Welcome back!
Associate Director Kaveri Qureshi and Lauren Hood, outgoing summer Intern, take stock of what GENDER.ED has been doing this summer, to get ourselves ready for the new academic year.
Naga Munchetty and Devi Sridhar in conversation at the Edinburgh International Book Festival
Photo taken by Lauren Hood
Welcome back to semester!
Kaveri:
Today is the first day of teaching, so I’ve been up bright and early and teaching since 9am about gender, equity, rights and health! Now we’ve reached lunchtime, I’m able to sit down with Lauren Hood, our outgoing summer Intern, to take stock of what GENDER.ED has been doing this summer.
Lauren, I know a little about what you’ve been up to this summer. We certainly did an amazing amount of work together, to get our ducks in a row for the new year’s blog – I’m so grateful to you for all the work you’ve done, not only with drafting and editing but also with the visuals for the blog. Can you tell me what else you were doing as part of your GENDER.ED summer Internship?
Lauren:
I thoroughly enjoyed working with you on preparing the GENDER.ED blog for the upcoming academic year. I liked the mix of blog content authored by students and staff, and the variety of disciplines which authors discussed. Outside of blog work, I worked on revising transcriptions of oral history interviews conducted for Women’s, Gender, Feminist and Sexualities Studies Teaching at the University of Edinburgh – an oral history project which built upon the Voices from the Early Days Project. Alongside strengthening my writing and editing skills, working on this project allowed me a valuable insight into staff experiences of advocating for and carrying out teaching on gender and sexuality. Transcribing these interviews has also been good practice for my upcoming dissertation, where I will be conducting oral history interviews as part of my research.
My internship was hosted by Institute for the Advanced Studies in the Humanities (IASH), meaning that I also had the opportunity to work on some projects for them. This work included proofreading in-progress manuscripts and moving published website content over to a new platform. My work with IASH was extremely varied, which I loved as it allowed me to understand how such an institution operates and the different projects and academics which it supports.
Kaveri:
It was wonderful to see you in person at the Edinburgh International Book Festival reception last month. I know you were working on that too! The reception was hosted by IASH and the Edinburgh Futures Institute, to hear more about Women Who Dared: From the Infamous to the Forgotten, the latest book from the IASH Dangerous Women Project, which will be published by Edinburgh University Press later this month. I was really struck by the genre-busting creativity of this project.
Afterwards, we went to hear Naga Munchetty talk about her new book, It’s (Not) All In Your Head, in conversation with the University’s Devi Sridhar, at this IASH-supported book festival event. This talk addressed a compelling issue close to my heart – the medical neglect of women’s health and gaslighting of women when they present with symptoms, pursue diagnosis and treatment. Naga Munchetty pushed women to advocate for themselves in healthcare settings. The talk left me with further questions about the systematic, as well as intersectional nature of medical misogyny.
Hopefully, we can follow up some of these questions at our upcoming GENDER.ED Welcome event on 25th September. Over a reception – giving us the chance to catch up, mingle and meet new faces – we will be treated to an exhibition of poetry and artwork curated by Marie Larsson – The Pill. Angry Chuckles. Following that, there’ll be a roundtable discussion on the theme of Researching Contraception, Gendered Relationships and Social Justice, featuring Marie Larsson, Lauren Galligan, Arushi Sahay and Ingrid Young, and chaired by Lucy Lowe. Please sign up for the event here: GENDER.ED Welcome Reception Tickets, Thu, Sep 25, 2025 at 5:00 PM | Eventbrite
This will be just the first of a full calendar of events taking place over this new academic year.