Elaine Keane
Professor Elaine Keane, PhD, is Professor and Head of the Discipline of Education in the School of Education at the University of Galway, Ireland. Her research focuses on social class and education, teacher diversity, and constructivist grounded theory (CGT), and she has published widely and has led national and international projects in these areas, including as lead editor of Diversifying the Teaching Profession: Dimensions, Dilemmas and Directions for the Future (Routledge, 2023). She is Co-Editor of Irish Educational Studies, serves on the Editorial Board of Teaching in Higher Education, was Inaugural Chair of the National Initial Teacher Education Diversity Network and Convenor of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland (ESAI) Special Interest Group on Teacher Diversity Research. Over the years, Elaine has regularly worked with education stakeholders including the Department of Education and Youth, the Teaching Council, and the Higher Education Authority, including as part of Working Groups and consultations on teacher diversity and teacher supply.
On CGT, Elaine has collaborated and published with Kathy Charmaz and Robert Thornberg and taught workshops in Ireland, the UK, Poland, Sweden, South Africa, and the USA, including with the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science at the University of North Carolina and ResearchTalk Inc. She has taught CGT at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA, since 2015 and was keynote speaker at the World Conference on Qualitative Research (WCQR) at Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland, in February 2025, and at the MCAST 4th Annual Conference in Qualitative Research Methods in Malta in November 2025. A member of the International Association of Grounded Theorists, Elaine is lead editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Constructivist Grounded Theory in Educational Research (2025). She has authored/co-authored chapters in many methodology texts, including The Handbook of Qualitative Research Methods in Psychology (2026), the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Qualitative Methods (2026), the APA Handbook of Research Methods in Psychology (2023), The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research Design (2022), and The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Research (5th ed., 2018). Since 2025, she is (EU) Editor of the International Journal of Qualitative Methods (SAGE). https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1002-5119