CIGS Research Seminar: Dr Anna Bull (Weds 11 November, 4-5.30pm)

CIGS is delighted to host its first research seminar for this academic year and we are excited to welcome Dr Anna Bull, who will be talking about her campaigning and research on staff-student sexual harassment in UK Higher Education. See abstract below for further details.

The event will be held online on Wednesday 11 November, 4-5.30pm. All are welcome. The event is free, but please register here to reserve a place. Instructions for joining the event will be provided nearer the time.

"They were making it up as they were going along": Students’ experiences of making complaints of staff sexual misconduct in UK higher education.

The MeToo movement has placed heightened attention onto the issue of how institutions across society respond to sexual harassment and violence that occur within them. Higher education has been in the spotlight for its handling of sexual misconduct by academic staff. This talk draws on interviews with women students and early career academics in UK HE who made complaints of sexual misconduct from academic staff. It outlines the ways in which gender and student status give complainants unequal status in the complaints process, and in doing so explains some of the reasons why complaints processes are currently failing to adequately address sexual misconduct. Overall, women students’ experiences of sexual misconduct from academic staff in this study were doubly illegible due to their lack of rights as students within the complaints process, and their gendered experience being invisibilised or denied. Instead, if institutional complaints processes are to address the specificity of sexual violence, complainants need to be given more control and choice within the process.

Bio: Anna Bull is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Education and Sociology at the University of Portsmouth and a director of The 1752 Group, a research and campaigning organisation addressing staff sexual misconduct in higher education.