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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…
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Doing intersectionality in empirical research
Many Gender Studies students are well versed in the language and politics of intersectionality. But this often seems to fall by the wayside when it comes to designing their research projects. Intersectionality is easy to say, but difficult to do: this is work of designing and redesigning, questioning and (in Kimberlé Crenshaw’s words) ‘asking the other question’. In her famous article ‘Mapping the Margins’, Crenshaw defines three levels of intersectionality: Structural: how the social locations of Black women make their lived experiences qualitatively different from those of white women; Political: how feminist and antiracist politics have both marginalised the concerns…
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Reckoning Up: an institutional economy of sexual harassment and violence
(Content note for sexually violent language and descriptions of traumatic experiences) I want to construct an ‘institutional economy’ of sexual harassment and violence. What does this mean? These phenomena are often positioned within narratives about boys – or men – ‘behaving badly’. While it is crucial to hold individuals accountable for their actions, as sociologists we must go further. Sexual harassment and violence are of the social: produced and shaped by gender and other intersecting structures of inequality, and framed by the neoliberal rationalities which, as Wendy Brown argues, have seeped into almost all aspects of our lives. An institutional economy…
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Disclosure and exposure in the neoliberal university
This Spring, as part of a collaborative partnership of colleagues from the UK and 5 other European countries, I helped to launch a European Commission-funded project entitled ‘Universities Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence‘. Our main aim is to create university environments in which students can disclose experiences of sexual harassment and assault, through providing ‘first response’ training to key staff. We have committed to training 80 staff in each of our 13 Partner and Associate Partner universities. As we begin our work, I want to think more deeply about disclosure. The word is loaded, and the act is too: laden…
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The university campus as ‘Hunting Ground’
The Hunting Ground is an incredibly powerful film. Its main strength is the testimony of the brave survivors who tell their stories on camera – tales of harrowing victimisation, and narratives of resilience and strength as they take on the machinery of their universities and help each other through trauma and recovery. I am full of admiration for these survivors – their voices break the silence around campus sexual assault, and in the process become part of a long feminist tradition of sharing experience to create political change. They are both male and female, although it is a shame the…
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Why the ‘Nordic Model’ sucks (with references)
One aim of the recent Home Affairs Committee Prostitution Inquiry seems pretty clear. The first question contributors were asked to answer is ‘whether criminal sanction in relation to prostitution should continue to fall more heavily on those who sell sex, rather than those who buy it’. This leading formulation offers a choice between two modes of criminalisation rather than asking about all possible legal models, and situates the criminalisation of sex workers and their clients as separable when in reality they are not. There are numerous negative consequences of the so-called ‘Nordic Model’ criminalising sex workers’ clients in an effort to ‘end demand’ for…
