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. 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 (Routledge, 2025) (co-editor, Robert Thornberg) and was also lead editor of the 2023 Routledge book about diversifying the teaching profession. She is Co-Editor of Irish Educational Studies, serves on the Editorial Board of Teaching in Higher Education, is 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. Elaine has collaborated and published with CGT originator, Kathy Charmaz, and has taught expert workshops on CGT throughout Ireland and in Australia, South Africa, Sweden, the U.K., and the U.S.A., including at the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill), the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and ResearchTalk Inc. Elaine has also authored and co-authored chapters on CGT in several methodology books, including the Routledge Encyclopaedia of Qualitative Research Methods (forthcoming), 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).