Alison Phipps's Blog, page 2

Online lecture June 12th – ‘Re-enclosure in the Stack’

Next Wednesday June 12th I will be giving an online lunchtime lecture (12:30-2pm) for the Centre for Education and Social Justice at Lancaster University. This is based on a chapter from my forthcoming book Personal Business: sexual violence in racial capitalism, which will be out next year from Manchester University Press. Title, abstract and Zoom details below – all welcome! Feel free to share onwards.

Re-enclosure in the Stack? Digital violence in neofeudal times

This paper explores online violence against women, a phenomenon usually situated in a cultural ‘backlash’ frame. It contextualises this violence within a political economy of late (or ‘platform’) capitalism that draws on arguments that we are moving into a neo- or techno-feudal age. I engage Siapera’s understanding of digital violence as a strategy of enclosure that excludes women from technological spaces, arguing that it also enacts a fantasised neofeudal masculinity: this requires the humiliation and abjection of women, but ultimately vents a frustrated desire for power. Crucially, this ressentiment is one side of the neofeudal bargain in which some are offered impunity to perpetrate violence on others, as part of interactions between cyborgian serfs that ultimately serve to generate value for the platforms owned by neofeudalism’s petty kings.

Join Zoom Meeting
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83017749983

Meeting ID: 830 1774 9983
Passcode: 622094

Abolitionist strategies for addressing gender-based violence

I was recently part of a group of researchers collaborating with Abolitionist Futures to create a resource called ‘Addressing gender-based violence: carceral reforms vs abolitionist strategies.’ The resource is designed as a discussion tool for people, groups and organisations who want to think through how to tackle gender-based violence without using or bolstering the criminal legal system.

The resource has two parts: (1) a chart, that compares carceral reforms and abolitionist strategies; and (2) a booklet, that explains each strategy in more detail and considers the strengths and pitfalls of different approaches. You can download the resource here, along with a discussion guide to use if you’d like to facilitate a discussion group using it.

The resource will be formally launched on June 4th with an online event featuring speakers Lola Olufemi, Leah Cowan and frontline worker Billy. All welcome but please do register to attend here.

There are also a number of discussion groups focused on the resource coming over the summer. The first one is being held online and hosted by Abolitionist Futures on June 25th (register here). I am also co-facilitating a group in Newcastle on June 26th, on behalf of the Abolition Feminism for Ending Sexual Violence Collective (register here – it would be lovely to see some followers of this blog in person if you are in the area!) Other groups to be confirmed later. You can also facilitate your own groups and there is a guide to help you, as mentioned above.

Why Palestine is a Feminist Issue

This International Women’s Day, I wanted to share a teaching resource I made with input from some expert colleagues, called ‘Why Palestine is a feminist issue’. It’s a short electronic aid/handout with points to be elaborated in class and links to discussion material. Please feel free to download, adapt and use (and do share onwards with anyone you think might find it useful). It’s a very small and limited/imperfect contribution but I hope it’s helpful – especially to fellow feminist scholars who are not experts on Palestine but who want to centre this issue as much as we can in our classrooms.

Download as a PDF file at https://genderate.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/palestine_feminist.pdf

Download as a Word document at https://phipps.space/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/palestine_feminist.docx

Paper out in Feminist Theory

My paper in Feminist Theory is finally officially out – it is fully open-access and can be downloaded at https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14647001241232260. I am no longer on social media due to persistent harassment, so would appreciate any help at publicising it – these things take a long time to write and even longer to peer review, and very rarely get widely read! The abstract is below and I hope the paper is a useful contribution to thinking through how we tackle sexual violence in institutions.

A ‘rape crisis’ has been identified in universities in the Anglophone North, and responses usually take the form of institutional discipline and governance despite well-established assessments of the failings of both carceral and procedural approaches. In these responses, institutional reputation and risk management overdetermines, elevates and captures particular types of white feminist activism. This article theorises these dynamics, using precarity as a lens on the relations within which campus sexual violence is addressed. I trace the material connections between sexual violence and precarious labour, and the intersecting narratives of crisis focused on both issues in contemporary higher education, which reflect ‘genres of crisis’ in the wider politico-cultural sphere. In this context, persistent attachments to discipline and governance within the campus sexual violence movement can be theorised at least partly as a political flight from vulnerability, a ‘holding on’ to whatever one can find, that is ripe for exploitation by liability-focused institutional agendas. Such procedural enactments of security are possible because bureaucracy is the institutional ‘water in which we swim’, which creates a strong impetus to reduce politics to paperwork relations. This is especially manifest in risk-averse and compliance-driven ‘safeguarding’ modalities, securitarian regimes that serve mainly to interpellate the dangerous Other and safeguard the institution. I argue for the cultivation of more susceptible relations which are difficult to achieve within disembodied bureaucratic codes and which require a retreat from both narratives of crisis and procedural attempts at calm.

First look: new paper in Feminist Theory

I have just had a paper accepted by the journal Feminist Theory, entitled ‘‘Holding on’ in a crisis: theorising campus sexual violence activism within precarious labour relations.’ I have decided to share the accepted manuscript ahead of time with readers of this blog – it can be accessed at https://genderate.files.wordpress.com/2023/12/phipps-holding-on-in-a-crisis.pdf. Please share onwards freely, as the paper is available under a CC-BY licence.

The abstract is below and the paper will be officially out in 2024.

‘Holding on’ in a crisis: theorising campus sexual violence activism within precarious labour relations

Alison Phipps

A ‘rape crisis’ has been identified in universities in the Anglophone North, and responses usually take the form of institutional discipline and governance despite well-established assessments of the failings of both carceral and procedural approaches. In these responses, institutional reputation and risk management overdetermines, elevates, and captures particular types of white feminist activism. This paper theorises these dynamics, using precarity as a lens on the relations within which campus sexual violence is addressed. I trace the material connections between sexual violence and precarious labour, and the intersecting narratives of crisis focused on both issues in contemporary higher education, which reflect ‘genres of crisis’ in the wider politico- cultural sphere (Berlant, 2011: 26). In this context, persistent attachments to discipline and governance within the campus sexual violence movement can be theorised at least partly as a political flight from vulnerability, a ‘holding on’ to whatever one can find, that is ripe for exploitation by liability-focused institutional agendas. Such procedural enactments of security are possible because bureaucracy is the institutional ‘water in which we swim’ (Graeber 2015: xii), which creates a strong impetus to reduce politics to paperwork relations. This is especially manifest in risk-averse and compliance-driven ‘safeguarding’ modalities, securitarian regimes (Butler in Lorey, 2015: 8) that serve mainly to interpellate the dangerous Other and safeguard the institution. Following Butler (2004), I argue for the cultivation of more susceptible relations which are difficult to achieve within disembodied bureaucratic codes and which require a retreat from both narratives of crisis and procedural attempts at calm.

Interview – The Malcolm Effect

I was recently interviewed on The Malcolm Effect podcast by the fantastic Deej and Momodou – listen below or download from Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

https://player.fm/series/the-malcolm-effect/ep-78-challenges-for-feminism-today-dr-alison-phipps-deej

I hope you enjoy it!

Open-access resources

Just a reminder that my website contains a number of resources that are free to download, adapt and use.

Resources for lecturers: this is a portfolio of resources for fellow lecturers, which include a series of introductory lectures about feminism, and a gender theory syllabus for upper-undergraduate and postgraduate students.

Resources for researchers: this is a collection of handouts, infographics and blogs offering general advice to social science and humanities researchers, whether postgraduate students or early-career academics.

Resources for activists: this is a growing set of resources to support activists campaigning against and attempting to tackle sexual violence in universities and other institutions.

Please use and share onwards as you wish. All these resources are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

From white feminism to abolition: a work in progress

This is a keynote I recently gave at a workshop on abolition feminism by the amazing Read and Resist and Abolitionist Futures – reblogging it here from their site. They have also posted a YouTube video of the talk.

Read and Resist!

Abolition Feminism keynote – Alison Phipps

I am not an organiser – I am a teacher, a scholar and a survivor. I have been an activist, but in circles very different to these. I came to abolition from the heart of white feminism – the movement against campus sexual violence in the UK. This was powered by extremely angry white feminists, although some of the key student leaders were women of colour (I want to mention Susuana Amoah here, who I worked closely with for many years). From 2006 to 2018 I was heavily involved in the fight to influence mainstream policy and practice. I supported the National Union of Students with the firstnational surveyof violence against women students. I co-authored theNUS reporton ‘lad culture’ and joined the subsequent task force. I sat down with pseudo-government bodies such as the Equality Challenge Unit and Universities UK…

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From ‘sex-based rights’ to ‘become ungovernable’: from supremacy to solidarity

‘The inclusion of men who claim to have a female ‘gender identity’ into the category of women in law, policies and practice constitutes discrimination against women by impairing the recognition of women’s sex-based human rights. Organizations that promote the concept of ‘gender identity’ challenge the right of women and girls to define themselves on the basis of sex.’

This is an excerpt from the Declaration on Women’s Sex-Based Rights, launched in 2019, and now signed by over 30,000 individuals in 158 countries, in collaboration with 427 organisations. The Declaration has become the manifesto of contemporary gender-critical feminism, which positions itself against ‘gender identity’ and especially the ability to self-define one’s gender. It has roots in 1970s radical feminism and its concept of women as a ‘sex class’ defined by their ability to reproduce, but has become a banner under which feminists of all stripes gather alongside conservatives and libertarians. ‘Sex-based rights’ is a rallying cry of the movement, and the term is also now used by organisations such as Fawcett and in the mainstream media. 

I am not a legal scholar, but I do not think ‘sex-based rights’ has formal legal meaning. As a political discourse it sounds similar to the ‘sexual rights’ demanded in first and second wave Western feminism, but is more restrictive and exclusive. The Equality Act 2010 recognises nine protected characteristics, which include sex and gender reassignment, but does not grant specific rights to people possessing these characteristics, only the right not to be discriminated against. Feminism has a long history of fighting against ‘sex-based rights’ – for instance, the right of only men to vote – in favour of equal ones. In gender-critical feminism, arguments against sex discrimination are replaced by entitlements to possess sex-based rights. This foregrounds the biology that has been used to deny women citizenship in the past. I am not going to go into the legal technicalities of this, which others have done much better than I could, but I am interested in this political discourse and what its implications might be. 

Rights are a way of distributing resources. In the gender-critical framework, extending rights to another group – trans people, and specifically trans women – erodes cis women’s ‘sex-based rights.’ This territorial claim sits within what Nancy Fraser might call the rubric of recognition. It protects a piece of an imaginary pie, rather than attempting to enlarge the pie itself by tackling socio-economic conditions and the neoliberal mentalities that put us in competition for resources defined as scarce. It also does not question who is serving the pie, who baked it, what its ingredients are and where they were grown: as Nadine El-Enany reminds us, rights mediate entitlements to, and exclusions from, the spoils of empire. Whatever rights we may have are granted against this backdrop of genocide, theft, slavery, and environmental devastation. 

Anti-colonial scholarship tells us that citizenship is a mode of both belonging and bordering, demarcated by an ‘outside’. Entitlements to ‘sex-based rights’ require the exclusion of others. Fair Play for Women, one of the UK’s key gender-critical organisations, state: ‘do not let it go unchallenged when someone says it is illegal to exclude a transwoman from a woman-only space or service.’ The Equality Act allows service providers to offer a single-sex space without being in violation of discrimination law if such provision is justified. This does not mean, however, that individual women have the right to demand a single-sex space. In gender-critical feminism, Equality Act exemptions are reformulated as an entitlement to not have to share space or resources with a trans woman, and a right to exclude her. 

‘Sex-based’ rights are possessed by ‘real’ women, who gender-critical feminism defines as people assigned female at birth. This is biological, rather than legal, sex: it parallels the ‘born this way’ arguments for gay rights which have often proved successful for the wrong reasons. Diane Richardson has interpreted ‘born this way’ claims using Spivak’s notion of ‘strategic essentialism’: in contrast, gender-critical essentialism seems very deeply held. The movement has expended much energy attempting to exclude trans women from womanhood. After Labour leader Keir Starmer recently said: ‘trans women are women’, gender-critical figurehead JK Rowling called his comments ‘yet another indication that the Labour Party can no longer be counted on to defend women’s rights.’ The ‘real women’ of gender-critical feminism are also ‘respectable’ ones: it tends towards homonormativity in its rejection of queer identities, and its equation of BDSM and sex work with violence against women echoes the 1980s feminist ‘sex wars’. This appeal to moral purity and the ‘natural’ order of things also reaches deep into colonial history. 

As María Lugones writes, colonial capitalism simultaneously imposed the ideology of heteropatriarchy and invented the ideology of race to control land, production, and behaviour. Although notions of race have a longer history, colonialism systematically ‘raced’ populations so they could be hyper-exploited, and eventually discarded, by economic production. Populations were also systematically gendered to facilitate this process: women were subordinated to men and made solely responsible for social reproduction, and there were attempts to eradicate Indigenous genders that did not fit the Western binary. However, what Lugones calls the colonial/modern gender system has a ‘light’ and a dark’ side. The light side ordered bourgeois lives and constituted the meanings of gender and compulsory heterosexuality. The dark side of this system ‘was and is thoroughly violent’. Colonised people of all genders were reduced to less-than-human status and forced into ‘such deep labor exploitation that often people died working.’ 

In the 19th century, this brutal stratification system was underpinned by the sciences of sex and race. The Enlightenment, primarily a tool of white supremacist differentiation from the ‘savagery’ of the colonies, also biologised gender differentials that had previously been cosmologically given. Sex difference became a property of the white bourgeois classes, as narratives shifted away from the one-sex model to one containing two sexes which were fundamentally different, in which white, bourgeois women were imagined as permanently under sexual threat. Post-Enlightenment, Kyla Schuller writes, the achievement of civilisation and rationality was facilitated by ‘the sex difference allegedly lacking in the colonized’. Racialised people were assigned the unsexed state of ‘flesh’, be-numbed to pain and therefore readily available for abuse. 

Claims for ‘sex-based rights’ conjure up this history, as does the endangerment foregrounded in gender-critical feminism. The woman of gender-critical feminism is perpetually at risk, from ‘female and/or lesbian erasure’, and sexual violence. The idea of trans women as space invaders draws on the notion of ‘replacement’ which appears regularly on the far right. It is also not alien to the history of mainstream white feminism: bourgeois suffrage campaigners argued that votes for women would prevent the system being ‘overrun’ by newly enfranchised African American or working-class white men. And as Sophie Lewis describes, many Victorian feminists also supported other forms of containment, such as eugenic programmes in which bourgeois white women were encouraged to reproduce while other women were prevented from doing so. Extending this legacy, the gender-critical focus on the female reproductive body activates tropes about women as nation and conceals both the global care chains that facilitate Western motherhood and the labour of social reproduction also disproportionately performed by queer and trans people.   

In January 2019, at a joint panel with far-right think-tank the Heritage Foundation, Women’s Liberation Front board member Kara Dansky claimed that if the US Equality Act (which would protect sexual orientation and gender identity) was passed, the following would happen:

Male rapists will go to women’s prisons and will likely assault female inmates as has already happened in the UK. Female survivors of rape will be unable to contest male presence in women’s shelters. Men will dominate women’s sports. Girls who would have taken first place will be denied scholastic opportunity. Women who use male pronouns to talk about men may be arrested, fined, and banned from social media platforms. Girls will stay home from school when they have their periods to avoid harassment by boys in mixed sex toilets. Girls and women will no longer have the right to ask for female medical staff or intimate care providers, including elderly or disabled women who are at serious risk of sexual abuse.

Pleas for protection from this dystopia evoke the ‘purity’ cherished in white supremacist culture, and the sexualization of the ‘rabble’ that stalked fears of anticolonial resistance. Because of this, and even though women of colour participate in gender-critical feminism, these pleas may only be fully intelligible when articulated by and through bourgeois whiteness. They bring to mind Wendy Brown’s critiques of the ‘wounded attachments’ of feminism (which I have argued are actually those of white feminism), and its appeals to punitive state power. Although other groups, such as LGBT asylum-seekers, are forced to perform victimhood to gain recognition from the paternalistic state, in gender-critical feminism victimisation is essential and eternal, rather than rooted in the social world. 

Gender-critical feminism is attractive to the authoritarian powers currently attempting to generate consent through protection from any number of imagined dangers. Like the colonial regimes that preceded it, contemporary authoritarian populism stokes fear of sexual violence and entwines it with what Diane Richardson calls ‘sexual nationalism’, which positions sexual Others as sexual threats. As Judith Butler argues, ‘gender’ is now linked with all kinds of imagined ‘infiltrations’ of the national body. Border walls and bathroom bills construct immigrants and trans people as potential rapists, and while purporting to protect us, create the conditions for mass exploitation and abuse. In a context of social and economic crisis and ongoing pandemic, this use of sexual violence as a bordering project recalls the Cold War fuelling of homophobia. 

Gender-critical feminism has become aligned with the right- and far-right projects which foreground whiteness under threat from both the enemy without and the enemy within, and position gender identity (or ‘gender ideology’) as a repository for a cluster of resentments and fears. Gender-critical views circulate alongside white nationalisms and conspiracy theories, mainstreamed under the banner of ‘free speech’ (again, formulated as an individual right), and attractive to those casting about for someone to blame. In the US, gender-critical feminists have partnered with a number of far-right groups and have become part of the Christian right’s agenda to ‘divide and rule’ the LGBT community by separating the ‘T’ from the ‘LGB’. In Britain, the Institute of Race Relations recently warned that ‘gender critical’ feminism was playing directly into the hands of the far right. 

This repeats the history of colonial and imperial feminist entanglements, and the more contemporary ones, in which powerful white men have professed their concern for women’s safety only when it serves their quest for domination. The crusade against ‘gender ideology’ is ultimately a crusade against all sexual and gender minorities, against feminism, against reproductive rights and against women. In Hungary, Poland, Russia, and the US, attacks on trans rights have quickly broadened along these lines. This is a process of excluding, expelling, or assimilating errant life, reasserting geographical and ideological borders, and defending the cis, white, enabled, ‘economically productive’ and heterosexually reproductive capitalist body. Gender-critical feminists are used as human shields for this process, cloaked in the garb of damsels in distress.

These agendas understand white women as property, to be abused at will but violently defended from the Others. Our bodies are worthy of protection, but only as a pretext for violence. This means that gender-critical feminism trades freedom for an experience of safety which is temporary at best. It echoes the heteronormative patriarchal contract in which women exchange submission for security, what Susan Griffin calls the ‘patriarchal protection racket’ and a framework in which rape within marriage is not just allowed but normalised. It also feeds the ‘law and order’ agendas developed through colonialism, that ‘put away’ populations deemed surplus to capitalist requirements. I have called this the ‘racial capitalist protection racket’: the acts and threats of sexual violence that keep us afraid, that make us docile subjects of capitalism, also drive us into the arms of the carceral-colonial state and enable many other kinds of violence in the service of capitalist accumulation. At what Gargi Bhattacharyya terms the ‘edge’ spaces of capitalism, the most vulnerable populations are both subjected to sexual violence and constructed as sexual threats. 

In March 2021, marketing executive Sarah Everard was murdered by serving Metropolitan Police officer Wayne Couzens, after disappearing from London’s Clapham Common. The previous June, members of the same police force were suspended for taking selfies with the bodies of murdered sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry in a different London park. A vigil for these three women on Clapham Common, and almost 200 others who have died in police custody or prison in England and Wales, was subsequently led by feminist group Sisters Uncut and violently broken up by police. Yet mainstream demands following Everard’s murder promised more power to the carceral system – calls for the criminalisation of street harassment and for misogyny to become a hate crime.

While other feminists were demanding protection, Sisters Uncut said: ‘police are the perpetrators’, and launched the Kill The Bill campaign, which opposed the expanded policing powers in the Policing, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Bill (now passed) and asked the public to withdraw their consent from British policing. ‘Sisters Uncut maintain that more police powers will lead to more police violence and a society without police would be much safer,’ they said, demanding that police budgets be cut, and funding for domestic and sexual abuse services reinstated. They also launched police intervention training to help people know their rights and support others in dangerous policing situations, with a plan for national ‘CopWatch’ patrol groups. The slogan for this programme of work was ‘become ungovernable’. 

Withdrawing consent refers to the British tradition of ‘policing by consent’, and also to something much bigger. Even a cursory glance at the history and political economy of carceral systems tells us that they were not developed to keep us safe but to preserve state and elite interests, protect private property and resources, dispose of economically surplus populations, and ultimately ensure that racial capitalism functions unabated. The origins of policing lie in an 18th century triumvirate of oppression: colonialism, slavery, and control of the new industrial working class. The social contract, which is a sexual, racial and settler contract, is a covenant between white men that grants them sexual access to women, and (with white women) the race supremacy that rests on the dehumanisation of people of colour. This underpins the template of policing, which as Rinaldo Walcott writes, was founded on the idea that Black people and other people of colour are always suspect. What Walcott calls the ‘big threatening Black man’ is its archetype, with the vulnerable white woman as his foil. 

This iconography has legitimated colonial genocide, lynching, and the growth of the prison-industrial complex. In the everyday, it facilitates what Walcott calls ‘white deputisation’, with its key players described by Jessie Daniels as the ‘contemporary white women who call the police on black people sitting in a Starbucks, barbecuing in a park or napping in a dorm’. Mainstream white feminism also legitimates white supremacy by subscribing to what Alex Vitale calls the ‘liberal fantasy that the police exist to protect us from the bad guys’. However, like Sarah Everard’s murderer, many of the white men who purport to protect us from these Others reserve the right to abuse and kill us themselves. This is true of the other law enforcement officers worldwide who have harmed girls and women, and of the far-right politicians who profess concern for ‘women’s safety’ in their campaigns against immigrants and trans people, while harassing and assaulting both the women they know and the women who oppose them. 

While gender-critical feminism participates in the racial capitalist protection racket, Sisters Uncut, echoing Black liberation struggles, articulates a politics of refusal. On the anniversary of the Clapham Common vigil, they set off 1000 rape alarms at Charing Cross police station, a loud seizure of public space. In contrast, gender-critical feminism portends a return to 19th century bourgeois segregation. The ‘real woman’ is a symbol of moral order, set against a dystopia without borders and boundaries, the world Sisters Uncut inhabit in their solidarity with global abolition struggles. Gender-critical feminism can be seen as both a reduction of white women to the status of property and an attempt to protect what Cheryl Harris would call whiteness as property: a status property that confers rights denied to others, and entails a right to exclude. Recognising trans women as women, for gender-critical feminists, diminishes the value of womanhood – a value often realised within white supremacy through narratives of endangerment and victimisation. Gender-critical feminism echoes white nationalist politics in enacting victimhood and domination at the same time. 

The far-right war on women benefits from these forms of white womanhood that attempt to preserve their own position by punching down on ‘degenerate’ sisters. The enforced economic scarcity of neoliberal capitalism is legitimised by claims to resources and support for the ‘good’ women rather than the ‘bad’. The construction of trans people as aggressors conceals the fact that they are also subject to the male violence cis women fear. This violence is both interpersonal and structural; it is necropolitical state violence, the violence of war, and violence against the planet. Understanding this raises important questions: which lives are to be protected at all costs? Which are to be protected to protect the system? Which are already meant to be lost? 

Sisters Uncut articulates a politics based on grappling with these questions, undoing both gender and race by rejecting the law enforcement that protects the property of whiteness. In contrast, gender-critical feminism attempts to gain ground within racial capitalism by demanding protection that can only fully be claimed by bourgeois white women, reinstating the heterosexual matrix in the process. Gender-critical feminism is both deeply complicit with authoritarian governance and not critical of gender at all. The distance from ‘sex-based rights’ to ‘become ungovernable’ is the difference between supremacy and solidarity.

This piece is the text of a talk given at Newcastle University on 12th May 2022, at an event to celebrate Professor Diane Richardson’s retirement.

Writing up your methodology

Here are some suggestions on how the various sections of a dissertation methods chapter should be put together, expressed as question prompts for you to think about and respond to. This is not a definitive guide, and it does not replace careful reading on methodology and independent thought. You will need to cite academic literature to back up your answers to the questions asked here, and there may be other matters you need to address in your methods chapter that have not been included here, depending on your study. This is just some initial guidance. The prompts here are practical ones – remember that a methods chapter should contain a lot of operational detail. It should also be reflective and reflexive about your own role as researcher, although we don’t need your life story! Reading a methods chapter should give you all the information you would need to be able to replicate the study if you wanted to.  

Methodological framework

What is your methodological framework? (E.g., positivist, interpretivist, feminist, de- or post-colonial, postmodernist, or a mixture). Is your study qualitative or quantitative, or mixed methods, and why? Why did you choose this particular framework for your research topic? What are the benefits and limitations of this framework? If you used particular theories to frame your study, how did these theories fit with your methodological framework? How did you operationalise your theory(ies)? For instance, how did you recognise concepts such as ‘power’ or ‘agency’ in your data? How did you measure stigma?

Research design

What type of study did you conduct (e.g., longitudinal, comparative, case-study, cross-sectional) and why? How many stages was it conducted in? (E.g., an initial review of the literature, followed by design and piloting of research instruments, followed by fieldwork, followed by writing up). Why did you design the research like this and what were the strengths and limitations of your design? If you had to do it again, would you design it any differently and why? 

Sampling and gaining access

What did your sample consist of (e.g., three teachers and ten students, 20 policy documents) and how did you generate it? Did you choose a sample at random, was it self-selecting, did you use a purposive sampling technique or was yours a convenience sample? Were you looking for representativeness or was this a more exploratory study? If you worked with human subjects, what were the demographics of the sample and how diverse was it? If you were working with existing or ‘found’ data such as documents, how did you select them in a systematic way? You need to give assurances that you did not just cherry-pick your sample to confirm what you feel you already know.

How did you gain access to your sample (for instance, did you advertise on social media, did you approach a local organisation, did you go through a gatekeeper)? Were there any problems in sampling and/or gaining access, and how did you address them? What were the strengths and weaknesses of your sample and how does this impact on the knowledge claims you can make? For instance, if you were doing a study on young men’s experiences of the police, if your sample contained only white middle class men your results would probably be very different than if your sample contained working class men, both white and men of colour. You would probably miss a lot of important issues. The more broad or ambitious you want your claims to be, the bigger and more diverse your sample has to be – but remember that a limited sample does not necessarily undermine your study as long as you acknowledge it and temper your claims accordingly. Another example – you might study a Brighton yoga class. It might turn out that most of the participants are white middle-class women. This does not invalidate your research if you are open about it – in fact, you might write a very interesting study about how gender, class, and race shape people’s participation in particular forms of fitness and ‘wellness’ activity.

Methods

What methods or mixture of methods (e.g., surveys, interviews, focus groups, observation, content or documentary analysis) did you choose and why? If you were doing interviews or focus groups, were these structured, semi-structured, unstructured and why? If you were doing observations, were these overt or covert, participant or non-participant and why? Were they conducted in open/public or closed settings? Did you collect data in person or online? What are some of the benefits and drawbacks of these methods and the combination of methods you chose (if relevant)?

How did you design your research instruments (e.g., your survey/interview/focus group questions) and how did you decide what questions to ask? How did you translate your research questions and operationalise your theory (if relevant)? Did you use a top-down approach (generate headings first, then populate sections) or a bottom-up one (list all topics of interest, then organise)? If you did observations, did you write field notes freely or use a structured observation schedule? Did you take any quantitative notes and how? How did you record both your subjective experiences and your analysis? If you did content analysis of existing data, how did you systematise this? Did you do quantitative or qualitative analysis, or both? Did you do discourse/narrative/semiotic analysis? How did you create your coding frame or schedule? Was it concept- or data-driven? How did you capture any contextual data? (More about this in data analysis below).

What was it like to collect the data? How did you generate full and sincere responses to your questions and create rapport with participants? In focus groups, how did you manage the interaction in the group and deal with any dominant or shy individuals? Did you record the interaction, body language and group dynamics, and how? How did you remain flexible while keeping the discussion on-topic? Did you use any creative methods or audiovisual materials to facilitate discussion and how did this go?

Ethics and reflexivity

What was your approach to research ethics in your study? Did you follow a professional framework such as the British Sociological Association’s, and how did you put that into practice? How did you ensure participants were giving informed consent throughout their participation in your study? How did you manage refusal and withdrawal? How did you ensure confidentiality and anonymity if these were offered? How were your data processed and stored in line with both ethical principles and any relevant legal requirements (such as GDPR)? What did you do, both immediately and in terms of after-care, if any participants were distressed because of the research? How did you exercise cultural, social, political, and personal sensitivity in both the process, writing up and publication (if relevant) of your research?

How did you manage your own social and/or cultural positionality(ies), and any potential political or emotional investments you had in the research? Remember we don’t need your autobiography here. How did your participants respond to you and why? How did you feel about the whole process? How did you look after your own wellbeing, if you were studying a sensitive topic or if difficult issues arose? What other ethical decisions did you have to make, and how did you make and implement them? What would you do differently next time?  

Data analysis

How did you analyse your data (e.g., coding, compiling statistics)? How did you build up your coding frame and identify codes and sub-codes? Was your coding frame non-hierarchical or hierarchical in structure? Did you use software (e.g., NViVO, or comments on a Word document) or just a highlighter pen and scissors? What was your coding process (e.g., pre-analysis, code, adjust, code again)? Did you do inductive or deductive coding, or a mixture? How did you relate your codes back to your research questions and theory(ies) and look at the bigger picture?

How did you move from description to analysis and interpretation? How can you be sure your analysis and interpretation was careful and honest, and you were not just looking for what you wanted to find? How did you decide which story to tell about your data, and make sure you were not flattening out complexities and ignoring contradictions while remaining clear? How does your method of data analysis, and its drawbacks, impact on the knowledge claims you can make?

If you manage to address most or all of these questions in your methodology chapter, you will be well on your way. Don’t forget to end the chapter with a few sentences linking to the next section of your dissertation. Good luck!