Events

Hosted by two ISS21 research clusters, Genders, Sexualities and Families, and SHAPE (Society, Health Equity and Political Economy).

Co-organised and co-led by Dr Monica O’Mullane (School of Public Health) and Dr Gema Kloppe-Santamaría (Department of Sociology & Criminology).

Supported through funding from the Marie Sklodowska-Curie project GendeResearchIreland

Register at: https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/0meV8fqm2k

Event Overview 

This symposium seeks to provide space for unpacking research experience in developing and using creative methodologies to interrogate the nexus of studies of inequality and social justice. Through the two keynote presentations, the Symposium presents a diversity of experience in applying creative methods to answer research questions across the interdisciplinary space of the social, public health and economic sciences. The focus of the Symposium is sharing experiences in creative methodologies, with some reflection on what worked well and what did not work well, rather than a focus on a research topic. The Symposium will also provide an opportunity for participants to pitch their ideas for using creative methodologies in their research, and to also capture practice ongoing in the clusters in the use of creative methodologies through facilitated group discussion.

Keynote Presentations

Visual and Embodied Methodologies: A VEMinist Framework for researching gender violence

Dr Jelke Boesten, King’s College London.

How do we generate new and useful knowledge about persistent forms of gendered violence that, despite decades of research, continue to shape lives, institutions, and inequalities? This presentation reflects on a collaborative research project that employed Visual and Embodied Methodologies (VEM) to investigate experiences, understandings, and representations of gendered violence. In the process, the project developed a ‘VEMinist’ framework for qualitative research grounded in principles of social justice, reflexivity, care, and connection.

Drawing on collaborative work between researchers, artists, activists, and community partners, the presentation explores how visual and embodied approaches can generate forms of knowledge that are often inaccessible through conventional research methods. Rather than treating participants as passive sources of data, VEM foregrounds creativity, relationality, and co-production, enabling new insights into how gendered violence is experienced, remembered, resisted, and transformed.

The presentation discusses the methodological and ethical implications of VEMinist research, including questions of power, representation, emotional engagement, and researcher responsibility. It argues that a VEMinist approach not only expands the methodological toolkit available to researchers of gendered violence, but also creates possibilities for more inclusive, transformative, and socially engaged forms of knowledge production.

Keynote as Exhibition

Dr Kate Carruthers Thomas, Birmingham City University.

In her keynote, Kate invites you to get up close to a range of creative methods she’s used to disseminate research into gendered issues in higher education, living and working through COVID-19, and feminist family history. She will also use the opportunity of a captive audience to talk briefly on the tyranny of tidy in academia, on the joys of revisualising data and on matters of scale.

Biographies

Jelke Boesten is Professor of Gender and Development in the School of Global Affairs at King's College London. She has published extensively on sexual violence in war and peace, gender-based violence, social policy, and political processes.

She is currently working on two book manuscripts: ‘Intimacies of Violence: Veterans, Gender, and Memory in Postconflict Peru’, and ‘VEMinism: Feminist Visual and Embodied Methodologies to Address Gendered Violence’ (with McIlwaine, Kerr, Martin, Hall and Fairey; Bloomsbury 2027).

Boesten founded the Gender Studies Network at King's College London and co-leads the Visual and Embodied Methodologies (VEM) Network. Through this collaboration, she led an ESRC-funded project exploring visual and embodied methodologies and intersectional gender-based violence (2023-2025).

Kate Carruthers Thomas is Associate Professor of Higher Education and Gender at Birmingham City University. As an interdisciplinary social sciences researcher, she brings sociological, geographical and educational theories and concepts to bear on primarily qualitative research into issues of gender within contemporary UK higher education. Alongside conventional academic formats including journal articles and book chapters, Kate has developed a multimodal portfolio of creative methods of research dissemination, including graphic social science, research poetry, an illustrated digital archive and a board game. Kate is a member of the Governing Council of the Society for Research in Higher Education and of the Editorial Advisory Board for the Journal of Creative Methods. She is also a feminist family historian and presenter of the podcast series A Feminist Family History in Eight Lives and A Feminist Family History in Three Generations.