Addressing gender-based violence and sexual harassment in academia and research organisations

Trained as a Sociologist, my work spans Sociology, Criminology and Gender Studies. My research focuses on gender-based violence (GBV) and feminist activism against it. Recent work examines GBV in universities, online abuse (such as against feminists), and image-based sexual abuse (such as ‘upskirting’). Recent publications include articles in Violence Against Women, British Journal of Criminology, and Journal of Gender-Based Violence as well as books: Digital Sexual Violence, Abuse and Violation (in press) Routledge, with Matthew Hall and Jeff Hearn, Collaborating for Change: Transforming cultures to end gender-based violence in higher education (2020) Oxford University Press, edited with Susan Marine, and Gender-Based Violence in University Communities: policies, prevention and educational initiatives, (2018) edited with Sundari Anitha. As well as working as an academic for decades, I have also been involved in various kinds of activism, including helping to run domestic violence organisations, to organise conferences and ‘gatherings’ for practitioners, activists, and scholars, and to provide training about GBV.

Liisa Husu is a Finnish sociologist and Senior Professor of Gender Studies at Örebro University, Sweden. She has been engaged in gender and science issues in research, policy and civil society since the early 1980s, including research and policy development concerning sexism and sexual harassment in working life and academia. Her re­­search fo­­cuses on gen­­der in scien­­ce, academia and knowledge production, espe­­­­­­cially gen­­der dyna­­mics and in­­equa­­li­­ties in scien­­tific careers, organisations and scien­­ce po­­licy. She is an internationally recognized gender expert, advising ministries, international and national agencies, funding organisations and universities, and has played an active role in European research development and actions on gender and science since late 1990s, in EC expert groups, networks, and numerous EC gender and science research projects, participating currently in the EC UniSAFE project on gender-based violence in universities. She is: scientific adviser of the European Women Rectors’ Association, EWORA; and advisory board member of GENIE – Chalmers University of Technology ten-year Gender Initiative for Excellence. 

Marcela Linková PhD is the head of the Centre for Gender and Science at the Institute of Sociology of the Czech Academy of Sciences. Her research focuses on sociology of gendered organizations, research careers, governance of research and research assessment as well as the analysis of public policies for gender equality in R&I. She is the chair of the ERAC Standing Working Group on Gender in Research and Innovation. Marcela is the coordinator of Horizon 2020 GENDERACTION and participates in GE Academy, Gender-SMART, CASPER, UniSAFE and RESISTIRE. Her work has appeared in European Journal of Women’s Studies, Gender and Research, and Science and Public Policy, among others. With Mary Frank Fox and Kjersten Bunker Whittington she contributed to the 4th edition of the Handbook of Science and Technology Studies (2018) and with Lut Mergaert to the Routledge Handbook of Gender and EU Politics (2021).

Barbara (PhD in psychology) is currently Associate Professor at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili (Department of Pedagogy). She is the coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Working Group on Feminist Research Methodology a research/teaching group focused on exploring feminist strategy of knowledge production with the objective of transform both ‘science’ and ‘society’, and of the URV branch of the Intercultural education research group. She just joined the Standing Committee of the Inter-University Women and Gender Studies Institute. Her research topics are in the wider area of feminism, spreading from feminist epistemology and methodology to subjectivities, social transformation and gender relates violence. She has been the Catalan coordinator of the European researches GAP Work and Universities Supporting Victims of Sexual Violence. Actually, she is the PI of the National founded project Visibilizing and measuring the scale and scope of sexual and gender-related violence in universities.