Standing in the Gap - feminist, activist research to address sexual harassment and ill-being in HE 

Safe to Speak Up? Sexual harassment in the UK film and television industry since #MeToo from Anna Bull was published last week. Anna has worked on sexual harassment across industries, most notably in universities with the 1752 group. Last year, Anna Bull and I finally published the article: 'Joining up well-being and sexual misconduct data and policy in HE: ‘To stand in the gap’ as a feminist approach'. 

I say finally, because this article began in the pub in 2016. We were discussing our frustrations with our experience of how universities deal with well-being and sexual harassment in HE. Our shared anger and dissatisfaction with the status quo was the imperative for a piece of shared research. We discuss more about the origins of the article and the article itself, in a video of a presentation we co-delivered here.

The article, then, comes from feminist activism to address the issues of staff sexual misconduct, well-being in HE & the uses of data & evidence. It demonstrates how to ‘stand in the gaps’ – between knowledges; between evidence & action; between policy & care. We stand in these gaps through the joining up of bodies of evidence on 2 linked HE concerns that are treated as unrelated in policy: PhD well-being, and staff sexual misconduct. The article reveals ways that PhD experiences, particularly the cultures that engender ill-being & enable sexual misconduct, are silenced.

We talk about the organising modes of HE that conceal lack of care, staff sexual misconduct and poor well-being – and enable poor HE policy to be reproduced. We describe how the lack of care in HE policy is enabled through: 1 the (mis)construction of the typical student; 2 the (mis)construction of the phenomenon of well-being; 3 the (mis)construction of HEIs as inclusive, integrated, agential and ethical.

Joining up evidence of #wellbeing & sexual harassment in HE policy & practice reveals: - Risks of greater supervisor responsibility for PGR well-being; - Patterns of vulnerability to ill-being & staff sexual misconduct; - Norms of institutional listening while silencing.

With this article we are trying to move beyond siloed approaches that discuss sexual misconduct and wellbeing separately, and to make visible the institutional logics that underpin the similar issues that have been documented in both domains. In short we want to break the silos and break the silence. 

Oman, S., & Bull, A. (2022). Joining up well-being and sexual misconduct data and policy in HE: ‘To stand in the gap’ as a feminist approach. The Sociological Review, 70(1), 21-38. https://doi.org/10.1177/00380261211049024

The video discussing our paper was originally presented as part of the conference “Unsettling Knowledge Production on Gendered & Sexual Violence Symposium 2021”, University of Cape Town. 

Susan Oman is Lecturer in Data, AI and Society at The University of Sheffield.

Anna Bull is Senior Lecturer in Education at The University of York.