FemIDEAS

Good afternoon, everybody. Hopefully most of you who managed to get in, apologies that
there were a few issues with the Zoom link. I think when everyone’s trying to get in at
once, it sometimes is a little bit upset. But let’s get started. My name is Anna Bull.
I’m a senior lecturer in education and social justice at the University of York. And I’m
a co-founder and director of the 1752 Group. We’re a research and campaigning organisation
based in the UK, working to address the issue of sexual harassment and violence in higher
education, with a particular focus on addressing staff or faculty sexual harassment and misconduct.
And that’s an issue that we’ve been working on since we were founded in 2016. We thought
we would have solved the issue by now, but sadly not. And this webinar is jointly hosted
between the 1752 Group and FEM Ideas, which is a research project run by my co-director,
Adria Day, which is a project called Decolonising Sexual and Gender-Based Violence in Higher
Education. So I’m just going to give you a little bit of background to how and why this webinar
came about. It’s a year exactly since the book Sexual Misconduct in Academia, Informing and
Ethics of Care in the University was published last March 2023 by Routledge, Taylor and Francis Group.
However, in August last year, the book was withdrawn from publication
after the publisher, Routledge, released a statement saying that they had taken a step
of withdrawing the book after receiving, quote, a series of legal threats from various parties,
unquote. And this was in relation to one chapter, Chapter 12. Chapter 12 was entitled
The Walls Spoke When No One Else Would, Autoethnographic Notes on Sexual Power
Gatekeeping Within Avant-Garde Academia. It was co-authored by Elisa Lottaviana,
Katerina Leranejo and Mia Nadia-Tom. So in September, following this book being withdrawn,
we were involved in an open letter, which was published calling for Routledge to republish
the book. And that letter was signed by thousands of academics internationally. But now, a year on
after the book was published, this is effectively the anniversary event, the entire volume remains
unpublished, including 11 further chapters that were not subject to complaints. And we’re here
for one of the authors of one of those chapters today. So there’s no route forward for publication
currently. And so we’re going to talk about some of the implications of this situation.
We’re not going to discuss the Routledge example in particular, but we’re going to talk about the
issues that this situation raises, in particular, the implications for authors who are publishing
work on gender-based violence in academia, and particularly on academic work,
and talk about what support we need from publishers and from our institutions and
from activists in doing this. And we’ll talk about strategies for activism to ensure that
publishers and institutions don’t side all the time with the powerful and don’t continue to
silence the voices of victim survivors. And I’d just like to say thanks to the authors of Chapter
12 from the book section was Conduct Academia, who helped with putting the panel together
and who we’ve liaised with in setting up this event. So I’m really excited to have four panelists
with a wide variety of expertise with me today to speak about this issue. I’ll introduce them
in full detail shortly. But just briefly, we have Alex Pitythorn from York University in Canada,
Dona Amadi from the Groningen University in the Netherlands,
Tom Dark from Edinburgh University Press, and Dirk Verhoef from Ghent University,
who’s involved in initiatives around academic and media freedom internationally.
And I can see that we have got quite a few people who’ve joined us. My apologies to those of you
who’ve had a little trouble getting in, because lots of people were trying to access the Zoom link
at the same time, then we had a bit of a backlog. And that’s why you maybe had a few problems.
I’ll just briefly say thank you to the funders of the webinar. So as the University of Westminster,
and also to say that we’ll be putting together a short report based on the discussions from this
webinar, as well as the webinar last week, which was a really fantastic discussion hosted by
Adresia Day, my co-director of the 72 Group. And so if you’d like to receive this report
when it’s published, we’ll put a link in the chat to our mailing list. So please go ahead
and join the mailing list and you’ll receive this. Due to the sensitivity of the issue,
we haven’t yet made a decision as to whether we’re going to release the recording of the event,
and we’ll make that decision after the event. But if you join the mailing list,
you’ll receive whatever outputs come from this event, as well as from last week’s event.
Finally, in terms of practicalities, there is a Safer Spaces statement, which was in the sign-up
page, which we’ll now also post to the chat. And that’s got links for support and information
relating to this issue. And so just to say in terms of organising this webinar,
due to the sensitivity of the topic, we will be moderating all questions or comments before
the audience can see them. So if you post a question or comment, we’ll come to those
in the second half of the event, but we will just make them visible to the audience one
by one. So don’t worry if you can’t see what you posted. So what are we going to talk about?
We’ll spend the first half an hour, 40 minutes or so, and on a short discussion with each of
the panellists to introduce their experiences and perspectives. And that will serve as a way of kind
of getting a sense of the current situation and where things now stand around academic publishing
and academic freedom. And then we’ll turn to a discussion of what needs to change and what
activism or support might lead to that change. Around 1.15, 1.20 or so, we’ll have a short
breather. And that will also be an opportunity for the audience members to post questions.
And then we’ll spend the last half hour or so discussing any audience questions.
So let’s get started. As I said in the first part of the webinar, we’ll focus on the current
situation. And I want to start with Alex and Donya and giving them the opportunity to describe
their experiences of attempts to silence their academic writing. And then we’ll hear from Tom
and Dirk how these experiences fit into the wider picture of what’s going on. So I’ll start with
Alex. Alex Pettithorn is a doctoral candidate in anthropology at York University in Canada.
And their research focuses on queer community building and gender-based violence. And they
were the author of a chapter entitled Sexual Misconduct in Academic Liminal Spaces,
Autoethnographic Reflections on Complaint and Institutional Response. And this chapter was
published in the now withdrawn Routledge book, Sexual Misconduct in Academia. And this was one
of the chapters that really, really sadly we have lost, or at least hopefully temporarily lost,
due to this book being withdrawn, which I’m personally very disappointed about because
it’s an incredibly powerful piece of writing and also a very brave piece of writing.
So perhaps, Alex, if you could get started and reflect on why it was important to write this
piece of work as an academic output. And also perhaps reflect on the impact on you as an early
career researcher and as a survivor of having it withdrawn. Over to you, Alex.
Right. Thank you so much, Anna. So again, my name is Alex Pettithorn. I use they,
them pronouns. And I’m a doctoral candidate at York University in Toronto.
So just for some context, my chapter was about my experiences of sexual harassment and stalking
as a graduate student at an institution in Canada. And the chapter reflected really on the
institutional response to, or the lack thereof of institutional response to those experiences
because they were outside of what the institution found to be its own jurisdiction. So they occurred
in union spaces predominantly. So thinking about that from the perspective of why does one write
this piece and why does one do that work? Personally, as a survivor, writing about those
experiences was a processing tool. It was something that was therapeutic. It was something that,
you know, before I was writing about it academically, I was writing about it personally.
And that was something that was quite important. But coming at it from the lens of academic
writing and turning that from a personal experience into a piece of knowledge,
you know, writing academically about those experiences for me was really focused on
bringing things that, you know, in my experience had existed in a whisper network
and encoding them into language and encoding them into published knowledge. So again, my chapter was
really focused on response from the institution and, you know, in a great way on institutional
and, you know, in a great way on institutional betrayal. And that’s something that I think
people who are active in this space and who study or do work in antiviolence prevention
are quite familiar with. And it’s something that we talk about quite frequently. But, you know,
not everyone is familiar with these ideas. So I think writing them down and producing this
knowledge is important. I also think about my own experiences prior to this happening to me.
You know, I had not heard about things like institutional betrayal. It had not occurred to
me that the institutional response would be violent in and of itself. You know, this was
brand new information as a 23 year old graduate student who was kind of brand new to the space.
So thinking about kind of little Alex back then and this person who really needed support,
it was important to me to write and encode these things for the next people who came along that
this would inevitably happen to you to say that this is not a unique experience. This has happened
before. These are patterns, you know, at an institutional level. And here are some of the
things people have done about them. So for me, the crux of why one writes this and does this work
is not so much about telling my story in particular, though that’s certainly helpful,
but it’s, you know, it’s about ensuring that these things aren’t swept under the rug and that these
things do not just kind of disappear into that whisper network and that that knowledge is there
for other people to find. Now, in terms of the impact that you asked about, Anna, you know,
it impacts one in multiple ways to have this publication withdrawn. You know, as a survivor,
it’s triggering, right? It’s triggering to do this work. It’s very emotionally and psychologically
labor intensive to write about these experiences to begin with. And I’m sure I’m not alone in saying
that when you write about this work as a survivor, you know, you often have already had attempts to
silence you before you get to that point, either in a complaint stage or, you know, maybe you’re
not supported in starting to write about a project, right? So it’s usually not one’s first experience
of being silenced. So having a publisher silence you again is triggering. As a graduate student,
you know, as an early career researcher, there’s an impact on your career, right? It’s, you know,
it’s a CV line, obviously, that is impacted, of course. But, you know, publishing takes a great
amount of time out of one’s schedule, particularly something that’s this emotionally draining and
labor intensive to write. That’s time you can’t get back, right? And graduate students were on
a very short clock to accomplish a great deal of things going on to a job market that is
precarious, to say the least. So there’s a real opportunity cost there to taking on this work and
writing this kind of publication and then not having it materialized, right? That is time I
can’t get back. So there are those kind of material impacts on career trajectory.
You know, and it impacts your willingness to engage with academic publishing going forward,
too. So, you know, how many people coming up against these barriers then don’t write again,
don’t write again, or how many of these people do we lose who leave the academy because it
it shakes them so much. So kind of whatever angle we’re approaching this from, you know,
whether we’re thinking about the psychological or emotional harm or the career harms or anything else,
you know, it’s a really troubling message to be sending to survivors and to early career researchers.
Wow, thank you so much, Alex. I mean, it’s again, making me kind of upset and angry all over again
to hear about this brilliant chapter being withdrawn and being no longer available. But
we will come back to talking about some of your more positive experiences of publishing in this
area a little bit later on. But I also particularly appreciate your perspective as a graduate student,
as an early career researcher, because I think for those who are kind of coming into the publishing
landscape, it’s really, really important, you know, to hear how you’re experiencing these
processes. So we’ll come back and hear a bit more from you a bit later, Alex. But I want to turn to
Donya now, who has also had the experience of her work being threatened to be withdrawn. So Donya
Ahmadi is an assistant professor of international relations at the University of Groningen in the
Netherlands. And her research addresses an intersectional feminist critique of Iranian
nationalism. And she’s published widely on this and related topics in academic journals and elsewhere.
So I’m actually going to give a brief outline of Donya’s current situation, which she’s kind of
given permission for me to do, because it is a little bit complicated. And then I’ll turn to Donya
to kind of talk about how it’s impacting on her and how she’s experiencing that.
So in 2023, last year, Donya published an academic article in the journal Women’s Studies
International Forum about the MeToo movement in Iran. And in this article, as part of her
wider analysis, she mentions an example of a man who had been named online within the Iranian MeToo
movement. And after publication, Donya was subjected to three different levels of threats and
complaints. First of all, she received personal threats of being sued for defamation.
Second, the journal itself received a complaint. And as a result, the journal and the publisher
who owned the journal, SVA, opened up an investigation, asking Donya for evidence to
support the claim that she made in the article. Now, Donya has provided this evidence. And at this
stage, it appears to have been accepted. As the article is still available, it has not been
withdrawn. But on top of that, Donya’s university, the University of Groningen, has also apparently
received a complaint about scientific misconduct relating to her article. And even though the
journal’s investigation, even before the journal’s investigation had concluded, and despite there
being no finding of fault in the journal’s investigation, the university has opened up a
disciplinary investigation into Donya herself for academic misconduct, scientific misconduct.
So this situation, of course, has very clear resonances with what’s happened in relation
to the Routledge book. But in this case, the publisher actually have not given into the
threats that they have received. So Donya, can you talk us through what this experience has been
like for you and what you think the wider implications are? Thank you so much, Anna.
I want to say hi to everyone who’s attending the seminar. I want to first start by thanking you for
inviting me to be here. I’m quite frankly in the thick of it right now. I’m very much in the middle
of everything that is going on. I’m still waiting for the University of Groningen investigation to
come to a close. And I have sort of a package of very negative and very positive experiences
that I can share. But right off the bat, I want to say that I’m not at my most articulate. I’m
currently on sick leave. I’m also not invested in putting on a facade of, you know, appearing
or sounding like this has not impacted me. Quite frankly, on a personal level, it has been horrendous,
you know, psychologically, physically, materially. I have had to give up all my teaching for half a
year. I do my teaching work with the passion, I’m happy to say. But I want to start on an
academic level because I’m here as a scholar first and foremost, and I want to link it to what Alex
said. Again, I heard about this chapter through some colleagues here in Groningen, and it is
quite shocking how the entire book has been withdrawn. I mean, I hear it from other people
how they express that they’re shocked and disturbed by what is happening to me. But
I am simultaneously in disbelief that this entire book talk about all that labor, mostly female and
I assume also queer people’s labor being completely erased. And normally our first sort
of response is to go to an independent publisher. That’s what I usually like to do, but my work is
too radical for mainstream lines of publishing. But this renders those publishers even more
vulnerable because usually independent publishers are not as strong. They don’t have a whole legal
department or a lot of finances at their disposal. So this will circle us back into the conversation
of the kind of support we need from publishers in this. The first and foremost impact
analogometric question as a scholar for me is the chilling effect, which I’m afraid to admit has
already started. I’ve become extremely paranoid of everything I write. I have now an article that
is being peer reviewed for publication, and it’s not on the Me Too. It’s not on sexual violence.
It is on the Iranian women’s movement, which continues to be a contested topic to our dismay.
But the quite immediate result of this as a scholar for me has been that everything I say or write,
I meticulously read and reread to make sure that no one can sue me on this basis.
Because I mean, other people here, you’ve been threatened by the lawsuit. But the material impact
on this and the psychological impact of this is huge. I mean, you have to deal with, for me
personally, this was the first instance in my life that I had to deal with lawyers and, you know,
the whole legal, judicial sphere. You need to sort of educate yourself in understanding what these
terms mean. The challenge of finding a lawyer, mustering up the finances to pay for a lawyer.
I mean, lawyers charge you for a phone call, for an email, you know, so the bill keeps becoming
bigger and bigger. And something that Alex said, which really resonated with me was that,
especially those of us who are in feminist studies, anthropology, queer studies, you know,
autoethnography has been a very sort of transgressive, decolonial tool for making sense
of our own experiences when nobody else wants to write about it. And oddly, in this process,
the first thing that came to my mind was that the only way I can make sense of this as a scholar
and as a human being is that I can utilize my experiences to talk about the issues that I see
that are systemic. Oddly enough, a lot of the things that I’m experiencing right now are things
that I’ve already theorized in my article. In terms of backlash, I mean, the person I’ve named
in my article, I’ve named him as an example of retaliation against his survivors. So I have not
named him as a perpetrator. The difference between my case and Alex’s is that I have named someone
who has already been named in social media, in MeToo discourse, hundreds, maybe thousands of times
in Iranian social media, in Farsi Twitter and Instagram. So I have merely, and I continue to
to state this, that I have merely used publicly available information, as we do as scholars.
But this somehow still has rendered me exposed to threats of defamation and of slander, so both
civil claims and criminal claims before a court. But the chilling effect means that
you not only am I sort of compelled or forced to spend all of this time and energy, again,
talk about the labor that goes into defending yourself against these claims. It is so incredibly
disproportionate to the claims that these abusers raise. In my case, I have named this man alongside
at least I think seven or eight other abusers from very high profile international ones to
lower profile ones such as the man that is now coming after me.
This man is only mentioned once in a full length peer review journal article in one sentence.
But that itself has cost me three months of my sort of time and effort, thousands of euros in
costs, and at least a semester of my teaching and research duties. I have been on leave because
the pressure has become too much. And this labor, I keep thinking this price that I’m paying,
and I’m fighting this. I’m going to stand tall, and I’m going to fight this and see to the end.
I have done nothing wrong as a scholar, and I continue to advocate for that. And I think
this is an experience as painful as it is for me that we can all learn from. And that’s why I’m
very invested in talking about it. Although talking about it renders me vulnerable, right,
to more lawsuits, to more attacks, to more backlash. But not only you have to spend going
back to Alex’s point, to spend all this time and energy and money essentially to survive these
processes, that experience itself and the ability to reflect on it and to theorize it as scholars,
which in a way is a very empowering exercise. It gives you a lot of solace because it allows you
to not be a victim, right, to analyze the situation, to stand above and outside of it.
This is robbed from us because engaging with this experience will again probably open up
possibilities for lawsuits, for disciplinary investigations. And at the very least, you will
be perceived as this trouble seeker, you know, even if the whole sort of chapter is closed.
And you know that I have a lot to talk about on this case, but I also don’t want to take too much
time from the panel. So I think it’s better if you have specific questions and I ask them throughout
the session and I’m still here. Thank you. Thank you, Dona. That was very powerful.
I will, before we move on to speak to Tom, could you just briefly say a little bit about how the
publisher responded to the issues raised? So the journal, so this, my case has been,
the article came out in May 2023. The whole debacle, as I like to call it, started I think
already October, November is when the journal starts getting emails from this man, allegedly
also his lawyers. I wasn’t looped in, I wasn’t cc’d in those emails. And he claims that I have
fabricated these claims to defame him. And he sort of frames it as me being the first person who
raises this, like a survivor would, I guess, similarly to Alex’s case, which in that case,
still, it’s a discussion of why are survivors not protected, not allowed to talk about their
own experiences without having a risk so much. So when this happened, I think in November,
I got the first email from Lavinia Stamm, the editor of Women’s Studies International Forum.
So Women’s Studies International Forum is a very prominent gender studies
journal, is one of the older ones, has been publishing since the 1970s.
So it is a feminist studies journal. And I wonder had I published in a non feminist studies