Dr Clare Vaughan - Gender Interview

“My experience in researching gender and working in frontline services around gender has focused predominantly on violence against women and girls and inequalities. For example, domestic abuse and violence and harassment in public and private spheres, and inequalities around structural issues such as housing and the built environment. My PhD was on homelessness and domestic abuse among young women and girls. So, most of my research interests tend to look at that from different angles and not just violence and abuse but also the structural issues they relate to and the impact it has on other areas of life. Another research interest that I did touch on in my PhD, but potentially I’d like to explore further, is around social networks, not online social networks, but how women support each other and prop each other up in life in general such as through housing, poverty, and food insecurity.

“I have always been a feminist, but I wouldn’t necessarily have had the language to be able to express that when I was a teenager. Then when I got to university, I did an undergraduate in Human Geography, and it was through those modules that I started to learn a bit more about gender in a structural sense, and the impact of structural inequality on women and women’s lives. That’s when I started to build up more of a language around gender, understand what I was interested in, and reflect a bit more on my own experiences. I specifically remember modules that Prof Peter Hopkins and Prof Helen Jarvis taught, and that was predominantly my primary introduction to gender research. Since then, that’s been my focus in all my research. It’s very much the theme that’s followed me beyond education into the workplace.”

“I’ve recently worked on a few different projects, such is the life of fixed-term research contracts. I am working on a project funded by the Office of the Police Crime Commissioner (OPCC), situated within the School of Architecture, Planning and Landscape. That project is around safety within parks, and the OPCC commissioned it due to the Safer Streets fund created following the murder of Sarah Everard last year. It was set up to understand the situation regarding gender inequalities and park use in the North East. We conducted a lot of research in various forms and with park users, people who maintain parks, and women and girls organisations in Newcastle and the North East to understand the disparities of why people aren’t using parks. A significant number of people won’t go into a park on their own in certain seasons, or the evening. That experience is very much led by or shaped by people’s experiences of violence and abuse, and therefore it is predominantly women. There are intersectionalities within that, but women and people who experience hate crimes feel that they cannot go into parks. They wanted us to try and shine a light on the different things happening in parks and how people in the North East feel about them. We’ve also created a Safer Parks Standard, which will hopefully offer some principles or guidelines around what people who are stakeholders and park managers can do to try and make them less fearful places. To try and encourage more types of people to be able to use them, when they want, without fear of violence and harassment. ”

“One of the things that’s emerged from the research—which isn’t a surprise researching violence against women and girls—is that the fear of using parks very much emerges from risks and experiences of violence, harassment, abuse, hate crime, homophobia and racism in parks. So, where do I see that going? These types of gender issues are pretty topical. I hate saying that; gender inequality isn’t something to be popularised, but it’s very much in the public realm at the moment in terms of thinking about society and what we need to do to improve it. So, hopefully, there will be some more funding around this issue, and it will be taken on in the long term. Gender inequality is a structural issue, and small physical changes to parks won’t stop men from abusing women. Hopefully, North East parks will be adapted to feel safer, and more people feel able to use them.”

“Another project I’ve worked on recently is at Dwellbeing Shieldfield. It’s around community development, community education and activism. It is a bottom-up project working with residents and workers within Shieldfield to make it a nicer place to live. It’s not a project focused explicitly on gender, but I would say that it’s built on feminist principles of participation, access and thorough engagement with people who use that space and live there. Residents and workers very much lead Dwellbeing, and make up the majority of the organisation. Residents are employed staff, and they also volunteer on the project. It is a long-term project, and we try and embed sustainability and the future into all of the actions that we do. One of the main principles and purposes of Dwellbeing is to make changes in the urban environment. Things such as guerrilla gardening, planting and community food growing. It focuses on environmentalism, improving well-being, and making the best use of the in-between spaces within Shieldfield because there was a lot of rapid urban development, such as student accommodation. The project is a response to that. A big part of the project is peer education, sharing expertise and learning between residents. One of the core tenets that makes it a sustainable long-term approach is that you can’t undo education and knowledge. That’s one of the safeguards that we use to ensure the principles that residents foster and cultivate remain. They can be carried forward into the future and hopefully make it a nicer place for children and young people who live there.”

"I’m a Vice-Chair of Trustees at a wonderful charity in Gateshead called the Young Women’s Outreach Project (YWOP). We work with young mothers and those for whom the mainstream school system isn’t working, offering support, group work and training around issues such as domestic abuse, trauma recovery and building relationships with family and social networks. YWOP is a fine example of how to upskill young people for lifelong change and progression, and they even use peer ”

"Then finally, some non-academic work that I worked on for a number of years is the East End Women project in Walker, at Building Futures East charity. It’s a women’s project around education training, domestic abuse support and social opportunities.”

“Dwellbeing was set up initially as a two-year participatory action research project in which the principals were not doing anything without the steering, guidance and involvement of those living in Shieldfield. Participatory Action Research has had a tradition of using creative and arts-based methods to try and work alongside people. They’re used as a tool to open up conversations in a more accessible way. Lots of the methods that we use at Dwellbeing are creative, and we have worked with commissioned artists to work with residents to produce works. One of the artists we've commissioned, Sara Cooper, did quite a lot of workshops with the local school in Shieldfield using cameras, trying to support the young people and children to communicate what they saw so that we could see it through their lens. As part of a commission last year, we planted a wildflower meadow at the bottom of one of the high rises in Shieldfield. That was part of the artist commission; it's a way to try and improve the area and also provide a social opportunity for residents to be able to come together and do something physical and practical to improve that specific space for the long term and also to foster, again, those themes of environmentalism. We've hosted numerous engagenent events with different groups who live in Shieldfield, such as the older people's group that meet at the Forum Café. We did one with the Youth Working Group, using imagination and mapping exercises to think about what changes they would like to see in Shieldfield. At the crux of it, we try and have fun, foster social relationships, get to know one another and think about what we want to do and how to make that happen."

“Gender cuts across every discipline and is integral to every field, but my undergrad was in Geography, and then my MA and PhD was in Sociology. Gender as a topic is not a niche in any way. It's fundamental to how society is mapped out and the problems we have in it. I come from the point of view that the research I do tries to address specific issues but If it's not interdisciplinary, then it can become siloed. When that's the case, we give excuses for gender to be dismissed as not relevant to other disciplines and not important, not an important factor within all of that research. This lets people off the hook for not considering gender issues. I think gender should be regarded in every area, everywhere! For the past ten years, I've worked alongside women on feminist orientated projects, and that’s very much a conscious choice. That has probably shaped my view somewhat of where gender is discussed in other realms. Ultimately, interdisciplinarity is important to gender research because it affects everything. We need to know the gaps in other disciplines to understand how to work together to change that. There will inevitably be people, colleagues, or staff that care about gender and might feel alone in their area. So even if from that point of view of offering solidarity and support to other disciplines and people who are trying to make strides within those disciplines, I think that's important."

“My advice would be to do at least do some volunteering or some work within their sector and try and work with as many women as feasibly possible because a theoretical perspective on gender is only going to get you so far. To understand how to do good research on gender and research, that's ethically driven and considers intersectionality, and all of the various things that affect women in their lives, you need to get out there! Being in the world and being outside of a university setting and working on gender, be that through activism, joining a women's group or volunteering, whatever that might look like, will help you to think about what you’re reading in a more rounded way. It’s important that gender research can have a practical application. That's not necessarily going to be for everyone. There are loads of academics that write convoluted works on gender that never see the light of day beyond the academic sphere. Working in frontline women’s services, I struggle to see the value of this.

Thinking about my own experience at the undergrad level, I remember walking from the library to the Daysh building for a lecture and seeing a sign for a poster for the Feminist Society. At that point, I didn't know what the Feminist Society would be like and what they might do. I wasn’t part of it, but if I had, I'd have had a better awareness of what was happening on the ground or outside of the university. Even inside the university and the different types of activism that was happening and that students were leading. It would have helped me read those journal articles and be a better researcher. Though that all comes with time and experience.

When I left university, when I went home to Birmingham for a year, and did a course on feminist activism and developing feminist campaigns for change. As part of that, we had to provide a case study, and I presented one from the Feminist Society. They had worked within Newcastle University to stop a club night at the Students’ Union. Women students who worked there were required to wear knickers as uniforms, serving sports teams jugs of beer. There was a photo booth in the club, whereby attendees were encouraged to get as mortal as possible. Then, people would go into the booth and neck on or strip off. All of the images from the photo booth would be posted on social media, obviously causing a whole host of issues around consent, slut shaming etc. Newcastle University Feminist Society campaigned to have it stopped, and they stopped running it. So, my advice comes back to understanding how people are trying to enact the knowledge and the learning that’s coming from articles into day-to-day life."