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Staff Profile

Dr Jessica Wild

ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow

Background

I joined Newcastle University as an ESRC postdoctoral fellow in 2021. Before joining Newcastle, I completed my PhD at the University of Leeds in the School of Sociology and Social Policy (2020). Prior to that, I completed my Gender Studies Masters with qualitative and quantitative research methods, at the Centre for Interdisciplinary Gender Studies, also at the University of Leeds in 2016. I obtained my BA in English literature and philosophy at the University of Sheffield (2007).


Prior to returning to academia in 2015, I mainly worked in London managing 'frontline' community and accommodation based services for adults and young people experiencing homelessness and rough-sleeping, domestic abuse, substance use, and mental health challenges. This included running a large accommodation based service for women experiencing homelessness with co-occurring needs including street based sex work/prostitution, complex trauma, domestic and sexual violence, and mental health. In addition, I have managed domestic abuse refuge services for women with complex needs, as well as, working in a 'frontline' / 121 capacity in community outreach services. Most recently, I have worked for a research and development organisation developing evidence-informed resources for adults' and children's social services, and was the organisational lead for domestic violence and abuse. 

Research

My current project as part of the ESRC postdoctoral fellowship is builds on my doctoral research project titled: Domestic violence & abuse prevention, intervention and the politics of gender. My doctoral and current research seeks to radically reconceptualise the dominant practice and policy paradigms governing the prevention of, and responses to, domestic violence and abuse (DVA) and men's violence more broadly. My research contributes to current debates regarding widespread men's violence, as it seeks to trouble normative understandings and responses to these gendered social problems, which typically place disproportionate responsibility on victim-survivors (usually women), for addressing them. I have therefore examined the incorporation of men in efforts to prevent and intervene in men's violence against women, which is understand as a crucial component in efforts to challenge dominant victim-blaming narratives, as well as to hold perpetrators of abuse to account, at various scales, including in the context of families who come to the attention of children's social care. 


My research interrogates the dominant discourses of gender and gender relations constituted in and by DVA, and exposes the ubiquity of notions of ‘authentic’ victimhood. It also provides an exploration of the gender dynamics in operation in a gender-neutralising UK policy environment and the impact this has upon victim-survivors and practitioner experience. Using a feminist, intersectional lens, my work seeks to theorise and achieve greater recognition of the diversity and complexity of the full range of victim-survivor experience, foregrounding victim-survivor resistance to violence and the multiple ways in which the dominant DVA narratives occludes many victim-survivors’ experience. 


My work has also explored the deleterious impact of welfare reform on women’s experiences of DVA and the problematics of ‘resilience’ as a distinct subject-making discourse within contexts of neoliberal welfare reform. In this context, I have examined geographies of trauma and notions of small scale activism within the context of the home. I have also explored how group work and collective group spaces can operate as a counterpoint to the highly individualising neoliberal political agenda of austerity, as well as serve as a mechanism for recovery from trauma, following an experience of domestic abuse. 



Publications