Representatives of Indian diaspora community formations in Ireland came together for the first meeting of the Indian Diaspora Advisory Group (DAG) at DCU on 14th August 2026. The meeting was the focal point of diaspora community engagement within the Indian strand of the DiaDip project, led by Revathy Kuttykrishnan Jayakumari. The DAG will help guide the community focus of Revathy’s PhD project and inform the wider project team’s understanding of diaspora diplomacy. Over the course of the day in DCU, the room was filled with stories of diasporic lived experiences, deep discussions around issues that are vital for the community and co-creating the understanding around diaspora diplomacy.

The DAG consists of Indian diaspora community representatives from across Ireland, representing diverse formations within the diaspora. Spanning across Dublin to Belfast, Limerick, Cork, Galway and Clare, they not only represent geographic dispersion within Ireland, but also cross-cutting intersectional identities of gender, profession and cause of representation. From anti-caste movement to queer diaspora formations, the DAG also re-imagined the majority narrative of what an Indian diaspora formation should be like. The DAG meeting was also an interface for the representatives to know more about and engage with each other’s areas of work, fostering inter-community engagement.

Diaspora representatives shared their stories of migration to Ireland, the ideas and journeys that led to their respective movements, while also lending an empathetic ear to the challenges faced by each other.

“Bridge”, “Mediator”, “filtering agent”, “negotiator”, the imaginations around what makes a diaspora diplomat, were intriguing and often intersecting. Participants were encouraged to represent their ideas of diaspora diplomacy through art to capture visual depictions of how communities imagine diaspora diplomacy. Participants were introduced to Ho and McConnell’s (2019) framework of  Mediation, Advocacy, Representation framework to guide the discussion. Where should the diaspora diplomats be aligned towards? Host-land and community embeddedness of diaspora diplomats became a heated point of discussion, often bringing out the type of diaspora diplomat that the community was expecting. Revathy posed a reflexive question: if the DAG members themselves imagine each other as diaspora diplomats was posed to understand if the imagination of the term is still externalized. The discussion also envisioned who gets to be a diaspora diplomat, bringing in the social justice angle to the picture.

Revathy shared the current updates on the Indian diaspora strand, including the desk mapping of Indian diaspora organisations in Ireland, with the representatives. The intended fieldwork plan for the strand in the coming years was presented, seeking feedback, with a focus on what might have been missing from it. The discussion which followed revealed differences in community formations beyond Dublin, and the DAG members provided practical advice for accessing the organisations in their respective areas.

The event concluded with a discussion around what’s ahead in the community-facing plans of the project, seeking the guidance of DAG members on what would best serve the community interests. The homeland engagement and training elements envisioned as the final deliverables of the project were brainstormed with the community representatives. The diaspora communities being researched are not only at the receiving end of the DiaDip project, but also are actively guiding and shaping the research design and process from the start.

The details about Indian diaspora Advisory Group members can be found here.