Dr. Elaine Keane is Associate Professor of Sociology of Education and Research Methods, and Head of the Discipline of Education, in the School of Education at the University of Galway, Ireland. Her research and publications center on social class in education and teacher diversity, and she has led national and international funded projects in these areas. Since 2017, she has been Co-PI on the Access to Post-primary Teaching (APT) project, funded by the Higher Education Authority under the Programme for Access to Higher Education: Strand 1 (Equity of Access to Initial Teacher Education). She is lead editor of a book about diversifying the teaching profession (Routledge, 2023), Inaugural Chair of the National Initial Teacher Education Diversity Network, and Convenor of the Teacher Diversity Special Interest Group (SIG) of the Educational Studies Association of Ireland (ESAI). Elaine is Co-Editor of Irish Educational Studies and has also served on the Editorial Board of the UK Journal Teaching in Higher Education since 2015.

Elaine’s research passions also include research methodology, especially constructivist grounded theory, on which she has collaborated and published with professors Kathy Charmaz and Robert Thornberg and taught workshops in Ireland, the UK, Sweden, South Africa, and the USA. She has taught Constructivist Grounded Theory internationally including at the International Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ICQI) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign since 2015, at the Odum Institute for Research in Social Science (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) since 2023, and with ResearchTalk Inc. since 2024. Elaine is also lead editor of the Routledge International Handbook of Constructivist Grounded Theory in Educational Research (2025) (co-editor: Robert Thornberg).