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Staff Profile

Dr Aislinn Fanning

Leverhulme Early Career Fellow

Background

Aislinn joined Newcastle Law School in May 2026 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow to begin working on her project entitled Utopian Legality: Reimagining a Feminist Equality Law for the Island of Ireland. The project uses creative and participatory methods, working with well-established women’s groups and networks across the island of Ireland, to imagine new and alternative legal solutions for advancing gender and sexual equality. Aislinn’s work spans queer and feminist legal theories, equality and anti-discrimination law, peacebuilding and the transformation of societies after conflict, constitutionalism, law and literature, utopia as a legal method and participatory approaches in socio-legal research. She uses queer and feminist approaches to interrogate seemingly settled legal concepts like ‘equality’. 


Aislinn received an ESRC-funded PhD in Law in 2026 from Queen's University Belfast, School of Law and her thesis used feminist and queer theoretical and methodological approaches to analyse anti-discrimination law in Northern Ireland since 1998 and its effectiveness in addressing gender and sexual discrimination. She also holds an MRes in Social Science Research from Queen's University Belfast, School of Social, Sciences, Education and Social Work (also funded by the ESRC) and an LLB in Law with Politics from QUB School of Law.


Prior to joining Newcastle Law School, Aislinn was a Postdoctoral Researcher on the European Research Council-funded PatentsInHumans project (PI Prof Aisling McMahon, Maynooth University School of Law & Criminology & ALL Institute), where she worked on feminist approaches to patent law and its impacts on the lived and embodied experiences of health-technology users as well as on the empirical strand of the project.

Research

Aislinn joined Newcastle Law School in May 2026 as a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow to begin working on her project entitled Utopian Legality: Reimagining a Feminist Equality Law for the Island of Ireland. The project uses creative and participatory methods, working with well-established women’s groups and networks across the island of Ireland, to imagine new and alternative legal solutions for advancing gender and sexual equality. Aislinn’s work spans queer and feminist legal theories, equality and anti-discrimination law, peacebuilding and the transformation of societies after conflict, constitutionalism, law and literature, utopia as a legal method and participatory approaches in socio-legal research. She uses queer and feminist approaches to interrogate seemingly settled legal concepts like ‘equality’. She is currently working on a co-authored monograph on feminist constitutionalism (with Dr Ruth Houghton and Prof Aoife O'Donoghue) forthcoming with Bristol University Press.


Aislinn has a broader interest in the implications of law and legal systems on the everyday, embodied and lived experiences of people. Aislinn has extensive expertise in equality and anti-discrimination law in Northern Ireland and has a particular interest in the impacts of this area of law on women and LGBTQ+ people. She has written on the implications of Brexit for this area of law in NI and the rest of the UK, and on the impacts of Brexit on EU anti-discrimination law. She works closely with civil society organisations in NI. She was previously the Older People's Services Engagement Lead at Ardcomm, where she worked on projects engaging older people in West Belfast in policy processes. She is currently the Chair of Women’s Platform NI (previously Northern Ireland Women’s European Platform).  


Key areas of research interest:


  • Equality and anti-discrimination law.
  • Feminist legal theory.
  • Queer legal theory.
  • Constitutionalism, particularly feminist constitutionalism.
  • Human rights.
  • Peacebuilding and transition from conflict.
  • Utopia and prefiguration.
  • Law & Literature.
  • Feminist pedagogies.
  • Qualitative and participatory approaches to legal research.


Research funding:


  • Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (2026-2029) - Utopian Legality: Reimagining a Feminist Equality Law for the Island of Ireland.
  • Economic and Social Research Council NINE DTP 1+3 studentship - Transforming Equality: Feminist and Queer Perspectives on Anti-Discrimination Law in Northern Ireland since 1998.


Other research projects:


  • 2025-2026 - Postdoctoral Researcher on PatentsInHumans (European Research Council, Starting Grant, 2022-2027) (Principal Investigator Professor Aisling McMahon).
  • 2025 - Reviewing the impacts of menopause and perimenopause on academic and professional services staff careers in Higher Education (QUB School of Law Athena Swan Committee, with Dr Ciara Hackett).
  • 2024-2025 - Rhetorical Scale (with Prof Aoife O'Donoghue & Dr Sylvia de Mars).
  • 2024 - Team Teaching and Human Rights Education (with Prof Therese Murphy, QUB, Dr Norah Burns, QUB, Dr Conall Mallory, QUB, Dr Matthew Scott, Lund University & Dr Christine Evans, Lund University).
  • 2023 - Queering Women, Peace and Security (with Dr Jamie Hagen).


Teaching

Aislinn's teaching philosophy draws on feminist pedagogy and is aimed at engaging and including all students from a variety of backgrounds to fully take part in university life. Aislinn takes a collaborative and participatory approach to teaching and learning, encouraging students to actively engage and take ownership of their learning whilst feeling confident to ask for the help and support they need. Aislinn believes that legal education should be socially engaged, and has collaborated with civil society organisations to deliver opportunities for students to engage in law and social justice issues beyond the classroom (e.g,. with WAVE Trauma Centre and HereNI).


Previous teaching:


  • 2025 - Guest lecturer at Queen's University Belfast, School of Law, Legal Theory, Queer Legal Theory
  • 2022-2025 - Constitutional and Administrative Law, Queen's University Belfast, School of Law
  • 2021-2025 - Student Skills Assistant, Queen's University Belfast, School of Law
Publications

  • Articles

    • Burns N, Fanning A, Little S. Staff-Student Partnerships as Critical Legal Pedagogy: Cultivating Inclusivity, Participation and Belonging in Legal Education. Liverpool Law Review - Special Issue 2026. Submitted.
    • Fanning A. Delineating the boundaries of anti-discrimination law: the problem with complaining. Feminist Legal Studies 2026. Submitted.
    • Fanning A, Hackett C. Bloody. Hell.: Insights from a literature review on the impact of Perimenopause/Menopause on Academic and Professional Services Staff Careers in Higher Education. The Law Teacher 2026. Submitted.

  • Book Chapters

  • Conference Proceedings (inc. Abstracts)

    • Fanning A, Garforth L, Houghton R, Godden-Rasul N. Roundtable: Gender and Genre Beyond Literary Studies. In: Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy: Navigating Gender and Genre. 2026, Newcastle University.
    • Fanning A, Mcmahon A. Recognising donors' clinical labour in health research: re-imagining the role of intellectual property rights towards public stewardship of health technologies and greater access to health. In: Socio-Legal Studies Association Annual Conference 2026. 2026, University of Sussex.
    • Fanning A. Hope, Failure and Imagining Alternatives: Addressing Gender and Sexual Discrimination through Law in Northern Ireland after 1998. In: Fail Again Symposium. 2026, Queen's University Belfast.
    • Fanning A. From Vision to Revision: Aisling Poetry, Critical Utopias and Reimagining Gender Equality on the island of Ireland. In: ‘Stories of ‘Separation’ and ‘Gathering’ in Legal and Creative Imaginaries: A Legal Humanities and Creative Writing Workshop. 2026, University of Southampton (online).
    • Fanning A. Feminist Utopias and Creative Participatory Methods. In: Creative Methods Workshop. 2026, Queen's University Belfast: Doing Feminist Legal Work Network.
    • Houghton R, O'Donoghue A, Fanning A. Book Roundtable: A Feminist Constitutionalism. In: ICON-S 2026: Reimagining Public Law for a Fractured World: Technology, Identity & Truth. 2026, University College Dublin: International Society of Public Law.
    • Burns N, Fanning A, Little S. Advancing Inclusive Legal Education for Women: Feminist Pedagogy and Staff–Student Partnership in the Student Skills Assistant Programme. In: Women in Legal Academia. 2026, University of Nottingham.
    • Fanning A, Hackett C. 'A figure in need of fixing’: The Impacts of Perimenopause/Menopause on Academic and Professional Services Staff Careers in Higher Education. In: Women in Legal Academia. 2026, University of Nottingham.
    • Fanning A. Using utopian law-making to reimage feminist equality law on the island of Ireland. In: Legal Methodologies Symposium. 2025, Newcastle University.
    • McMahon A, Fanning A. Using feminist approaches to reconceptualise the marginalisation of patients' lived experiences within patent law: towards a more person-centred approach for patents over health-technologies?. In: Irish Association of Law Teachers Annual Conference. 2025, University of Ulster, Magee Campus.
    • Fanning A. Holding a queer lens to LGBTQ+ rights protections in Northern Ireland. In: Human Rights in Northern Ireland. 2024, Queen's University Belfast: European Human Rights Law Review & Cambridge University Press.

  • Digital or Visual Media

    • Fanning A, Clark C, Houghton R, Tongue Z. Utopia as a Method. Oxford Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, 2026.

  • Online Publications

    • Fanning A, Kirk-Smith A. Q&A with Student Skills Assistants on Take-Home Exams. Lawpod Blog, 2024. Available at: https://lawpod.org/qa-with-student-skills-assistants-on-take-home-exams/.
    • Fanning A. Feminist Approaches to PhD Supervision. 2024. Available at: https://dflw.ie/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/DFLW-Best-Practice-Guide-3-LR.pdf.
    • Fanning A. Dealing with gender-based discrimination: a call for alternatives. Reclaim the Agenda, 2023. Available at: https://www.reclaimtheagenda.com/16-blogs-for-16-days-2023/af.

  • Reports

    • O'Donoghue A, Fanning A. Response to Northern Ireland Scrutiny Committee Inquiry on Article 2 of the Protocol/Windsor Framework. 2026.
    • McMahon A, Fanning A, Adedapo S, Kane L, Masterson S. PatentsInHumans - Year 3 Report. Maynooth: PatentsInHumans Project, 2026. In Press.

  • Reviews

    • Fanning A. [Guest Book Review] Pratap Devarapalli, Bioinked Boundaries. Patenting 3D Bioprinted Tissues, Organs and Bioinks: An US, European and Australian Patent Law Perspective (Springer 2025). 2025.
    • Fanning A. Brice Dickson, International Human Rights Monitoring Mechanisms: A Study of their Impact in the UK (Edward Elgar 2022). European Human Rights Law Review 2023, 6, 650-652.