Gabriella Mwedzi – Gender Interview

“My research interests surround gender-based violence, looking at intimate partner violence (IVP) within Christian relationships. For example, how religion, ethnicity, and gender intersect creates spaces where intimate partner violence can sometimes go unnoticed and passed off as an aspect of religion or culture or something that identifies someone as part of their ethnicity instead of intimate partner violence."

“I think for me, from my personal experience, I am a Christian, and I'm also a pastor's daughter. I have had family members who have experienced intimate partner violence, so being exposed to all this stuff, I've seen how acts of intimate partner violence, whether it be economic abuse or financial abuse or sexual abuse, can be passed off as ‘that's just how we do things as part of our religion’ or ‘that's just how we do things as part of our culture’. It's about understanding why some people may struggle to identify this as being problematic and seeing it as might be just because it's part of your culture. Just because it's part of your religion doesn't mean that it's the correct thing you need to do. So, it's really trying to find out more about that but also without homogenising groups of people or without demonising people's faith or people's culture—trying to find a balance between ‘yes, this is who you are, and this is what you believe’ but also how can we not let women suffer at the same time.”

“During my undergrad, I initially didn't have any interest in gender, but during my undergrad, I took a module on sex work, a module on intimate partner violence, and a module on gender. It was all in the same semester, and just hearing stories from different women about how because they were women, they were suffering, especially when it came to sex work and how they didn't necessarily have the same workers' rights. Hearing how my lecturers speak about gender got me thinking about why is gender this big thing. There were even some stories from sex workers who were trans who were talking about their experiences and how their experiences were different from non-trans sex workers. They were just talking about it, and it really got me interested in the topic of gender. Here we are today, almost seven years later."

“It was the best module I took during my undergrad because of how the module leader taught it. We got to watch different documentaries on sex work and hear from the women themselves in a way that wasn't problematic, in a way that wasn't through the lens of cis white male's perspective on what sex work is. It was hearing the stories from these women, and I think we even had someone come in for one of our lectures and talk about their experience. The majority of the stuff was around women's safety in the sex work and how people just assume because you're a sex worker, it's okay for you to be violated or it's okay for you to experience violence."

"At the moment, I'm focusing on obviously the PhD. I'm at the stage where I'm planning the research that I'll be starting later this year. I'll be doing an ethnography and spending time with a few different church environments getting to know the women as part of my Master's degree. As part of my MA, I did focus groups with clergy members within the church to see if they could identify instances of IPV. I gave them some hypothetical situations, and then we had some discussions about them. I discovered a lack of female voices and that some people were prohibited from participating in the focus groups by their husbands. The reason for doing the ethnography is that it gives me better access to women and gets the women's voices across more in the research. That's where I'm planning the ethnography and hopefully starting at the end of this year. Then, I'm also a research assistant, working on a project on community power. We're working on trying to find ways that community power, such as different initiatives like asset transfer practitioner collaboration, how those various aspects of community power can help with the prevention and intervention of intimate partner violence. Basically, looking at the community as knowledge holders, looking at communities as experts in their own right, understanding that different types of communities know about their community better than we as researchers or policymakers know about their community. We are trying to see if there are various community power initiatives that we can use to help with gender-based violence. Different initiatives already help with isolation and peer support network groups that help with addiction but seeing if those same things can translate to gender-based violence."

"It is crucial to look at what different disciplines have to say specifically about your or my project. I'm also focusing on migration. I find migration literature actually hasn't been talked about gender or IPV in particular. There's a lot of overlap between how women are treated and how men are treated. When you add the layer of migration, that changes the ballgame completely. So it's essential to consider migration and gender, then religion, and then whatever other disciplines may come to light as I do my research. It helps build a bigger picture that doesn't flatten the community. I found with my MA that I didn't include this multi-disciplinary approach, and although the data was helpful, it wasn't as beneficial as it could have been for mapping your way forward or seeing how things could have been, things could be better or seeing how we could address the issues that the clergy members were highlighting. Also, you have to think about migration, when they migrated, how they migrated, and the circumstances around their migration. These things also build a picture of why they believe what they think, so if we're looking for policies or initiatives that will help, it's no use if I'm not considering migration. An interdisciplinary approach is helpful, especially when we're thinking about social problems because we're not one-dimensional people. We've got multiple layers, so we need to have that kind of approach to social issues."

"I started looking at the fact that statistically, within England and Wales, people from minority backgrounds experience higher rates of IPV. I then looked at the people who are experiencing this within the world; the people who are born here and the people born abroad. The rates of migration within England and Wales are very high, and I was finding that as I'm doing more research and more reading, it was people who migrated over here and in my own personal circumstance. I am a first-generation migrant. I wasn't born here; I moved over here with my parents, and the experiences that I've seen and experiences that I know have been migrant experiences. So knowing how gender is in origin countries, especially my origin country, and having read about that, I think that was what was like, okay, migration needs to be something that we're looking at because again, we're living in a day and age where everyone's migrating everywhere. If you're experiencing IPV within a country, you're not experiencing it with just the people you were born and raised with. You're experiencing it with other people who've migrated to your country. You have to investigate or understand what is gender like in the UK, how gender in the UK impacts the people who've migrated, what is gender like in people's origin countries and how that impacts the way gender is seen when they migrate. You have to look at both countries when you're thinking of different countries or backgrounds when you're thinking about IPV and gender because we are social beings, and we interact. As problematic as it is, sometimes social learning theory is a thing in the sense that we learn from each other, so I am learning from people who were born and raised here. Therefore, IPV is not just an issue, but it's an amalgamation of many different things."

"Especially within the PhD environment, everyone studying gender is like we're all in it together. If someone sees something exciting and knows that I'm studying gender, they'll be like, ‘oh, I read this, and it was about gender, and you might want to look at it.’ I think that, especially in the gender community within Newcastle, we have one common goal: to research gender and make the lives of all gendered people better. I think we do that really well, and we support each other. I always read horror stories from other universities about PhD students not getting along or supervisors not helping. Within our community of supervisors and students, we're all there to help each other, and we know that."

"I think you have to be really passionate about it. Researching gender is not easy. It can sometimes be triggering; it can sometimes be cumbersome when you spend days on end immersed in the literature that's literally talking about people's trauma and suffering. It can be challenging, but you have to be passionate about it because if you're not passionate about it, you're not gonna get through it. You're going to fall at the first hurdle because you're going to get affected by it to a point where you're not going to want to do it. You are going to get bored. My piece of advice is that you have to be passionate about gender to study gender."