Abstracts:

German Post-Terrorist Autobiography and the Feminist Politics of Violence

Dr. Clare Bielby
My research focuses on women, gender and left-wing militant groups labelled as terrorist in the context of the post-war Federal Republic of Germany. And in this paper, I reflect on feminist methodological and ethico-political considerations with regard to how I approach to the topic of violence into my soon-to-be-completed monograph, Terrorism and the Self: Gender, Violence, and Time in German Post-Terrorist Autobiography. Among other issues, I will discuss the gendering of epistemologies/ categories of violence (such as what counts as ‘political violence’ and ‘terrorism’), the feminist politics of the forms of violence we choose to direct our attention to, as well as reflecting on my own investment in this particular topic and in those who perpetrate.

Challenging the rural imaginary

Dr. Sam Lewis
Abstract: The English countryside, as captured in art, poetry and prose, presents an idyllic image of rural life. In this presentation, I will explore how dominant representations of rural England obscure alternative depictions of life in the countryside. Drawing on a Home Office-funded study of the geospatial and contextual patterns of rural domestic abuse, conducted in collaboration with Cumbria Constabulary and local domestic abuse service providers, I will examine the particular needs and experiences of rural survivors of domestic abuse, and those working to support them. This paper will close with a call for art and artists to complicate dominant narratives of rural life.

Writing motherhood and violence 

Dr Anna Johnson Abstract
In approaching some of the many possible intersections of motherhood and violence, I will draw on my recently completed PhD research on haunting in motherhood literature to look at examples of works that explore the effects of domestic and other forms of violence on motherhood experience. These works will include Catherine Cho’s recent memoir Inferno, Cherrie Moraga’s 1997 memoir Waiting in the Wings. More broadly, I will also touch upon the forms of violence done to mothers by the ‘institution of motherhood’1 . There is violence – social, psychological and physical – inherent in the ‘institution of motherhood’, that weight of expectation, assumption and unattainable idealisation placed on mothers and mothering by heteronormative, capitalist, patriarchal systems. The force of this ‘institution’ (identified in the 1970s in the work of poet and theorist Adrienne Rich) can be felt across obstetric and gynaecological violence, the psychological impacts of inevitable failure and, ultimately, the dehumanisation of those who mother. Finally, I will read a recent poem from my poetic life writing practice that speaks to these themes. 

From the spectacular to everyday violence in the lives of young women: Understanding the social roots of violence and (potential) responses to it
Professor Sundari Anitha
I draw upon some of my recent research violence on gender-based violence in university communities in the UK, on domestic violence in young women’s non-marital relationships in India and on university policies to address this violence in the UK and India to reflect on the underpinnings of such violence and potential responses to it. Following a brief overview of the continuum of violence from the spectacular to the everyday, from direct acts of violence perpetrated by an agent to violence embedded in social structures and political/institutional systems, I reflect on responses to such violence through community-based initiatives, self-organised actions and through seeking changes within political/institutional domains.

Collecting Rape: investigating the socialization of gendered violence with art as the mediating factor, focusing primarily on the collections and archives of the V&A museum
Kate Howe: I entered this project in 2020 when I encountered Artemisia Gentileschi’s Susanna and the Elders in person for the first time. What was this story? I’d seen this painting reproduced thousands of times. But what was it about? Who were these men? Why are they pointing to the sky? In 2021, Macushla Robinson published her ‘procrastination project’ Every Rape in the Met Museum. I began to wonder, as I sat, that same year, sketching in front of Titian’s Rape of Europa, how I could find this painting so astonishingly beautiful when the problem is right there in the title. I began to wonder, just how much rape are we collecting? What role has the museum played in normalizing rape, in recontexualizing the violence we see in paintings as allegorical, and therefore acceptable? I thought about what it would be to grow up eating breakfast under a massive tapestry in the family home, seeing Susanna trying to escape from the Elders every morning. The V&A museum began to pull hard on me - it is a museum of taste. The height of design, art, fashion, it houses the pinnacle of fine taste from the perspective of Victoria, ‘Empress of India’. (And, of course, Queen of England). This talk will set out the framework I am using to explore the collections and archives of the V&A museum, and ask: is art complicit? What effects does the presentation of objects of ‘high taste’ which represent rape and other forms of gendered violence have on a populace? What does it mean when the collection stands as the voice of the state? What do we learn about our gender identities when faced with objects which frame this violence as a) inevitable and b) beautiful?

Bios

Dr. Clare Bielby is Senior Lecturer in the Centre for Women’s Studies, University of York, and is currently completing a monograph on German leftist post-terrorist autobiography. Clare has published widely on the subject of gender, violence, and (self-)representation with a focus on post-war German culture. She is the author of Violent Women in Print: Representations in the West German Media of the 1960s and 1970s (Camden House, 2012) and co-editor (with Anna Richards) of Women and Death 3: Women’s Representations of Death in German Culture since 1500 (Camden House, 2010). Together with Mererid Puw Davies, she was Principal Investigator on the research project: ‘Violence Elsewhere: Imagining Violence outside Germany since 1945’, funded by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), out of which two volumes of essays have emerged: Violence Elsewhere 1: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany 1945–2001 and Violence Elsewhere 2: Imagining Distant Violence in Germany since 2001 (Camden House, 2024).

Dr Sam Lewis is Associate Professor of Criminology and Criminal Justice in the School of Law at the University of Leeds. In an academic career spanning 25 years, I have conducted research funded by organisations including the Home Office, the Crown Prosecution Service, the Nuffield Foundation and local criminal justice organisations. I have worked with police forces, domestic abuse service providers, probation services, youth justice services, and the prison estate. I have also worked with men, women and children in receipt of criminal justice interventions.

For the last decade, my research has focused on violence against women and girls (VAWG), particularly intimate partner abuse (IPA) and child-to-parent violence (CPV). Most recently, I led a Home Office-funded study of police responses to rural domestic abuse (DA) with 

Cumbria Constabulary. The project brought police together with domestic abuse service providers, Victim Support and others, to improve responses to VAWG. I also lead the university’s Feminist Research Into Violence & Abuse (FRIVA) network, and co-chair West Yorkshire Police's VAWG Scrutiny Panel.

Dr Anna Johnson: (they/them) Anna is a writer, poet, lecturer and mother, with a background in visual art. Anna’s prose/poetry life writing practice centres around the complexity and ambivalence of motherhood experience, haunting, and failure. They draw on, amongst other things, disability theory, queer and feminist theory. Anna explores the ways in which we attempt to express difficult-to-articulate experiences, such as the strangeness of early motherhood. They have published broadly within maternal studies and as a poet. Their full-length prose-poetry work, Motherhood: A Ghost Story, (as Anna Brook) is out with Broken Sleep Books in September 2025. Anna lectures in creative writing and English literature at Kingston University, where they have also recently completed their PhD in creative writing. In addition, they run writing workshops, are a guest editor of Studies in the Maternal journal and cofounder of the Visceral Bodies research network.

Professor Sundari Anitha: is Chair in Sociological Studies at the University of Sheffield, UK. She has published widely on the problem of violence against women and girls (VAWG), and on the intersections of gender, race and ethnicity in employment relations and labour resistance. She is co-editor of Families, Relationships and Societies, and serves on the editorial board of Women’s Studies International Forum. She served as a member of the UK's Research Excellence Framework - REF 2021 sub-panel 21: Sociology.

Professor Anitha is a public sociologist whose research is closely informed by and informs practice - she previously been a caseworker/manager at domestic violence refuges in the UK and collaborated with trade unions working to support migrant workers. She has been active in activism, advocacy and policymaking on violence against women for over 25 years. She currently serves as a trustee of three organisations: Southall Black Sisters, Anti-trafficking and labour exploitation unit (ATLEU) and National Centre for Social Research. 

Kate Howe (they/them) is an artist, writer and post-graduate researcher at the University of Leeds where they are pursuing a Ph.D. in Practice-led research entitled Collecting Rape: Collation, Curation and Response to every item in the Victoria and Albert Museum and Archives that takes Rape as its subject. Howe holds an MA from Kingston University in Creative Writing, an MA from the Royal College of Art in Painting, and a BA from Arizona State University in Art History.

Howe is the Founding Director and Artist in Residence at RutpureXIBIT, an inclusive, artist-run residency-based practice incubator located in South West London, and has shown their work at the Aspen Art Museum (US), Lychee One Gallery (London, GB), The Crypt St. Pancras (London, GB), Mile End Art Pavilion (London, GB), Orelans House Gallery (London, GB) and is currently showing at Patrick Studio, Leeds, Leeds (GB) through July 2025.