The increase in public and policy interest in violence against women and girls (VAWG) has repositioned it from a niche topic of study to a popular and necessary focus across disciplines including sociology, philosophy, and cultural theory. What has had less attention is the level of emotional labour involved in such research when one comes to the field with personal experiences of sexual violence and harassment. Exacerbating the limited work in this area are the ways in which, as feminist research has gained traction within the academy, its calling card of ‘the personal is political’ has given way to a perceived requirement for a more hygienic mode of data presentation. This project brings together six former PhD students at Europe’s first research unit dedicated to the study of violence against women and girls to reflect and intervene on this movement away from reflexivity. It addresses the question of how to do personal and political feminist research by developing the concept of 'co-reflexivity' as an innovative tool for reflecting on, speaking and writing the emotional labour of researching violence.

The six collaborators will participate in three workshops to revisit the personal impacts of their own research, as well as explore the impacts they witnessed for others. The project will produce a co-authored collection comprising personal accounts of the struggles faced by the researchers during their work, with these accounts informed by the process of co-reflexivity, a process to be developed during the course of the project. The book will constitute the first to focus on the emotional labour of VAWG research for early career researchers. The process of co-reflexivity will also be creatively captured through an online animation in the style of ''video scribing" - see for example www.scriberia.co.uk - that will share the findings of the project beyond the academy.