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Abigail Hardcastle
Abigail's PhD project title is 'Queer(y)ing Schooling: The Queer Geographies of Secondary Schools, Young People and the Role of Pedagogy and Education'. Read more about Abigail's research.
Project title
Queer(y)ing Schooling: The Queer Geographies of Secondary Schools, Young People and the Role of Pedagogy and Education
Supervisors
- Professor Anoop Nayak
- Dr Matej Blazek
- Professor Simon Forrest (Durham University)
Research clusters
About Abigail
I'm an ESRC funded doctoral researcher in Human Geography at Newcastle University.
My research interests broadly cover the geographical (re)production of gender and sexual identities.
Project description
This research offers a critical spatial perspective focusing on the queer geographies young people in relation to UK secondary schools.
The study contributes significantly to the sub-disciplinary field of children and youth geographies, which is currently limited in its focus on sexuality.
This research will, via a multi-spatial lens, uncover the active role young people play in the queer geographies of schooling e.g., via, performing, transgressing, voicing and normalising sexual and other normativities. This will add to limited geographical understandings of how sexual and other normativities work together in school spaces to position sexuality in multifaceted constellations of power.
Through this co-productive participatory research young people will be reframed within key debates and benefit from being encouraged to exercise their agency within and beyond the structure of schooling.
Further, by listening to how CYP (re)imagine and queer both pedagogy and the spatialities of schooling —through creative arts-based methodologies — we can better understand the role of pedagogy and education in moving towards a less violent and queerer future; with young people placed as equals in this process of knowledge production and alternative ways of thinking.
Personal interests
Beyond academia I also volunteer at Rape Crisis Tyneside and Northumberland as an activist and fundraiser. I have previously campaigned for university change and action around issues of sexual violence and am trained to support student survivors through the facilitation of peer group support sessions. I also co-founded and managed a project that ran workshops on sexual violence to secondary school pupils in the North-East.
Publications
2022: ‘It Happens Here Report’. Read more about this report at 487f80_It_Happens_Here_Report_to_CtC_Dec_(1)_(1).pdf (rackcdn.com)
Presentations
2024: ‘I came for the money but stayed for the revolution’: Crypto Visions, Crypto-Masculinities and the Gendered Geographies of Digital Finance. Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference - August 2024
2023: ‘It Happens Here’: Student Campaigning and Activism around Sexual Violence in the Context of the Neoliberal University. Royal Geographical Society Annual International Conference - August 2023
Teaching
Academic qualifications, memberships and achievements
- MA in Human Geography Research, Newcastle University (2022-23)
- BA in Human Geography, Newcastle University (2019-22)
- Awards:
- John Burgess Goddard Prize for the Best Economic Geography Themed Masters Dissertation
- Best Overall Human Geography Undergraduate Dissertation
- ‘Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group’ undergraduate dissertation of the year.