross-sectional analysis and the specific measure of social integration. The third study utilizes a panel data set and expanded measures of social capital. One concern with the cross-sectional analysis is that omitted individual level attributes could hinder the identification of the causal effects of home ownership and social capital, and also the identification of any differential effect for the foreign-born. The panel data allows us to control for unobserved individual-level effects. The data also allows us to expand the proxy indicators for social capital beyond the volunteering measure. The results are contrasted to the cross sectional findings. Overall, we find evidence to support the hypothesis that home ownership generates differential benefits for the social integration of the foreign-born, but the results are sensitive to the data set and social-capital measure used.2018-07-0