Roundtable on Gender and Violence

Speaker(s): Chaired by Clare Bielby (CWS, UoY), the event features the following speakers:

Boriana Alexandrova is a Senior Lecturer in Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York. She is the author of Joyce, Multilingualism, and the Ethics of Reading (Palgrave, 2020) and has published articles on multilingual modernism, disability, trauma, and translation in Modernism/modernity (“The Body Politic in Pain” Special Online Issue, 2023), European Joyce Studies, and elsewhere. Her new project, Storytelling the Unspeakable: Trauma's Languages in Modern Literature and Performance, explores new, arts-led methods of both storytelling and reading the “scrappy archive” of trauma histories. Her case studies include contemporary #MeToo memoirs, performance artists such as Johanna Hedva and Marina Abramovic, queer Surrealists and anti-Nazi Resistance fighters Claude Cahun and Marcel Moore, and others. 

Harriet Gray is a Senior Lecturer in International Relations in the Department of Politics, University of York. Her research focuses primarily on gender-based violence in armed forces and conflict spaces. Harriet has conducted research on domestic violence and sexual violence in the British military, and on multiple forms of GBV in (post)conflict settings in the African Great Lakes region. Her current work focuses on the memorialisation of sexual violence across war and peace in the contemporary USA. One of the key threads that binds her work to date together is an interest in unpacking the gendered processes through which harmful acts are storied in dominant discourse – in particular, how various acts come to be understood (or, do not come to be understood) as ‘violence,’ as ‘sexual/gender-based violence’ and as ‘conflict-related sexual/gender-based violence’ –and in the political implications of these definitional processes.

Sui-Ting Kong is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology at Durham University. Her academic interests are in feminist participatory methodologies, social work practice research and violence against women at the intersection of personal and political lives. Her recent research involves working with women activists in Hong Kong and the Hongkonger diaspora in the UK to understand the wider gender and personal impact of social movements. Sui-ting currently holds a British Academy/Wolfson Fellowship on the contested identities of Hongkongers and their community and home building in the UK.

Zahra Tizro is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Psychological Sciences, University of East London, having previously taught at York St John University. With degrees in psychology and gender studies, Zahra’s research interests focus on gender and violence from a cross-cultural perspective. In the context of her PhD, conducted at CWS, York, she investigated the issues surrounding domestic violence against women in Iran which resulted in the monograph Domestic Violence in Iran: Women, Marriage and Islam (Routledge, 2012). A particular interest is the exploration of violence at different scales, from the interpersonal to the international, with an empirical and theoretical focus on national and international relations. Zahra’s most recent book (co-authored with Farhad Gohardani) is The Political Economy of Iran: Development, Revolution and Political Violence (Palgrave, 2019).