After completing my PhD I returned to Ireland and worked for one year as Lecturer in the Department of Sociology, NUI Maynooth. I then took up a Lecturer in Sociology position at The Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, Scotland, where I taught sociology on the undergraduate and postgraduate programmes and learned about a more engaged sociology. I returned to NUI Maynooth, with new "cultural capital" from my Scottish sojourn, in January 2007.

Amanda’s most recent publications include ’Public Exercises in Othering: Irish Print Media Coverage of Asylum Seekers and Refugees’ (with Eoin Devereux and Michael Breen) in B. Faragó and M. Sullivan eds., Facing the Other: Interdisciplinary Studies on Race, Gender and Social Justice in Ireland, Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 162-181, 2008 and ’Mass Media Re-Presentations of the Social World: Ethnicity and ’Race’ in E. Devereux, ed., Media Studies: Key Issues and Debates, London: Sage, 162-190, 2007.

My research interests include the sociology of the family and personal life, masculinities, gay and lesbian studies, social movements and qualitative research methods specifically the use of life history. Recent publications include ’Asking Angela: Discourses about homosexuality in an Irish Problem Page 1963-80’ Journal of the History of Sexuality. Vol. 17.3 (forthcoming) and ’Coming out of the dark: a decade of gay mobilisation in Ireland 1970-80’ pp. 86-105 in L. Connolly and N. Hourigan (2008) (eds.) Social Movements and Ireland. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Following this, she worked as a researcher at the University of Cambridge in England and co-authored with the then Leverhulme Research Professor Robert Bennett, a book and several papers on local and regional economic development in the United Kingdom. Whilst studying for her doctoral degree at the ICS in the Netherlands, she received an ICS doctoral scholarship and was also awarded an EU Jean Marie Fellowship. In 2000, she received the UCD President’s Research Award for her study of social partnership and wage bargaining in Ireland. She has received a number of major research awards from various Irish and International funding bodies and has an excellent track record in successfully completing and publishing the research work proposed for these various research awards to date. Dr. Payne has published various articles in international, peer-reviewed journals, as well as several chapters in edited books. She has also published a number of books and she is a referee and/or book reviewer for several leading academic journals including American Sociological Review, Papers in Regional Science and Regional and Federal Studies. Dr. Payne is a member of various international sociological and political science associations. She is the Irish representative for the Steering Committee of the European Science Foundation (ESF) Programme "Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences (QMSS) ". For QMSS 1, she was the Chair for the ESF Topic Team Analysing Social Networks, which is a key thematic part of the QMSS programme. In 2007, she was also appointed by the IRCHSS as the Irish Coordinator for QMSS 2 for the time period 2008-2012. She is an Executive Committee member of the Research Committee on Rational Choice (RC45) for International Sociological Association (ISA) and is also a member of the Executive Committee for the Sociological Association of Ireland (SAI). Dr Payne has experience as a policy analyst and professional consultancy and has been involved in a number of consultancy-based research projects. Prior to her PhD training in the Netherlands, she also worked for the WRC (Social and Economics Consultants) which is based in Dublin. She has also experience of media work, primarily linked to her academic research project work.

Dr. Payne’s various research interests fall broadly in the area of political sociology and in particular, behavioral models of group processes and collective decision making. Related to this is an interest in the development of methodological approaches, particularly for quantitative research in the social sciences. In particular she is interested in computational social science including group decision modeling, agent based simulation and (formal) social network analysis. Her current research programme focuses on an analysis of policy networks and decision processes, with a number of empirical studies being conducted in Ireland. This work is comparative and involves a number of policy sector studies. A second project examines the operation of Public-Private Partnerships in Ireland and elsewhere. Related projects look at the operation of networks of innovation and research involving public and private interests and also networks of power in bureaucracy. Dr Payne has recently successfully completed a number of major research projects at UCD. She led the Irish team, as part of an international group of researchers, collaborating on the cross-national research project entitled Patterns of Urban/Regional Innovation, A Comparative Study of Eight European Countries. She was also a major partner in the UCD-based Irish team, which led the European Commission Framework project entitled Organising for EU Enlargement and which involved international collaboration with universities in Greece, Finland, Slovenia, Hungary and Estonia. She has recently co-edited a book entitled "Irish Social and Political Attitudes", published in 2006 and which presents the research findings, based on the analysis of the large-scale ISPAS data set. In 2001, she was co-funded by the Centre for Cross-Border Studies in Armagh and co-authored a major report in 2001, entitled Creating Living Institutions. Cross border and regional co-operation after the Good Friday Agreement. At about this time, she also collaborated with Dutch colleagues on a project examining national wage agreements and organised a research workshop at UCD entitled Negotiating Wage Agreements: Social Partnership in Ireland and the Netherlands. Prior to moving to UCD, Dr Payne worked with Professor Robert Bennett at the University of Cambridge on a project examining decision making for regional economic development under the Blair Labour Government, which culminated in several peer-reviewed papers as well as a book entitled "Local and Regional Economic Development. Negotiating Power under Labour". Dr Payne PhD research completed at the ICD, University of Groningen in the Netherlands focused on "Policy Making in the European Union: An analysis of the implications of the Reform of the Structural Funds in Ireland".