Contemporary challenges: researching gender in divided societies. Claire Pierson and Jennifer Thomson in conversation with Fidelma Ashe and Gorana Mlinarević

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Acknowledgments

The authors would like to acknowledge the help and support of the Women and Politics and the Irish Politics Specialist Groups of the Political Studies Association. The organizers would also like to thank Melanie Hoewer of the Institute for British-Irish Studies of University College Dublin, who was scheduled to take part in this discussion but was unfortunately unable to attend due to illness.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Claire Pierson is a Research Associate at Manchester Metropolitan University. She recently completed doctoral research at Ulster University examining women’s narratives of security and policing in Northern Ireland. She has worked with University College Dublin on the project Addressing Cultural Legacies of Conflict with women in Colombia, Liberia and Ireland.

Jennifer Thomson is a PhD candidate at Queen Mary, University of London. Her doctoral research is funded by the ESRC and considers the politics of abortion legislation in contemporary Northern Ireland. Her research interests include transitional justice, post-conflict governance and gender and politics.

Fidelma Ashe is Senior Lecturer in Politics at Ulster University, Northern Ireland. She has published widely on gender and ethno-national conflict. She is author of The New Politics of Masculinity: Men, Power and Resistance (Routledge 2007). She is part of Women and Post-Conflict Transformation, funded by the United States Institute of Peace in 2013.

Gorana Mlinarevic is a feminist activist and researcher on wartime sexual violence and post-war issues affecting women in Bosnia and Herzegovina. With Gabriela Mischkowski, she co-authored “ …  and that it does not happen to anyone anywhere in the world”: The Trouble with Rape Trials – Views of Witnesses, Prosecutors and Judges on Prosecuting Sexualized Violence during the War of Bosnia and Herzegovina (medica mondiale 2009). She is currently a researcher at Goldsmiths, University of London.

ORCiD

Claire Pierson http://orcid.org/0000-0003-0961-7157

Jennifer Thomson http://orcid.org/0000-0001-5518-9849

Notes

1. Nationalist and unionist are terms used in Northern Ireland to describe Irish and British nationalisms.

2. Fidelma refers here to a dispute around a Catholic girls school, located in a majority Protestant area in north Belfast, in 2001 and 2002. Protesters attempted to stop the girls attending the school in a clash that saw riot police summoned to escort pupils in and out of school (see Ashe 2006).

3. DemocraShe is a Northern Irish NGO working to advance women’s leadership in politics, civic society and peacebuilding at home and abroad.

4. The Northern Ireland Women’s Coalition was a political party formed to contest elections to the Forum for Political Dialogue that led to the Good Friday Agreement.

5. Green and orange are colloquial terms used to refer to nationalists and unionists respectively in Northern Ireland.

Additional information

Funding

Jennifer Thomson acknowledges the support of the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number ES/J500124/1].