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Staff Profile

Professor Alison Phipps

Professor of Sociology

Background

I’m a political sociologist and scholar of gender with interests in feminist theory and politics, the body and violence and neoliberal racial capitalism. I’ve pursued these in various areas including sexual violence, sex work, reproduction, and institutional cultures. All this work has involved different forms of engagement and collaboration, locally, nationally and internationally.

I was educated in Teeside, and then in Somerset at my local comprehensive. I wanted to be a dancer and did three years' professional training at Elmhurst Ballet School on a local authority scholarship, before it became obvious I wasn't going to make it and needed to find a different job instead. So I applied for, and got into, Manchester University to do Politics and Modern History. I probably wouldn't have gone to university if I'd had to pay fees. I also probably wouldn't get in to university now, as I only have two A-levels. 

Before becoming an academic I had lots of different jobs. I worked as a waitress in restaurants and cafes and behind bars in pubs and nightclubs. I was a painter and decorator. I worked in the Body Shop. I did admin jobs in many different companies and organisations. I danced on a podium and sang in bands. I got into academia by accident - Manchester University approached me to do a funded masters, and then put me in touch with my PhD supervisor who helped me get funding for that. If I hadn't been able to get funding it wouldn't have occurred to me to do a PhD - I'm the first person ever in my family to do one. 

I have had three academic jobs. Before starting at Newcastle in 2021 I was Director and then Professor of Gender Studies at Sussex University, between 2005 and 2021 (starting on a temporary contract which was made permanent eventually). Before that I was an hourly-paid lecturer at Brighton University.

I have been Chair of the Feminist and Women's Studies Association UK and Ireland and was a co-founder of the Safe Studies Network (now Universities Against Gender-Based Violence). I am currently co-leading the Feminist Gender Equality Network's gender-based violence group and I am one of the patrons of the Association of Gender Studies in Africa. I recently launched a new collective called Abolition Feminism for Ending Sexual Violence, with my Newcastle colleagues Nikki Godden-Rasul and Tina Sikka. 

Research
The big ongoing questions for my work are around the relationships between heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and gender-based violence, and how mainstream feminist theory and activism can divest from racial capitalism and become truly transformative.  

My second book The Politics of the Body (published by Polity Press in 2014) covered several issues - sexual violence, sex work and reproductive justice - and argued that mainstream feminism around these was caught in a dialectic between neoconservative and neoliberal frameworks.  

My third book Me, Not You: the trouble with mainstream feminism (published by Manchester University Press in 2020) explores how mainstream feminism around sexual violence tends to pull the levers of oppressive systems rather than building alternatives. In addressing this, I’ve grounded established critiques of how class-privileged white women dominate feminism, in the social and cultural history of white womanhood. I argue, drawing on Black and abolitionist feminist theory, that mainstream feminism, in its focus on criminal punishment and institutional discipline, effectively treats Black and other marginalised people as disposable.

The book also looks at some other Others of mainstream feminism – sex workers and trans people. I argue that branches of mainstream feminism can become reactionary, turning a focus on the wounded body into deep defensiveness. This positions other liberation politics as threatening, especially when it’s challenging, and trans women especially are constructed as a threat. In contrast, I argue that a truly transformative feminism requires what Angela Davis calls an ‘intersectionality of struggles’ in which we’re comrades and not competitors.

This analysis was shaped by my experience of being a scholar-activist in the movement around sexual violence against students since 2006. With NUS, I was involved in the first national survey of sexual violence against students and I led the report on ‘lad culture’ that helped catalyse a movement in this country. I’ve focused particularly on how this violence is framed by the neoliberal institution and in 2016 I co-founded the Changing University Cultures collective, which has conducted projects at several UK universities. I also co-led the pan-European Universities Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence project, which designed, piloted and evaluated disclosure training programmes for over a thousand staff in 21 different institutions in the UK, Spain, Greece, Italy, Latvia and Serbia. 

My work in universities has theorised how marketised, competitive cultures create the conditions for violence by giving certain individuals a lot of power and value, and tend to prioritise reputation over staff and student wellbeing. I have introduced the concept of ‘institutional airbrushing’, which takes two main forms: concealment and erasure. Either issues are minimised, denied or hidden, or when this isn’t possible, the perpetrator is ‘airbrushed’ from the institution and it’s made to appear as if they were never there. This stabilises the system - all the institution needs to do to preserve itself is remove the blemish. The malaise remains, and the blemish tends to reappear elsewhere.

I’ve consistently challenged approaches to violence that treat the institution as neutral. I draw from abolitionist university studies, which positions the university as key to the capitalist, colonial world-making project. As Audre Lorde famously said, ‘the master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house’.

I’m now working on a new book called Personal Business (again with Manchester University Press). This explores in depth what sexual violence does in the intersecting systems of heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism and colonialism. I argue that sexual violence enters the world along four vectors – threats, acts, allegations, and punishment – and these must be considered together if we want to understand why sexual violence occurs and how to stop it. I also go deeper into the limitations of existing activism and make a number of suggestions for ways forward which draw on abolitionist thinking.

All this work, which tries to move towards a world without sexual violence, means thinking and rethinking the role of care in all its complexity. This means engaging with the double-sided nature of care - critiques of privatised, individualised and consumerist models alongside recognition of our inter-relatedness and responsibilities to each other. In racial capitalism, care can be violence because it is compelled, forced, outsourced and unevenly distributed, and withheld from those who need it most. But, as I argue in my work, care is also at the heart of the alternatives we need. As Ruth Wilson Gilmore says, abolition means making the conditions for a better world.
Teaching

This year I am leading on the final-year dissertation and co-leading the second-year methods module Researching Social Life. Next year I will be offering an MA module called 'Gender, Violence and Social Change.' I supervise a number of PhD students in areas related to my research interests, and I am accepting new applications.

At my previous institution, Sussex University, I was Director, and then Professor, of Gender Studies between 2005 and 2021. In this role I was responsible for undergraduate, MA and PhD programmes. As curriculum lead for Gender Studies I prioritised intersectionality, self-knowledge, social change and what Mohanty calls ‘pedagogies of dissent’.  

In my own classroom, I practice what bell hooks calls ‘engaged pedagogy’. This works towards the intellectual and personal growth of students and foregrounds the notion of praxis, which involves both reflection and action. I aim to challenge the received 'canon', to bring politics into the classroom, and to encourage research for social change. My principles for teaching include validating student knowledge and experience, an emphasis on dialogue and not ‘debate’, recognising multiple inequalities and power relations, developing self-awareness, and ‘calling in’ rather than ‘calling out’ when conflicts arise. 

I share many of my teaching resources online for colleagues and students to use - my personal website hosts a range of resources including a set of introductory lectures on feminism, an advanced gender theory syllabus (with suggested classroom activities), and a set of handouts and infographics for dissertation students and their supervisors. Sharing resources is a political choice which allows me to resist the commodification of knowledge and territorialism over ‘intellectual property’ that neoliberal systems generate. 

I am a Senior Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. 

Publications