This one-day symposium explores ‘difficult conversations’ and how they can be the impetus for positive change. The emphasis on voice and naming of experiences in feminist theory has tended to elide the tensions that can arise as a result. We would like to explore these tensions, how they are dealt with in different scenarios and critically assess how they become a productive resource leading to positive change. Rather than simply focus on ‘speaking out’, the symposium is concerned with the tensions that occur when addressing sensitive topics, and how this is not only necessary but a productive force. The symposium is open to anyone who is interested to engage with these issues.

We are delighted to announce that confirmed speakers so far include: Pam Alldred (Brunel), Pam Cox (Essex), Sukhwant Dhaliwal (London Metropolitan), Maria do Mar Pereira (Warwick), Rosalind Gill (City), Gail Lewis (Birkbeck), Lata Narayanaswamy (Leeds), and Awino Okech (SOAS).

This event is organised by CISC (https://www1.essex.ac.uk/sociology/research/cisc.aspx) the Centre for Intimate and Sexual Citizeship, and is generously funded by the Department of Sociology. Refreshments (lunch and cofee/tea) will be provided.

This is a FREE event, but places are limited, please book as soon as possible to avoid disappointment.

If you have any queries about the event, dietary requirements, need alternative formats of materials or other reasonable adjustments, please do not hesitate to get in touch with the organisers at: cisc@essex.ac.uk.

The event will take place at the Essex Business School (Room EBS 2.50) which is located on the Universtiy of Essex Campus: building J on this map: https://www.essex.ac.uk/-/media/documents/about/colchester-campus-map.pdf

Programme

11-11.15 Introduction

11.15-12.45 Panel One: Neoliberalism and academia

Rosalind Gill: Difficult conversations… privilege and struggle

Maria do Mar Pereira: Having Difficult Conversations when we’re Too Tired to Talk: On Doing Feminist Work in the Hyper-productive University

Awino Okech: Pedagogy and Resistance: Reflections from the classroom

12.45-1.45: Lunch

1.45-3.15: Panel Two: Power and struggle

Gail Lewis: ‘I’m speaking but what do you hear?’: Brief thoughts on the question of racial ontology and racialized experience.

Sukhwant Dhaliwal: Pushing for a creative solidarity politics: reflections on challenging fundamentalism in the UK

Pam Alldred: Imperatives and Striations in Debates about Sexual Violence

3.15-3.30: Tea/Coffee

3.30-.4.30: Panel Three: Gender and voice

Pam Cox: Difficult conversations: findings ways to voice and address the harms caused by recurrent care proceedings

Lata Narayanaswamy: Difficult Conversations Professionalization and the decolonisation of global gender equality norms

4.30-5.00: Final discussion

Abstracts

1. Rosalind Gill: Difficult conversations… privilege and struggle

When I was approached to speak at this symposium on difficult conversations, within moments I realised that the concept spoke to multiple aspects of my experience within academia – despite my privileged position as a white, tenured professor with a job in a metropolitan centre. Yet how to speak of this in a properly critical way that doesn’t fall into self-indulgence, exaggeration or recentring my own privilege? How to speak too in a public environment, without it becoming painful, even unbearable, and without exposing too much of myself or making others vulnerable? In thinking about this topic my brief talk will range over questions about marginality, experience, responsibility, and solidarity – trying to draw connections between embodied experiences of shame, anxiety, anger, disappointment, and the wider environments of febrile social media and hyper-competitive academia.

BIO:

Rosalind Gill is Professor of Cultural and Social Analysis, at the School of Arts and Social Sciences of City, University of London. She is known for her research interests in gender and media, cultural and creative work, and mediated intimacy. For the last decade she has made a significant contribution to debates about the “sexualization of culture”. She enters this contested and polarized field bringing an emphasis upon difference – particularly the ways in which differently located groups (by age, class, gender, sexuality, vulnerability, etc) are positioned by and in relation to sexualization – and upon new ways of thinking about the relationship between culture and subjectivity – how what is “out there” gets “in here” to shape our sense of self. She is the author and editor of numerous books, including Aesthetic Labour: Rethinking Beauty Politics in Neoliberalism(Palgrave, 2017) and Mediated Intimacy: Sex and Advice in Media Culture(Polity Press, 2018).

2. Maria do Mar Pereira: Having Difficult Conversations when we’re Too Tired to Talk: On Doing Feminist Work in the Hyper-productive University

The point of feminist scholarship, many would argue, is to have difficult conversations. Fostering dialogue and exchange on difficult, disturbing and disruptive issues has been feminism’s raison d’être, mission and most significant contribution, both within and beyond the academy. But what happens to feminist scholarship – and to feminist scholars – when we are too tired and too busy to be able to talk, when we don’t have the energy or the time to maintain difficult conversations? In this presentation, I explore these questions, drawing on an ethnography of academic work in neo-liberal universities. I analyse the generalised mood of exhaustion, depression and alienation which arguably characterises contemporary academia, but I also discuss the reactions colleagues have had when I presented that analysis at other academic events. I argue that tackling this mood requires its own difficult conversations – about the future of feminist scholarship, our fraught relationship with academic work, and our ambivalent individual and collective investments in academic success.

BIO:

Maria do Mar Pereira is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Warwick, and the Deputy Director of Warwick’s Centre for the Study of Women and Gender. Her first book – Doing Gender in the Playground: the Negotiation of Gender and Sexuality in Schools – was published in 2012 and received the ICQI Award for Best Qualitative Book in Spanish or Portuguese (2010-2014). Her second book – Power, Knowledge and Feminist Scholarship: an Ethnography of Academia – was published in 2017 by Routledge and received a Philip Leverhulme Prize. She is an editor of the journal Feminist Theory and tries (often unsuccessfully) to juggle all of the above with sanity, parenting and involvement in feminist activism.

3. Awino Okech: Pedagogy and Resistance: Reflections from the classroom

This paper focusses on the classroom and the syllabus as a site of resistance. How do curricula and pedagogical methods frame knowledge production and its circulation as sites of multiple struggles – historical and contemporary? What are the difficulties that emerge with this approach to thinking about pedagogy and what is the duty of care of a pedagogue? How are the tensions mediated by who the pedagogue is – racialised, gendered and classed in specific ways? Who speaks back and through what channels? How is discomfort registered and what do we do with it, in order to make intersectional meaning of what it means to teach feminism in its inter-disciplinary forms. More importantly, how do we build critical transnational praxis. This paper will draw on my experiences as a lecturer and a range of interviews with black academics that I have conducted over the past six months.

BIO:

Dr. Awino Okech's teaching and research interests lies in the nexus between gender, sexuality and nation/state making projects as they occur in conflict and post-conflict societies. In addition, Dr Okech sees the processes through which knowledge production occur as critical to transforming and re-thinking academic practice today. Therefore, the politics of knowledge production, research and research(ing) form a central part for her teaching and research focus.

4. Gail Lewis: ‘I’m speaking but what do you hear?’: Brief thoughts on the question of racial ontology and racialized experience.

Starting from Fanon’s chapter 5 in Black Skins, White Masks, in this brief presentation I will attempt to offer some thoughts about the tension between ‘the fact of blackness’ and ‘the lived experience of the black’ and its implication for feminists to engage in difficult conversation.

BIO:

Gail Lewis joined the department of Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck in September 2013. She studied at the LSE for her first degree was in Social Anthropology, followed by an MPhil in Development Studies gained from the Institute of Development Studies at Sussex. Her PhD in Social Policy was gained at the Open University, where she was a member of the Social Sciences Faculty between 1995-2004 and again between 2007-2013. Between her two spells at the Open University she worked at Lancaster University in the Institute for Women’s Studies, where she was Head of Department. She is also a qualified psychodynamic psychotherapist. Her academic interests centre on the constitution of subjectivity as racialised and gendered, psychoanalysis, black feminism, experience as a site of knowing and knowledge production, social policy and welfare practice, psychodynamics of organisational process, multiculture and formations of national belonging. She has published in Feminist Review, Feminist Theory, Ethnic and Racial Studies, Signs, Cultural Studies, and theEuropean Journal of Women’s Studies. Her most recent publication is ‘Questions of Presence’ (2017) in Feminist Review117.

5. Sukhwant Dhaliwal: Pushing for a creative solidarity politics: reflections on challenging fundamentalism in the UK

Through reflections on her involvement with the activist group Women Against Fundamentalism and journal Feminist Dissent, Sukhwant will reflect on the persistent tensions surrounding anti-fundamentalist activism. In particular, she will point to the struggle to get feminists and anti-racists in the UK to see fundamentalism as their concern in spite of the international resurgence of fundamentalist religions of all hues. Secondly, she will note the difficulty in trying to get anti-fundamentalist activists to approach the issue from a civil liberties and human rights perspective. Moreover, she will reflect on the central place of discussions about the State (as surveillance, state over reach, imperialism and racism) in reactions to fundamentalism. Throughout the presentation, Sukhwant will highlight the productive nature of all these tensions and the particular way that they have enabled and given rise to creative, enriching and enlivening networks across marginal spaces but she will also note the persistence of recurrent themes.

BIO:

Sukhwant Dhaliwal is a Senior Lecturer at London Metropolitan University. Before moving over to academia, she worked in the women’s voluntary sector in the UK, for Black and minority women’s organisations supporting women and children fleeing violence and abuse. She has worked on research projects at the intersection of ‘race’ and a number of other equalities strands, namely gender, age, disability, religion and belief. She was centrally involved with Women Against Fundamentalism (WAF) between 1996 and 2012. When WAF decided to close, with Nira Yuval-Davis, she co-edited Women Against Fundamentalism: Stories of Dissent and Solidarity, published by Lawrence an Wishart. She is one of the founders and editorial collective members of Feminist Dissent a new journal on gender and fundamentalism and she is currently working on their Special Issue on Prevent, the government's anti-radicalisation programme.

6. Pam Alldred: Imperatives and Striations in Debates about Sexual Violence

I welcome the increased attention to sexual violence in the popular media, but not always the terms in which it is discussed. Arguments about sexual violence are replete with assumptions. This paper will consider how these assumptions shape the debates, and ultimately our sexualities, by applying the Deleuzian notion of 'striation', and the idea of 'territorialisation' (Fox and Alldred 2017). I will try to apply these to the findings from the USVreact Project, which Alison Phipps (Sussex U) and I lead from 2016-2018. USVreact has piloted sexual violence first-responder training for staff in 21 universities (and these training resources are now available for adaption and use at other universities: www.USVReact/eu). I will explore whether these concepts can help understand the politics and micropolitics of sexual violence awareness in these six European countries.

BIO:

Dr. Pam Alldred is Reader in Education and Youth Studies in the Social Work Division at Brunel University London. She researches sexualities, parenting and sex education and has lead two large international projects on gender-related violence, and then on sexual violence with European Union co-funding. The first (GAP Work) produced free training resources to help youth practitioners to challenge gender-related violence in young people’s lives (https://sites.brunel.ac.uk/gap

7. Pam Cox: Difficult conversations: findings ways to voice and address the harms caused by recurrent care proceedings

This presentation is based on Prof Cox’s ongoing collaborative and interdisciplinary research on a series of projects aiming to reduce recurrent care proceedings in England and Wales. The research involves local authorities, voluntary organisations and birth parents as service users in the co-design and co-conducting of mixed method evaluations of new interventions offered to mothers who have had one or more of their children removed through public law child protection processes. Both the interventions and the evaluations involve a series of difficult but vital conversations. Prof Cox has co-published articles on this work in the Journal of Law and Society and the Journal of Social Welfare and Family Law.

BIO:

Prof Pamela Cox teaches and researches across sociology, social history, criminology and gender studies at the University of Essex. She has just completed a co-authored book, Young Criminal Lives: Life Courses and Life Chances from 1850 (OUP) which traces the adult outcomes of those passing through the youth justice and care systems as children. She is also leading a series of collaborative research projects around the contemporary care system focusing on the challenge of reducing recurrent care proceedings.

8. Lata Narayanaswamy: Difficult Conversations Professionalization and the decolonisation of global gender equality norms

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) – SDG 5 – makes explicit commitments to achieving gender equality. Enabling the agency of women and adolescent girls is central to the SDG commitment to ‘leave no one behind’. Harmful gender norms around, for instance, forced marriage, educational access and sexual expression are widely seen as constraints on the agency of women and girls. A growing chorus of voices envisions gender norm change as central to attempts to liberate female agency in service of wider development objectives such as the SDGs. These approaches coexist alongside powerful neoliberal norms that emphasise individual agency, competitiveness and privilege, whilst remaining silent on the persistence of structural/institutional barriers to the capacity of women and girls to facilitate change in the lives of themselves and their communities. It also highlights ‘difficult conversations’ about norms, and the question of whose norms count. As development feminists have theorized about the need to diversify the voices included in these debates, I argue that the spaces of dialogue and contestation from which gender norms are perceived to emerge are increasingly silenced by neoliberal processes and the related professionalisation of development practice. It is against this backdrop that the knowledge for development movement has arisen to privilege certain modes of information - consisting of books, reports, conference papers and pamphlets – and certain modes of dissemination such as conferences and policy roundtables. Development practice may seek to privilege the voices of those on the margins, but often fail as a result of spreading professionalisation. Most importantly, the favoured modes of the development professional often serve to reinforce the primacy of the English language and the tendency for English to be the form in which ideas are codified and thus legitimized. My work challenges us to ‘decolonise’ these structural/institutional barriers if we are to promote inclusion in gender and development discourse and practice and ‘leave no one behind.

BIO:

Since 2001 Lata has worked as a research practitioner, consultant and most recently lecturer in international development. Her most recent book, Gender, Power and Knowledge-for-Development, raises questions about the essential utility of the knowledge paradigm and its underpinning presumption: that a knowledge deficit exists in the global South, particularly for marginalized women, that may be addressed by improving the supply-side of knowledge without accounting for the specific needs of the knowledge systems being targeted for support.

Event image courtesy of Krystina Stimakovits: http://www.stima-images.com