Staff Profile

I joined Newcastle's Sociology Department in October 2022 as an ESRC postdoctoral research fellow through the Northern Ireland and North East England Doctoral Training Partnership (NINE DTP). I received my PhD in Education from the University of York in January 2021. My research focuses on university responses to disclosures of sexual violence, and draws on feminist theory, organisational studies, and sociological theories of power and inequality.

My doctoral thesis--from which I am publishing during this fellowship--was a comparative study of how a selection of universities in the United States and in England respond to student disclosures of sexual violence. I used qualitative methods, specifically interviews and discourse analysis, to interrogate how universities respond at the structural level of national policy guidance, the institutional level of university staff implementing policy, and the subjective level of how survivors experienced their university's response.

In the future, I am interested in researching transformative and abolitionist responses to sexual violence, the university body, and the reporting experiences of survivors of marginalised genders.

• Shannon ER. Safeguarding and Agency: Methodological Tensions in Conducting Research with Survivors of Sexual Violence in Universities. Social Sciences 2022, 11(8), 350.
• Shannon ER. Protecting the perpetrator: value judgements in US and English university sexual violence cases. Gender and Education 2021, 34(8), 906-922.