Reflecting on 2022 and Looking Ahead

This is GENDER.ED’s fifth year! It seems fitting that our first substantial blog post of the year looks back on the year past and shares with you what we hope for 2023.

Reflecting on 2022

Supporting the study of gender and sexualities 

Flagship Courses: Our flagship pre-honours undergraduate course Understanding Gender in the Contemporary World continues to run at full capacity (280 students) and this year Dr. Meryl Kenny co-convened it with Dr. Hemangini Gupta. We award the Yuan Changying Prize to the best student essay in this class and prize-winners are featured on our blog with consent. This year, marking our fifth anniversary, we are instituting the Queer Futures Prize which will be awarded to an essay submitted to the Introduction to Queer Studies course that GENDER.ED also supports (convened by Dr. Merlin Seller in ECA). The Prize seeks to acknowledge and celebrate thoughtful and innovative work in queer studies inspired by classroom discussions and learning. By publishing the winning posts on our popular blog, we continue to build an active resource for widespread teaching and learning about gender and sexuality studies.

Feminist and Decolonial Pedagogy: We continue to work closely with our sister network, RACE.ED. We led on a roundtable conversation on feminist pedagogy and decolonising the classroom on the occasion of International Women’s Day (8 March 2022) as part of a programme of joint work in 2022 on Decolonising the Academy with RACE.ED and CRITIQUE.

International Collaborations 

UnaEuropa: GENDER.ED is part of a successful bid of gender centres/institutes for seed-corn funding to create a UNA Europa gender network (UGEN) in 2022-23. We will host the network’s next meeting, online in February.

16 Days Blogathon: Working with our partners at Ambedkar University Delhi and University of New South Wales, GENDER.ED has curated its fifth 16 Days international blogathon to raise awareness of gender-based violence during the global 16 Days of Activism against Gender-Based Violence (November 25-December 10 2022). In 2022, our theme was Migration, Mobilities and Displacement and the Blogathon was launched with an introductory post by Urvashi Butalia, acclaimed feminist activist and scholar and founder of India’s first feminist publishing house. Our theme for 2023 is Sexual Harassment and Higher Education.

Research Collaborations: We continued to consistently support projects and collaborations within the University involving national and international institutional partners. Most notable in this regard are the Gender Equalities at Work Project, Dangerous Women Project, and Teaching Feminisms, Transforming Lives Project.

Promoting Inclusive and Intersectional Research and Campus Cultures

Research methods training: On 4-6 May 2022, we delivered for the third time a feminist research methods workshop for postgraduate researchers on behalf of the Scottish Graduate Schools and in partnership with Strathclyde University. The workshop garnered significant interest and participation from 25 PhD researchers from various universities in Scotland and from across arts and humanities and social sciences disciplines. It took on a hybrid model where participants were able to meet in person for the first two days on University of Edinburgh campus (hosted by GENDER.ED), and online for the final day over Zoom (hosted by Strathclyde University Feminist Research Network). Team members leading the sessions drew on their own research practice and disciplinary expertise while addressing themes of power, intersectionality, ethics, and the value of ‘lived experience’, which underpin feminist research across disciplines.

GENDER.ED Postdoctoral Fellowship: To mark GENDER.ED’s 5th year anniversary celebrations, GENDER.ED and IASH announced the launch of the GENDER.ED Postdoctoral Fellowship at a reception event held in September ’22. Starting AY 2022/23, one Fellowship per annum will be awarded to a qualifying academic to allow them to spend up to 10 months at IASH, pursuing research on gender and sexuality studies.

Improving Research with a Gender Sensitive Approach: Makarere University, Uganda has been a key partner in our GCRF-funded programme on gender-sensitive research and equitable research partnerships. We are now expanding the reach of the Gender Sensitive Toolkit that came from this partnership and on February 8, Dr. Rosalind Cavaghan and Dr. Claire Duncanson will host a workshop for Edinburgh Earth Institute (EEI) Fellows to hear about their work and introduce them to the toolkit. Our resources have attracted interest and praise from around the University, including from the Department of Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, Scottish Funding Council, and the British Academy, and have been cited in a recent BEIS review of ODA research. The toolkit has been adopted by several Universities including Glasgow and Bristol.

Recognising Undergraduate Feminists: The Undergraduate Trailblazers Award, jointly run by the Edinburgh University Student’s Association and GENDER.ED, was launched just last year and the winners—Katie Horsburgh, Jaime Prada, and Shy Zvouloun—were featured on our blog. 

Supporting interdisciplinarity and networking

Annual Showcase: Our Annual Showcase of academic, student and institutional research, campaigns and change projects was successfully held in May 2022 using the virtual platform Gather. It featured a roundtable conversation chaired by Professor Fiona Mackay and featuring Dr Ale Boussalem (GeoSciences), Dr Rosalind Cavaghan (independent researcher), Professor Louise Jackson (History, Classics and Archaeology) and Dr Radhika Govinda (Social and Political Science). They engaged in thought-provoking reflections and discussions on what it means to be a feminist/queer researcher in the academy. The showcase attendees were then invited to virtually walk around the poster rooms, which featured 26 posters capturing gender and sexualities-related research created by more than 30 academics from various schools and centres across the University of Edinburgh, including Education, Geosciences, Edinburgh College of Art, School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences (PPLS), Institute for the Advanced Study of the Humanities, and Centre for Research Collections. The poster themes and topics ranged from cultural geographies of LGBTQ+ entrepreneurship in Scotland to feminism and digital consciousness-raising in Brazil.

Image: Audience at the relaunch of the Gender Sexuality Studies Reading Group convened by Dr. Rebecca Hewer, credit: Aerin Lai

Gender Sexuality Studies Reading Group: We have relaunched the Gender Politics Reading Group as the Gender Sexuality Studies Reading Group, convened by Dr. Rebecca Hewer. At an event in January, we relaunched the group at a packed event at which members of GENDER.ED read out pieces of their favourite poetry and academic writing. The first meeting of the group in end-January took place in a seminar room filled to capacity to discuss the recent work of Nancy Fraser. We supported (with CRITIQUE) the Gender Politics Reading Group in convening the Judith Butler ‘Deep Dive’ – this involved an immersive engagement by University of Edinburgh-based gender and sexualities studies academics with Judith Butler’s scholarship led by a Butler expert, Professor Moya Lloyd from the University of Essex.

Critical Friend

Expert Advice: We have provided expert advice across the University, including: University’s Future of Hybrid and Home-Working Working Group (providing support through our Care, HE Careers and Covid online resource). We have contributed to the work of the EDIC Gender sub-committee and its Action Plan, and the University’s short-life working group on Research Cultures and its Action Plan; and are in discussions with EDI Lead, DVP Research, and CAHSS Dean of Research to contribute to institutional work on twin projects examining a) gendered and racialised patterns in UoE REF submission; and b) on impacts of COVID on HE careers (and are currently updating our online resource). The research will inform institutional actions going forward.

Public-Facing Activities and Upcoming events 

Public-facing Activities: We hosted a pre-event reception at the Edinburgh International Book Festival in honour of acclaimed author, Jenni Fagan.

Over July-August 2022, GENDER.ED organized a two-part workshop on ‘Academic Writing for the Public’ for University of Edinburgh-based Early Career Researchers working on gender and sexualities to learn how to pitch an idea, distil findings and write for a general audience. The outputs from the workshop fed into a virtual Early Career Researchers’ Spotlight (September-October 2022) on our blog.

We also had several events attended by members of different centres and departments and the public. With Edinburgh Centre for Data, Culture and Society we co-hosted a book launch September featuring editors Melissa Terras and Elizabeth Crawford in conversation with Professor Fiona Mackay (September); with SPS, a student-led exhibition on #MeToo in China along with an in-person roundtable conversation on ‘#MeToo in China and Beyond’ (September); with the Centres for African Studies and Asian Studies, a roundtable to discuss Rahul Rao’s new book, Out of time: The Queer Politics of Postcoloniality (October); with the Centre for South Asian Studies, and two undergraduate feminist societies, for an in-conversation event with Jaspreet Kaur, acclaimed author of Brown Girl Like Me (November); with the Institute of Middle Eastern Studies, the launch of Ebtihal Mahadeen’s (LLC) new book, Women and the Media in Jordan (November).

Upcoming Events: In February, we will host a workshop with our gender sensitisation toolkit to EEI and host, with CRITIQUE, Sherilyn MacGregor (Uni of Manchester) to give a talk titled ‘Interlocking Crises, Intersectional Visions: Eco-Feminism in Conversation with Degrowth.’ March will see our annual International Women’s Day event, this year focused on Reproductive Justice with a panel discussion bringing together activists and researchers working on this urgent current theme.

Blog posts: Our blog is taking on exciting new directions in programming! Last year our blog hosted invited pieces offering commentary on important contemporary issues like the protests in Iran, historical context on International Safe Abortion Day, work from the Early Career Researchers who participated in our Academic Writing for the Public workshops, reflections on our events, and so much more! This year we will focus on drawing on the expertise of research in gender and sexuality amongst our network to present commentary on current events, offer examples of new directions in feminist research, and curate transnational conversations on feminist activism! We welcome submissions for our blog – if you would like to contribute and share your work, please email us at gender.ed@ed.ac.uk or hemangini.gupta@ed.ac.uk

Succession and Steering Group

Dr Radhika Govinda is now Director of GENDER.ED and has been joined by an Associate Director, Dr Hemangini Gupta. Our Steering Group also welcomes several new members, expanding our interdisciplinary reach, while some existing members have stepped down. This year we are also happy to expand our team with two new members, an undergraduate intern, Sheher Bano, and a PhD Assistant, Rhea Gandhi. We’ll be introducing them soon on our blog.

To keep up to date with us and join our mailing list email gender.ed@ed.ac.uk. Follow us on Twitter @UoE_GENDER.ED and check out our website.