Jan Monk Lecture 2020

Abstract: This paper focuses on key tensions between individual and collective experiences, responses and concepts in gender-based violence (GBV). The isolation of survivors is not just 'how it is', but a condition both created and exploited by perpetrators, and buttressed by social perceptions and practices. Here I consider whether and how we can think of GBV in terms of collective trauma, as some scholarship and recent social movements suggest; a concept more widely used in Black and postcolonial literatures to describe the social and communal nature of the long afterwards/ongoing present of structural forms of trauma. I draw on a participatory action research project conducted with a group of domestic abuse survivors that used discussion, drawing and song to identify both how isolating functions and the many levels of communal experience that counter it. The paper ends with reflecting instead on the utility of commoning to connect forms of resistance to violences across time and space, a concept that is better able to contain diverse and uneven experiences.

 Rachel Pain is Professor of Human Geography at Newcastle University in the UK, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences. Her research focuses on violence, fear and trauma, with gender-based violence a particular interest from intimate to international scales. Her work is informed by feminist and participatory theory, practice and activism. She collaborates on this research with a range of voluntary and public sector organizations as well as survivor groups.