Cultural Studies
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In January 2018 Professor David Tombs will visit SIIBS and deliver a special Shiloh Project lecture on ‘#MeToo Jesus’ with Dr Jayme Reaves.
Professor Tombs is the Howard Paterson Chair of Theology and Public Issues, at the University of Otago, Aotearoa New Zealand. He has a longstanding interest in contextual and liberation theologies and is author of Latin American Liberation Theologies (Brill, 2002). His current research focusses on religion violence and peace and especially on Christian responses to gender-based violence, sexual abuse and torture.
He is originally from the United Kingdom and previously worked at the University of Roehampton in London (1992-2001), and then in Belfast, Northern Ireland, for the Irish School of Ecumenics, Trinity College Dublin (2001-2014) on a conflict resolution and reconciliation programme. He has degrees in theology from Oxford (BA/MA, 1987), Union Theological Seminary New York (STM, 1988), and London (PhD 2004), and in philosophy (MA London, 1993).
Dr Jayme R. Reaves is a public theologian with 20 years experience working on the intersections between theology, peace, conflict, gender, and culture in the US, Former Yugoslavia, Northern Ireland, and Great Britain. Her book, Safeguarding the Stranger: An Abrahamic Theology and Ethic of Protective Hospitality is available from Wipf & Stock or any book retailer. You can find out more at www.jaymereaves.com.
Jayme’s social media links are:
Twitter: @jaymereaves
Facebook: www.facebook.com/JaymeRReaves
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#MeToo Jesus: Why Naming Jesus as a Victim of Sexual Abuse Matters
2pm, 16 January, G.03 Jessop West, University of Sheffield
Jayme Reaves and David Tombs
© http://www.arttrav.com Used with kind permission.
The #MeToo hashtag and campaign created by Tarana Burke in 2007 and popularized by Alyssa Milano in October 2017 has confirmed what feminists have long argued on the prevalence of sexual assault, sexual harassment and sexually abusive behaviour. It has also prompted a more public debate on dynamics of victim blaming and victim shaming which contribute to the silences which typically benefit perpetrators and add a further burden to survivors. As such, the #MeToo movement raises important questions for Christian faith and theology. A church in New York offered a creative response in a sign which adapted Jesus’ words ‘You did this to me’ in Mt 25:40 to read ‘You did this to #MeToo’. This presentation will explore the biblical and theological reasons for naming Jesus as a victim of sexual abuse drawing on earlier work presenting crucifixion as a form of state terror and sexual abuse (Tombs 1999). It will then discuss some of the obstacles to this recognition and suggest why the acknowledgement nonetheless matters. It will argue that recognition of Jesus as victim of sexual abuse can help strengthen church responses to sexual abuses and challenge tendencies within the churches, as well as in wider society, to collude with victim blaming or shaming.
For further reading, see David Tombs, ‘Crucifixion, State Terror, and Sexual Abuse’ in Union Seminary Quarterly Review (1999).
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The Shiloh project directors, Caroline Blyth (University of Auckland), Katie Edwards (University of Sheffield) and Johanna Stiebert (University of Leeds), are co-investigators of a successful Worldwide Universities Network research development grant with the University of Ghana.
Katie Edwards and Johanna Stiebert will visit the University of Ghana in 2018. Stay tuned for more updates on the project!
Meredith Minister, Assistant Professor of Religion at Shenandoah University, talks to us on the final day of UN Women’s 16 Days of Activism campaign about her work on religion and sexual violence. Meredith works closely with fellow academic activists Rhiannon Graybill and Beatrice Lawrence. They have a forthcoming edited volume Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (Lexington Books), which will be profiled on this blog in January.
Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?
I’m Meredith Minister, Assistant Professor of Religion at Shenandoah University. I also teach courses in the Gender and Women’s Studies program at Shenandoah.
What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?
I am involved with gender activism in my scholarship, on campus, and in the community.
My recent scholarship has been focused on addressing sexual violence on college campuses by providing a better theoretical framework for prevention and response. This project has been ongoing for several years and has included presentations on trigger warnings and a critique of existing approaches to sexual violence including consent and bystander intervention. I also attended a NEH seminar this summer on diverse philosophical approaches to sexual violence led by Ann Cahill at Elon University. In my forthcoming book, I explore how rape culture is learned through cultural, religious, institutional, and legal processes and argue for deep and ongoing pedagogical interventions that offer possibilities for unlearning rape culture. This book is titled Rape Culture on Campus and is forthcoming from Lexington next year.
Beatrice and Rhiannon have been faithful conversation partners for this work and Rhiannon’s interview describes the ways we’ve collaborated so far and where you can find our work!
On campus, I have worked with students to promote better structures for preventing sexual violence and for responding to specific instances of sexual violence. I have also worked with faculty by developing and offering a workshop on teaching about sexual violence in partnership with our Title IX office here at Shenandoah.
Finally, off campus, I work with the Valley Equality Project, a community organization that serves the Winchester community by working to make our community safer for and more inclusive of LGBTQ+ persons.
How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?
I think The Shiloh Project is doing really important work and I’ve enjoyed reading about the other scholars featured in this series. Scholarship is so often presented as an isolated endeavor but I think the kinds of academic work we’re doing, including challenging engrained cultural assumptions, really requires collective work and imagination. Not only can we learn from one another, but we also find validation and commiseration when things get messy (as they sometimes do when you come out against sexual violence).
How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?
In my forthcoming book, I argue that the classroom can be a space where we can begin to unlearn engrained patterns of rape culture. This unlearning goes beyond simplistic interventions such as consent education and bystander intervention. These interventions depend on an understanding of human beings as autonomous individuals and fail to connect rape culture to other cultural assumptions such as white supremacy and institutions such as the prison industrial complex. Rather than creating responses to sexual violence that perpetuate these individualistic assumptions, I hope to draw on understandings of human beings as fragile and relational in order to rethink existing responses to sexual violence. I do this theoretical work in my scholarship in part because it energizes my resistance to gender-based violence on campus and in the community.
On the final day of UN Women’s 16 Days of Activism campaign, we profile Rhiannon Graybill, an Assistant Professor at Rhodes College, who works closely with fellow academic activists Beatrice Lawrence and Meredith Minister on gender-based violence. Look out for their forthcoming edited volume Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Engagements (Lexington Books).
Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?
My name is Rhiannon Graybill and I’m an assistant professor of Religious Studies at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. At Rhodes, I am also the director of the interdisciplinary Gender and Sexuality Studies program.
What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?
I’m involved in gender activism in a number of ways. One of my major goals as director of Gender and Sexuality Studies is promoting scholarly work and campus awareness around gender. At Rhodes, I’ve organized events on feminism and surveillance, sexual violence on campus, and abortion activism, and I’m now working on a trans film festival event. The program also sponsors an undergraduate research symposium and a faculty scholarship group.
I’m also involved in gender activism in my research. My book, Are We Not Men? Unstable Masculinity in the Hebrew Prophets is about masculinity, but to me this is always a feminist concern. Are We Not Men? uses feminist and queer theory to think about the male bodies of prophets and to understand the ways in which prophecy transforms masculinity and embodiment. My next book is a study of queer feminist readings of biblical women.
I also work specifically on sexual violence, especially in collaboration with Meredith and Beatrice. The three of us met at the Wabash Center for Teaching and Learning in Theology and Religion, when we were part of Teaching and Learning a Workshop for Pre-Tenure Religion Faculty. We not only got along really well, but we realized we were all deeply concerned about sexual violence on campus, and working to address it in different ways. We started collaborating, beginning with a workshop for our peers at the Wabash Center and coordinating some on-campus activities (I organized a workshop for my colleagues about teaching about rape in the Bible and classical literature). Then we put together a couple of publications, one for Teaching Theology and Religion and one for the Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion. We also organized a panel at the AAR/SBL Annual meeting in 2016. Now we’re co-editing a volume entitled Rape Culture and Religious Studies: Critical and Pedagogical Perspectives with Lexington Books.
How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?
I’m so excited about The Shiloh Project! These issues are so important, and we need as many people working on them and talking about them as possible. It’s also really exciting to me to be able to be involved in international conversations around these issues, as I’m mostly familiar with the U.S. context. We have some peculiarities to our system, like the way that Title IX (the federal law about equal access in education that’s used to justify a lot of sexual violence policies) works. Thinking globally helps us gain perspective, as well as think about possible alternatives. I’m also really interested in The Shiloh Project’s work on popular culture, as well as spiritualism and transphobia. I can’t wait to see what you all produce!
How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?
This is the time to do it! Things have seemed pretty terrible on a gender front in the U.S. lately, but in a funny way I’m heartened by the outpouring of sexual harassment and assault allegations in the media and politics. I think it’s possible this might lead to some change. At the very least, people in authority are beginning to hear what we’ve been saying for decades – longer than that! I also think popular culture provides an interesting, if complicated, feminist space. I’m going to keep studying and teaching about it; I think teaching students is one great avenue for feminist activism.
Follow the links to read more of Rhiannon’s work on sexual violence:
Sexual Violence in and around the Classroom (a piece the three of us wrote for Teaching Theology and Religion).
On Day 15, the penultimate day of the 16 Days of Activism, we talk to Dawn Llewellyn, Senior Lecturer in Christian Studies at the University of Chester.
Tell us about yourself…who are you and what do you do?
I’m Dawn and I am Senior Lecturer in Christian Studies, in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Chester – I’ve been here for 7 years since finishing my PhD in Religious Studies at Lancaster in 2010. I teach and supervise in the areas of gender and religion, sociology of religion, gender studies, and qualitative methodologies and methods. My work is grounded in feminist qualitative approaches to the study of gender and Christianity: I’ve researched women’s religious reading practices and cultures in relation to literature and the Bible; I’ve also written on feminist generations, third wave feminism, the wave metaphor, and the disciplinary disconnections between feminist/women’s/gender studies and religion.
I’m currently examining women’s reproductive agency in Christianity. In particular, my research focuses on women’s narratives of choice toward motherhood or elective childlessness, and how women mediate and experience the pronatalism circulating through doctrine, scriptures, teachings and the everyday social practices of church life (no surprise, there’s *quite* a lot of pronatalism for women to mediate).
What’s your involvement with The Shiloh Project?
I was delighted and honoured to be asked to become a member when the Shiloh project began. It’s such an important conversation that Katie, Johanna, and Caroline and the team have brought to the fore because religious discourses do inscribe and re-inscribe the inequalities underlying gendered violence and rape culture.
At the moment, I’m very good at tweeting and retweeting about the Shiloh Project and SIIBS, and I have promised to write a piece for the blog! I’m really excited to be part of the work the Project is doing and will do.
How does The Shiloh Project relate to your work?
As a feminist researcher in religious studies, I try in my teaching and research to analyse the ways religion, particularly Christianity, generates gendered injustice, and in particular, how women mediate and negotiate patriarchal and androcentric religious structures. In my previous project, I interviewed Christian and ‘post’ Christian women about the literatures that inspired and resourced their faith and spiritual identities. In the interviews, the women also discussed their biblical reading practices and disclosed their anger at the passages they understood to valorize violence against women. For some participants, this meant they left Christianity or at least turned to women’s writing as a substitute for the Bible – unable to read texts or belong to a tradition that sacralizes narratives that demean women. For others, they resist and reject the text they found problematic. Interrogating how women engage with the biblical texts, and Christian teachings, doctrines and practices is central to my research and teaching.
How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussion about gender activism today?
Rape culture and ideology can be insidious; that’s part of its power. One way to dismantle its power and the shame and guilt it perpetuates is to name it, as we saw with #MeToo. During that campaign, I was really struck, moved, and enraged by the shared stories of my friends and colleagues who had experienced harassment in academia: at conferences, in meetings, when travelling, and at University or departmental social events. It was also painful to see how many social media posts by women about #MeToo started with a line or two saying that they didn’t think what they’d experienced was ‘serious’ enough to warrant mentioning; and the media backlash against those testimonies reveals, again, the prominence of gendered violence and its acceptance. In a secularizing society like the UK, in which religion has lost some of its influence for individuals, communities and institutions, it is too easy and simplex to think that religion no longer shapes cultural norms. The work that the Shiloh Project does – the blogs, the lectures, the projects, the seminars, the research – is important research that uncovers religion’s role in constructing and supporting rape culture.
What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?
The project’s themes and aims are helping me think more critically about motherhood and rape culture. Just as Christianity’s essentialist ideas about women’s bodies limit their roles to the maternal, essentialist ideas underpin sexual domination and violence. Generally, though, I’m looking forward to potential joint projects and questions that are already emerging, to being part of a such a fantastic initiative, and learning with and from such a fantastic bunch of scholars.
And I really need to write my blog piece…
Vanita Sundaram, Professor of Education at the University of York talks to us about her work on sexual violence in educational contexts.
Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?
My name is Vanita Sundaram and I am a Professor of Education at the University of York, working on gender-related harassment and violence across the education lifecourse.
What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?
My work is increasingly applied in its focus, as I seek to use the fundamental and theoretical knowledge we have about gender-related harassment and violence among children, young people and young adults, to inform prevention and intervention work in educational settings. I have used my work to develop critical consciousness-raising clubs about gendered and sexual pressures facing young people in secondary school, as well as working with local survivor organisations to develop educational programmes about sexual violence for university settings. I am interested not only in the causes of gender-related harassment and violence and the multiple ways in which children and young people encounter such practices, but in working with children and young people themselves to develop educational interventions which can challenge the values, attitudes and cultures which allow such behaviours to flourish in educational settings. Part of this endeavour involves engaging young people with gender activism, with making visible the gender and sexual norms that govern and shape their identities, expectations and practices in and outside of school.
How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?
I am hugely excited to be involved with the Shiloh Project. The focus on rape culture in/and religious imagery, and the myriad of ways in which this is produced and sustained through popular culture is immediately relevant to my own work on young people’s experiences of gender-related violence. Popular culture is one of many interfaces through which young people’s understandings and expectations of gender and sexuality is negotiated, including in relation to representations of harassment and violence. Together with the Directors of the Shiloh Project, we are developing work on young people’s interactions with representations of violence in religious imagery used in popular culture. I am particularly excited by the intersectional approach we will take in understanding how particular notions of gender, race/ethnicity, class, and sexuality are produced through religious imagery in popular culture. This also links to current research I am doing on developing an intersectional approach to violence prevention with Professor Alison Phipps (Sussex) and Dr Tiffany Page (Cambridge).
How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?
My research is directly related to challenging gender-related violence, through fundamental research on young people’s experiences and understandings of violence, as well as through applied research on prevention and intervention initiatives. I am keen to develop this applied focus, as it crosses over with activist work in school settings.
On Day 13 of the 16 Days of Activism campaign we speak to Sofia Rehman, PhD student at the University of Leeds and activist.
Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?
My name is Sofia Rehman and I am a second year PhD candidate at the University of Leeds. My research allows me the pleasure of being supervised in the Theology department as well as the Arabic, Islamic and Middle Eastern department. My current research centers around a 12th Century Islamic text by Imam Badr al-Din al-Zarkashi entitled al-Ijāba li-Īrādi mā Istadrakathu cĀ’isha cala al Sahāba – The Corrective: Aisha’s Refutations of the Companions, in which the statements of Aisha, the wife of the Prophet Muhammad, are collected wherein she is found to be correcting, refuting, or outright disqualifying statements made by invariably male Companions of the Prophet Muhammad, on matters pertinent to the understanding and practice of religion by Muslims. I am working on a translation and feminist study of the original text.
What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?
Before returning to academia, I spent a number of years teaching within my local Muslim community, either in local mosques, or in my own home. This made me privy to many of the issues Muslim women face, and the ways in which both patriarchal interpretations of the religion within the community and gendered Islamophobia from outside the community oftentimes leave Muslim women doubly violated and doubly silenced. I had already studied in Islamic seminaries and received traditional instruction in Islam, so in 2014 I decided to return to academia and embarked on my Masters in Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies at the University of Leeds, and continued on to do my PhD thereafter. Whilst I had entered academia with the aim of expanding my own understanding of gender and religion, with particular emphasis on Islam, I was also invested in contributing to the effort of unreading patriarchal interpretations of its texts, more specifically the hadith tradition which purports to transmit the sayings and actions of the Prophet Muhammad.
It is central to my outlook on research that my work be not only academically rigorous, but also of service and benefit to the Muslim community, most particularly the women. In pursuit of this then, I was able to secure some funding as Impact Fellow (2015) in the Theology and Religious Studies department, which I used to deliver a series of three workshops through the Muslim Women’s Council to a group of local Muslim women from Bradford. Each session spotlighted a different Muslim woman, one of which was Aisha, for whom I presented findings directly related to my research. We were able to discuss the importance of historicizing and contextualizing Prophetic statements, and the importance of being at liberty to question the veracity of such statements. It was thoroughly rewarding to witness the electric atmosphere of women feeling empowered through their faith tradition.
Additionally, I have recently been asked to take part as a contributor to an upcoming anthology, Cut From the Same Cloth, with Unbound Publishers, which recently enjoyed a flurry of attention when Hollywood actor, Riz Ahmed tweeted about the project. The aim is to platform 15 British Muslim women from a range of backgrounds to write on their experiences. This is an opportunity to allow Muslim women the chance to speak for themselves instead of being spoken over and about; to not be tokenized in a campaign aiming to tick a diversity box, weaponized in anti-terror political rhetoric, or utilized to the satisfaction of someone’s saviour complex. More can be learned about the project here.
How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?
I was made aware of the Shiloh Project through Johanna Stiebert. While the primary focus of the project is the Bible and interpretations of it, I can see how many of the efforts can inform my own work on Islamic texts, and showcase approaches that can be transferred too. Understanding that religion plays its own role in the rape culture inherent to the society in which we exist, allows for a more effective dismantling of this culture through the deconstruction of its component parts. The interrogation of narratives constructed around religious texts that allow for gender-based violence to be perpetrated, is vital in not only providing thought-provoking, insightful academic contributions but also in facilitating grassroots changes and actively impacting on people’s lives.
Today is World Aids Day and our gender activist on Day 7 of 16 Days of Activism is Dr Mmapula Kebaneilwe, Senior Lecturer in Hebrew and Hebrew Bible at the University of Botswana. Botswana has one of the highest rates of HIV and Aids in the world. Botswana is also a country with a strong national commitment in responding to this health crisis: notably, being the first country in the region to provide universal free antiretroviral treatment to people living with HIV.
Mmapula is a womanist activist and has published on how the Bible can offer paradigms for women’s resistance in the face of vulnerability to HIV infection and to Aids. Here is her article on the character of Vashti from the book of Esther.
Tell us about yourself: who are you and what do you do?
I am Dr Mmapula Diana Kebaneilwe, Senior Lecturer in Hebrew and Old Testament Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Botswana. I am a womanist scholar and my research and activist interests centre on women’s rights and experiences.
What’s your involvement with gender activism? Does your work intersect with gender activism? How?
I am involved in gender activism through my research and publications. I have keen interest in all issues that involve the welfare of women and girls in my society. My PhD thesis was on the Woman of Courage in Proverbs 31 and I read this poem for and within the patriarchal culture of Botswana, which has seen women suffocate in many ways. My conclusion is that men and women are created equal but that there remains an urgent need to reflect this equality – especially in our Botswana culture(s) that have long mistreated and that continue to relegate women and girls to the margins, to everyone’s detriment. My research has shown that in my context women and girls continue to experience multiple ills that are perpetuated by gender inequality. As part of this, our women and girls experience horrendous acts of gender-based violence – such as rape and murder – which are so rampant in Botswana.
How does or could The Shiloh Project relate to your work and activism?
I believe that The Shiloh Project will create a platform, which will allow me to carry forward my research on the issues mentioned above. As a scholar of the Bible the project will allow me to explore further, through research on gender issues, the ways in which rape culture and religion intersect in my own context. I hope to be able to get involved in my communities here in Botswana and to find out about the ways rape culture manifests and how religion both contributes to rape culture and how indeed religion might also be used to curb it.
The issue of rape culture in Botswana is one that causes me considerable concern as women and girls get beaten, raped and killed (predominantly by male perpetrators) every single day. I hope with The Shiloh Project I will have the chance to do more and to contribute to effective changes in gender policy in Botswana.
How are you going to get active to resist gender-based violence and inequality?
I am going to get active to resist gender-based violence by doing further research on the issue and disseminating the findings of my research, so as to reach the wider community. I intend to work closely with communities in order to learn more from real people’s lived experiences of gender-based violence and also to explore critically laws and policies on the same. My aim is to be able to influence policy makers to better the lives of primarily Botswana women and girls through creating legal channels aimed at the protection of our female population. At present such polies seem lax.
On Day 6 of the 16 Days of Activism Against Gender-based Violence campaign, we speak to Emma Nagouse, PhD student in the Sheffield Institute for Interdisciplinary Biblical Studies (SIIBS).
Tell us about yourself…who are you and what do you do?
I’m Emma Nagouse and I am a PhD candidate in SIIBS (supervised by Katie Edwards and Johanna Stiebert) where I research the Bible and rape culture. I’m involved in local feminist activism, particularly as co-organiser of the Sheffield Feminist Archive and a Branch Officer for Sheffield UCU. Before joining SIIBS I worked in HE and studied Archaeology where I specialised in the archaeology of religious violence.
What’s your involvement with The Shiloh Project?
I have been a member of The Shiloh Project since its inception at a research day in Leeds and I am a contributor to The Shiloh Project blog.
How does The Shiloh Project relate to your work?
My research focuses on how biblical and contemporary intersectional gender presentation (with a focus on class identity) facilitates rape and disbelief culture through reaffirming oppressive stereotypes and informing perceptions of rape gradations. I am focusing on the rapes of Dinah, Bathsheba and Tamar.
I have also authored a chapter for an upcoming volume on religion and rape culture edited by Katie Edwards, Caroline Blyth and Emily Colgan. In this piece of work I read Lamentations 3 alongside the best-selling novel and widely acclaimed TV series Outlander to suggest that the Man’s suffering in Lamentations 3 can be read as an expression of the trauma of rape. A (very) abbreviated version of this chapter can be found here.
I returned to University as a PGR student after working in various professional roles in HE. I was particularly influenced by my time working for Sheffield’s Widening Participation Research and Evaluation team – a task that really impacted me was working on a literature review about the experiences of care leavers in HE. I was deeply moved and troubled by what I read and, coupled with roles working for Sheffield Students’ Union, trade unions and the Sheffield Feminist Archive, I knew that if I was to return to HE as a student researcher, it would also be as an activist.
I feel very privileged to be able to focus my working life on interrogating rape culture, which I believe to be one of the most urgent and insidious social justice and public health issues facing contemporary society.
How do you think The Shiloh Project’s work on religion and rape culture can add to discussion about gender activism today?
The work of the Shiloh Project has much to add to wider scholarship around rape culture, particularly in terms of interrogating underpinning values which provide a scaffold to normalised misogyny. After all, biblical motifs are still regularly appealed to in public discussions around sex, gender and, inevitably, sexual violence. Whether we’re talking about Mary’s virgin birth, the temptation of Eve, Jezebels…
What is particularly exciting about this project, as mentioned by Katie in a previous post, is the breadth of expertise involved from both faith, non-faith, and international perspectives.
What’s next for your work with The Shiloh Project?
As the news cycle is constantly exploding with reports on sexual violence I’m pretty sure that this will be a very busy year for The Shiloh Project. I am currently very interested in the phenomenon of revenge porn (particularly after the experiences of Blac Chyna made waves online) and how this relates to wider rape culture – I’m working on a piece of research exploring revenge porn alongside enforced bodily exposure in the prophetic texts.
I’m also applying for funding for a project with the feminist poetry collective Verse Matters and an artist from the University of Brighton for a collaborative project creating poems and a piece of sculpture relating to abused biblical women. I took great inspiration from Caroline Blyth’s research on the silencing of raped women and a talk by Cheryl Exum on the potential of art to grant access to the perspectives of biblical women.
Of course, immersing yourself in this kind of research can be quite challenging – beginning to come to terms with the sheer scope of the problem and being given an insight into the experiences of those who have suffered dreadful abuses can be (at least for me) dizzyingly infuriating, painful and emotionally draining. It can also cause you to reevaluate experiences in your own life. For this reason, I’ve collaborated with wonderful colleagues in Research Services (Dr Kay Guccione and Sarah Bell) to set up a network for researchers who engage in traumatic or sensitive topics.
Having said that, I’ve previously spent a lot of my time as a student not feeling like I had much (or any) capacity to work towards change in areas which were important to me. Undertaking this work alongside such inspiring scholars and activists is truly galvanising.