International Women’s Day Research Showcase – 12th March 2026

Date: Thursday 12th March 2026

Time: 09:30 – 16:00

Location: Hellerup Stairs, Mithras House, Brighton, BN2 4AT // Microsoft Teams

 

To celebrate International Women’s Day, the CTSG is delighted to be hosting a one-day showcase of research, art and poetry from four experts in their field. The event is open to all staff and students.

 

Please click here to book your free tickets.

 

Speakers:

Professor Alison Phipps (York St John)

Professor Carolyn Jackson (Lancaster University)

Professor E J Renold (this is a link to Cardiff University for info, Professor Renold is now at Manchester Metropolitan University)

AFLO. the poet Artist. Activist. Academic. (University of Brighton)

 

We’ll also be showcasing a student poster exhibition celebrating IWD, kindly designed by students in the School of Arts and Media!

 

Talk Titles

Professor Alison Phipps: The coloniality of sexual violence

The weaponisation of women’s rights by reactionary projects has been termed colonial feminism (Ahmed 1992), imperial feminism (Amos and Parmar 1984), and femonationalism (Farris 2017, see also Bhattacharyya 2008). Ideas of sexual threat are central to these frameworks, yet there is more to uncover about how racialised constructions of sexuality and borders intertwine across scales. This paper, taken from my forthcoming book Sexual Violence in Racial Capitalism (Manchester University Press), describes the coloniality of sexual violence. This framework blends the coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2008; Segato, 2016), the semiotics of Blackness (Spillers, 1987), and the psychosexuality of white supremacy (Fanon, 1952; Anzaldua, 1987). I argue that the relationship between sexual terror and the construction of the sexually dangerous ‘savage’ means a monopoly on sexual violence is constitutive of colonial/modern Man. A monopoly on sexual violence continues to shape the rhetoric and political strategies of the contemporary far right, in which sex exceptionalism (Gruber 2022) is combined with sexual exceptionalism (Puar 2007) to create a multitude of states of exception. The coloniality of sexual violence is what allows marginalised populations to be vilified, geographically contained, economically excluded, expelled or even exterminated – apparently in the service of defeating sexual threat.

 

Professor Carolyn Jackson: ‘It’s their world, not mine’: Universities as unsafe spaces.

 

Professor E J Renold: Ruler-skirts, Rights-kites and Rainbow Ribbons: making gender equality matter with pre-teens in arts-activist research and practice

Building upon participatory arts-based praxis developed in previous research projects, and in dialogue with feminist and queer post-qualitative educational scholarship, the chapter explores the making and mattering of a Welsh-government funded arts-activist engagement project with over 70 children (age 9-11) in rural, urban and suburban schools across Wales (UK). The project was designed across two phases. The first phase used a range of multi-sensory arts-based methods in friendship group interviews to explore the everyday gender assemblages that children become entangled in. The second phase invited children to make a range of ‘dartaphacts’ (arts-based objects carrying messages for others to interact with, see Renold 2018) graffitied with ideas for making the world more gender-safe, gender-inclusive, and gender-fair. Through fieldnotes, images, vignettes, and film, each section progressively unfolds the transformative power of the visual arts to attune (Phase 1) to and activate (Phase 2) how ‘gender matters’ in the lives of pre-teen, and how ‘what matters’ can be further amplified with policymakers and practitioners.

 

AFLO. the poet: Raising Voices

AFLO will be sharing some poems and speaking about her journey with spoken word and activism.

 

Microsoft Teams meeting

Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/36089496698284?p=6UO9uEqugsm02scPWy

Meeting ID: 360 894 966 982 84

Passcode: Qb9zJ2D5