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What the ‘grievance studies’ hoax is really about
This is the Open Access (and slightly longer) version of a piece published in Times Higher Education on October 4th 2018. An article entitled ‘Academic Grievance Studies and the Corruption of Scholarship’ has recently been published in Areo Magazine. It describes what Helen Pluckrose (editor of Areo), James A. Lindsay (who has a PhD in mathematics) and Peter Boghossian (an assistant professor of philosophy) term a ‘reflexive ethnography’ of particular academic fields, in which they wrote twenty Sokal-style hoax papers and submitted them under pseudonyms to peer-reviewed journals. The papers cover a variety of topics including sexual violence in urban…
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Sexual harassment and violence in higher education: reckoning, co-option, backlash
This is the text of a keynote (and the inaugural Lincoln Lecture) delivered at the British Association for Contemporary Literary Studies conference in Loughborough on June 12th 2018. I am speaking today about sexual harassment and violence. It is difficult to speak about sexual harassment and violence; these are traumatic experiences, and survivors are subject to many forms of silencing. This is why ‘speaking out’ is crucial. We speak our truths publicly because problems need to be named, to be dealt with: and putting our trauma ‘out there’ is a way to avoid being consumed by it ‘in here’. But…
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To tackle sexual harassment, we need cultural change
This is the longer version of a piece published in the Guardian on 13th December 2017. We’re talking about sexual harassment in higher education again. We need to talk about sexual harassment – in agricultural and domestic labour, sex work, Hollywood, politics, academia, and every other industry. That we’re talking about it in universities at all is due to the work of the 1752 Group, NUS and the Guardian. Because of them, female academics, especially early-career researchers, are coming forward with their experiences. I’m a survivor, too – and with each story, my stomach knots with grief while my heart…
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Juggling the balls, having it all? Tips from a mother and part-time Professor
When I was promoted to Professor in Spring 2017, a number of my female colleagues asked me, ‘how did you do it?’ I have two children, born in 2010 and 2013. I worked three days a week after my first maternity leave, and increased to four days in September 2015 (and remain on a 0.8 contract). I was promoted to Senior Lecturer just before having my first child, to Reader in Spring 2015 and Professor two years after that. As I have tried to get used to my new title (and some of the additional demands that come with it), the…
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‘Reckoning Up’ sexual harassment and violence
This is the transcript of a presentation given as part of a symposium at the 2017 Gender and Education conference (University of Middlesex, June 21-23), focused on the Universities Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence project. The other papers in the symposium were given by Vanita Sundaram, Anne Chappell and Charlotte Jones. I want to start with a reflection on how things have changed since we first developed the USVSV project. When we submitted our bid, disclosure training was not common in universities. Now, at least in the UK, there are a number of excellent models about. I think this is…
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On ‘Impact’
I really hate the word ‘impact’. It makes me think of things which are hard and aggressive: a meteorite colliding with the earth; a fist connecting with a face. It brings to mind the forcible contact of one object with another. In research terms, this is the way ‘impact’ is often done. We imagine it moving with velocity, in a linear direction. We conduct our research and only afterwards think about its impact – then we try to force our ideas out into the world, to leave our mark. We talk about ‘impact acceleration’. And once the impact has been…
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Arguing from qualitative data
One of the main queries I get from research students is about how to develop an argument using qualitative data. When you’re sitting with a stack of narratives, how do you shape them into something interesting and important? How do you construct a clear story without losing complexity, and while letting people speak for themselves as much as you can? This is difficult, painstaking work. This post doesn’t contain advice about data analysis but about what happens after: how you create interpretations from data once you’ve synthesised them into categories or themes, once you’ve understood key trends and identified any…
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The feminist classroom as ‘safe space’ after Brexit and Trump
So it’s happened. Donald Trump is President-elect of the United States. He ran on a white supremacist ticket, and multiple allegations of sexual harassment and assault failed to stop him taking the White House. There were reports of racist, homophobic and misogynistic hate crimes within hours of the result being declared. David Duke called the night one of the ‘most exciting’ of his life, and the Vice-President of France’s Front National declared: ‘their world is collapsing – ours is being built’. The Israeli Right took the opportunity to announce that the era of a Palestinian state is over. This only…
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On Outrage
I have been thinking a lot about outrage. Recently, I have been outraged a lot. Outrageous things have been happening. Outrage is an important feature of contemporary politics, within a proliferation of news and social media which has both democratised debate and given us the ability to hold powerful institutions and individuals to account. It is one of a number of emotions which enter the political, arguably more now than before. OUT-RAGE. It gets our rage out. Out into the public sphere; out of our systems. Outrage is cathartic. It has a righteousness which is a function of its ‘outness’…
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Whose Personal is More Political?
The text below is from a guest blog I wrote for the journal Feminist Theory, to launch my article ‘Whose Personal is More Political? Experience in Contemporary Feminist Politics’, forthcoming in volume 17(3). At present the full text of the article is available from the journal free and can be accessed here. If for any reason you are unable to download this version, the open access version can be downloaded here. Whose personal is more political? This question has been bothering me for a while. Feminism has been a politics of the personal since its inception, from the testimonial activism of black…
Alison Phipps 