“Has he eaten salt?”: communication difficulties in health care

The communication gap can lead to lack of trust, poor diagnoses and ineffectual treatment. Using research in allied fields of applied linguistics and intercultural communication this article demonstrates the problem of considering patients as deficient in their language resources and suggests the use of arts-based methods for bridging the communication gap in minority and Aboriginal community settings

That's what she said: women students' experiences of 'lad culture' in higher education

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Violence against women students in the UK: time to take action

Sexual and gendered violence in the education sector is a worldwide concern, but in the UK it has been marginalised in research and policy. In this paper we present findings from the National Union of Students' study Hidden Marks, the first nationwide survey of women students' experiences of violence. This research established high levels of prevalence, with one in four respondents being subject to unwanted sexual behaviour during their studies. We analyse why the issue of violence against women students has remained low profile in this country, whereas in the USA, where victimisation rates are similar, it has had a high profile since the 1980s and interventions to tackle it have received a significant amount of federal support. We urge UK policymakers, universities, students' unions and academics to address the problem, and make suggestions about initial actions to take

Review essay

THE GAZE OF THE WEST AND FRAMINGS OF THE EAST, SHANTA NAIR-VENUGOPAL (ED.) (2012) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, XV + 264 pp. ISBN: 978-0-230-30292-1, h/bk, £66.0

The fight against sexual violence

This paper engages critically with the feminist fight against sexual violence, especially in relation to global rightward shifts in which political and cultural narratives around gender are being reshaped and rejuvenated. In the context of a new ‘war on women’ worldwide, #MeToo and similar movements have been key to contemporary political resistance. However, mainstream movements against sexual violence are ill-equipped to address the intersections of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism which produce sexual violence. Furthermore, the reactionary arms of these movements are gaining increasing power and platforms, dovetailing with the narratives of the far right in their attacks on sex workers and trans people. I argue that to resist an intersectionality of systems, we need what Angela Davis calls an intersectionality of struggles, and that feminism which does not centre the most marginalised is not fit for purpose

'Every woman knows a Weinstein': political whiteness and white woundedness in #MeToo and public feminisms around sexual violence

This article explores how whiteness shapes public feminisms around sexual violence, using #MeToo as a case study. Building on the work of Daniel Martinez HoSang (2010), Gurminder Bhambra (2017) and others, I theorize political whiteness as an orientation to/mode of politics which employs both symbolic tropes of woundability and interpersonal performances of fragility (DiAngelo 2011), and invokes state and institutional power to redress personal injury. Furthermore, I argue that the ‘wounded attachments’ (Brown 1995) of public sexual violence feminisms are met by an equally wounded whiteness in the right-wing backlash: acknowledging the central role of race exposes continuities between both progressive and reactionary politics dominated by white people. Political whiteness stands in contrast to the alternative politics long articulated by women of color, and black women in particular. However, these alternatives may encounter different problematics, for instance intersecting with neoliberal notions of resilience which are also racialized. Challenging political whiteness is therefore not simply a case of including more diverse narratives: this must be done while examining how sexual violence is experienced and politicized in the nexus of patriarchy, capitalism and colonialism, in which gender, race and class intersect with categories such as victims and survivors, woundedness and resilience