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Created by the SSPS Communications and Engagement team
Meet the GENDER.ED Core Team
Director
Dr Radhika Govinda is the Director of GENDER.ED.
Radhika is the Director of genderED; she is a feminist sociologist at the School of Social and Political Science.
Radhika’s research bridges the fields of sociology of gender, international development and South Asian Studies. Her work sheds light on the importance of understanding gender politics at the intersections of caste, class, race/ethnicity and religion in women’s and social movements, in development policies and practice, in everyday social relations, and in the global dynamics of knowledge production. She was the Principal Investigator of the recently concluded international project, Teaching Feminisms, Transforming Lives: Questions of Identity, Pedagogy and Violence in India and the UK.
Associate Director
Dr Hemangini Gupta is an Associate Director of GENDER.ED.
Hemangini is a Lecturer in Gender and Global Politics at the School of Social and Political Science. She has a PhD in Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies.
Hemangini researches and has teaching interests in transnational feminisms, postcolonial and decolonial theory, and gender and sexuality in the South. Her PhD thesis was based on an ethnographic study of what she understands as “startup capitalism” in Bangalore, India. It is the basis for a monograph now under contract with the University of California Press, tentatively titled “Startup Capitalism: Experimental Lives and Feminised Labor in India.”
Advisors & Leads
Prof Fiona Mackay is GENDER.ED’s Governance and Policy Advisor.
Fiona is the founding Director of GENDER.ED (2017-2022).
She is a feminist political scientist at the School of Social and Political Science at the University of Edinburgh. Her research focuses on the impact of gender reform efforts during periods of restructuring and institutional change, addressing the extent to which global and local institutions of politics and governance may be designed or reformed to address gender inequality and promote gender justice.
Fiona is a member of the Steering Group.
Dr Patricia Erskine is GENDER.ED’s Stakeholder Relations Advisor.
Patricia is Head of Stakeholder Relations & Policy Officer for the College of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
She is a member of the Steering Group.
Dr Meryl Kenny is GENDER.ED’s Education Advisor, the Teaching, Learning and Curriculum Project Lead, and the Co-Convener of ‘Understanding Gender in the Contemporary World.’
She is a Senior Lecturer in Gender and Politics, Convenor of the Gender Politics Research Group, and Co-Director of the Feminism and Institutionalism International Network. Meryl’s research interests bridge the intersection of gender politics, party politics, territorial politics, and institutional approaches to the study of politics.
Meryl created the Ordinary level course ‘Understanding Gender in the Contemporary World’ and currently co-convenes it with Dr Hemangini Gupta. Meryl is a member of the GENDER.ED Steering Group.
Dr Rebecca Hewer leads GENDER.ED’s Gender and Sexuality Studies Reading Group (GSS-RG).
She is a Chancellor’s Fellow in Sociology, School of Social and Political Sciences. Her research explores the socio-legal regulation of (primarily) women’s bodies, the politics of knowledge production, and feminist utopian thinking. She is particularily interested in reproductive and sexual governance and justice, and prefigurative policy reform. Rebecca convenes the UG honours course “Contemporary Feminist Debates”.
Dr Rosalind Cavaghan is the Project Manager and Lead Researcher of the ‘Doing Gender Sensitive Research’ Project.
She is an independent scholar and consultant who manages genderED’s SFC/GCRF funded project ‘Integrating Gender into GCRF Funding Bids and Projects’. The project aims to increase gender sensitive research capacity across all disciplines, especially STEMM at Edinburgh and in partner institutions.
Her research applies a feminist political economy lens to EU macro economic policy, climate transition policies and post-Brexit trade policy, focusing on intersectional policy impacts and bureaucratic and civil society knowledge production processes, that seek to promote or challenge existing policy.
Communications
Rhea Gandhi is GENDER.ED’s PhD Communications and Editorial Assistant.
Rhea Gandhi is a psychotherapist, group therapist and liberation-oriented educator and researcher. She is doing her PhD in Counselling Studies and broadly exploring decolonial approaches to counselling training.
Amy Life is GENDER.ED’s Summer Undergraduate Communications and Events Intern.
Amy Life is going into her fourth year as a French and Philosophy student at the school of Literatures, Languages and Cultures.
She is passionate about ending all forms of Gender Based Violence and has a strong interest in promoting equality within her local communities. Amy is particularily interested in the links between epistemic injustice and the way marginalised identities are perceived when fighting for justice in both individual and group settings.