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Writing up your methodology
Here are some suggestions on how the various sections of a dissertation methods chapter should be put together, expressed as question prompts for you to think about and respond to. This is not a definitive guide, and it does not replace careful reading on methodology and independent thought. You will need to cite academic literature to back up your answers to the questions asked here, and there may be other matters you need to address in your methods chapter that have not been included here, depending on your study. This is just some initial guidance. The prompts here are practical ones – remember…
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Writing your introduction and conclusion
One of the most difficult things to do in drafting any piece of writing (but especially a thesis or dissertation) is the introduction and conclusion. Students often try to tackle the introduction first; I usually advise them to write both the introduction and conclusion last, because they both have a summative function. I also advise students to write them together, because they function as ‘mirror images’ of one another. Here are a few tips I share with my students – I hope you find them useful. Introduction The main purpose of an introduction is to ease your reader into your…
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White feminism and the racial capitalist protection racket: from #MeToo to Me, Not You
Originally published on the Manchester University Press blog On May 25th 2020, Minnesota police officer Derek Chauvin murdered George Floyd, an act that precipitated a powerful wave of Black Lives Matter protests across the world. May 25th 2020 was also the day Amy Cooper (a white woman) called the police on birdwatcher Christian Cooper (a Black man, no relation) because he asked her to leash her dog in Central Park. Her use of the phrase ‘there’s an African-American man threatening my life’ was a threat to get Christian Cooper killed by a cop. These incidents are linked by more than…
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Tackling sexual harassment and violence in universities: seven lessons from the UK
This is the text of an online keynote I gave, hosted by the Universidad Autónoma de Baja California and the Freie Universität Berlin, on February 5th 2021. It was the last in a series of sessions on sexual harassment and violence in universities; when I was invited to speak, I was honoured but also concerned about what I could offer as a UK-based academic whose work on sexual violence has been focused on universities in my home country. My work started in 2006 with a pilot study at my own institution, and since then I have been involved in a…
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Gender, Violence and White Feminism: Q&A with Alison Phipps
This is an interview I did for the Climate Emergency Manchester blog. Could you tell us a little about yourself – where you grew up, went to school, how you came to be a Professor of Gender Studies? I was born in North Yorkshire, then lived in Teeside for a while before my family moved to Bristol. After doing my GCSEs at the local comprehensive, I left home at 16 – I wanted to be a dancer and went into full-time professional training. But I lacked the talent to pursue ballet (my real passion) and was too self-conscious for musical…
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What do we do?
‘What do we do?’ is the question I’m most frequently asked by readers of Me, Not You, and this question has become louder and more urgent in the past two weeks. Massive protests in the US and elsewhere against the police murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Tony McDade and countless others have brought the idea of abolition into the mainstream, and many white feminists are newly interested in fighting sexual violence without criminal punishment. I am also at the beginning of a (life)long journey towards what Angela Davis calls ‘abolition feminism’, and the final chapter of my book shares…
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Transphobia, whorephobia and (as) capitalist-colonial gender
This is the first of a series of blogs I will write following the webinar on my book Me, Not You: the trouble with mainstream feminism. This was broadcast on April 7th to over 100 attendees, who asked some fantastic questions! Because I didn’t get a chance to answer all these during the session, I thought I would answer some of them now. This first piece covers a couple of related questions, pertaining to reactionary trans- and sex-worker-exclusionary feminisms. I deconstruct these feminisms in detail in Chapter Four (‘The Outrage Economy’) and Chapter Six (‘Feminists and the Far Right’) of…
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The political whiteness of #MeToo
This is an edited extract of a chapter from my forthcoming book Me, Not You: the trouble with mainstream feminism. It appeared in Red Pepper on June 4th 2019. On January 24th 2018, gymnastics coach Larry Nassar was sentenced to 40 to 175 years in a Michigan state prison for seven counts of sexual assault of minors. This was one of three sentences given to Nassar, accused of molesting at least 250 girls and young women and one young man, between 1992 and 2016. Sentencing Judge Rosemarie Aquilina told him that, if authorised, she would ‘allow some or many people to…
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Feminists fighting sexual violence in the age of Brexit and Trump
This piece is based on a talk delivered as part of the University of Birmingham School of Social Policy seminar series in January 2019 and as the annual lecture of the University of Bristol Gender Research Centre in April 2019. It brings together much of my recent work on feminist activism against sexual violence both within and outside institutions, contextualising this within broader rightward shifts and the intersecting structures of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism. I want to start with John Mavroudis’ illustration of Dr Christine Blasey Ford, taken from the cover of Time magazine, October 15th 2018. It contains phrases…
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Tanya Serisier’s ‘Speaking Out’
These are some remarks written for the launch of Tanya Serisier’s brilliant new book ‘Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape, and Narrative Politics’ (Palgrave 2018). You can buy the book, or order it for your library, here. Tanya Serisier’s book Speaking Out is the first critical study of white feminist politics around rape which explicitly situates this politics as a narrative form. It analyses narratives from the second wave and after as part of a testimonial genre which has specific plots, characters and themes. The book resists equating ’speaking out’ with justice, freedom or feminism, noting that although there has been a…
Alison Phipps 