Introducing our new Co-Directors, Rebecca Hewer and Kaveri Qureshi!

As of this month, GENDER.ED has a new core team, as Becky Hewer and Kaveri Qureshi have begun as Co-Directors. In this blog, they introduce themselves, and their hopes and aspirations for GENDER.ED, in conversation with Associate Director Wannes Dupont.

Wannes: Becky, can you tell us a bit about yourself?

Becky: Yes, of course! I am a Senior Lecturer (Chancellor’s Fellow) in Sociology, in the School of Social and Political Science. I was appointed to Sociology as a Chancellor’s Fellow in 2021, towards the tail end of the pandemic, but have been at the University of Edinburgh since 2012 as a student and as a post-doc. I am also a parent, a fan of contemporary literary fiction (please talk to me about your favourite book) and a somewhat slow but persistent runner. 

Wannes: Tell us a little about your research?

Becky: My research sits at the intersection of gender studies, socio-legal studies and social policy. Broadly, I am interested in how the state uses its various regulatory technologies to police women’s reproductive and sexual bodies. I am also a big fan of critical and feminist theory. In recent years I have focused on reading the ‘two-child limit’ as a form of reproductive governance, and recently completed some research on the policy’s associated ‘rape clause’.  I have a side interest in critical approaches to knowledge which trouble notions of temporality and realism – approaches like feminist utopianism and hauntology - which is a strand of work I hope to elaborate in the near future. 

Wannes: What motivates you in your feminist work?

Becky: Curiosity and a wide range of emotions. Anger and indignation at injustice, love for those affected, hope for a world that looks radically different to the one we currently occupy. I think there is a lot of beauty in the world, a lot of unseen ordinary beauty, and I am persistently crushed by how readily it is destroyed or at least devalued. But, at the same time, the very fact it exists and continues to emerge, time after time regardless, is cause for optimism. Also, my very many brilliant colleagues motivate me to keep going in the face of obstacles.   

Wannes: What drew you to GENDER.ED and what do you hope to achieve as a Co-Director? 

Becky: I have been involved with GENDER.ED for sometime now. I have been an organiser of the Gender and Sexuality Studies Reading Group since 2018, and a co-organiser of our flagship course since 2024. As a new Co-Director I want to continue to nurture GENDER.ED’s existing portfolio of work, and to ensure it continues to thrive in an institutional environment currently defined by so much disruption and uncertainty. I am also keen to develop the GENDER.ED community in a way that encourages more staff and students to consider it their intellectual home (as I do). Kaveri and I are also committed to growing GENDER.ED’s contributions to the University’s research cultures and activities. 

Wannes: Kaveri, it’s great to be re-introducing you now as a Co-Director of GENDER.ED. Please remind us a bit about yourself and your work.

Kaveri: Sure! I am also a Senior Lecturer at the School of Social and Political Science (in the Global Health Policy Unit, in Social Policy). I joined GENDER.ED a year ago as an Associate Director, having found GENDER.ED to be a home and community crucial to my intellectual and political growth. I work on intersectional inequalities in health, work and family life and this semester I’m actually on sabbatical! I am trying to write a book on reproductive health and labour in Pakistan, as well as a short piece on coloniality and the commercial determinants of health, and inch forward with proposals for new research on economic injustices in South Asian women's experiences of marriage and divorce. Outside work, I'm also into literary fiction and jogging, and dragging my kids up hills.

Wannes: What would you like to achieve as you step into the role of Co-Director?

Kaveri: Becky has already put it so well, in terms of keeping GENDER.ED a thriving place at the current institutional juncture and developing it as a community. I’m particularly invested in it continuing to develop as a cross-career and non-hierarchical space, drawing in people all the way from undergraduate level through to professors - and want to try to build up research in gender and sexuality studies from below, as well as promoting it outwardly in the ways that we already do.

Becky Hewer’s and Kaveri Qureshi’s University profile pages.