Exploring Anti-carceral Pathways to Address Gender-based Violence in Universities: A Conversation

Abstract This article is an overview of a Legislative Theatre (LT) workshop that was organised by the authors at Newcastle University in June of 2024. The workshop was aimed at both rethinking and reimagining the university’s broadly defined approach to and policies around complaint handling with a specific focus on instances and reports of gender-based violence (GBV). All of the authors are committed to enacting anti-carceral feminist futures aimed at challenging structures that cause harm and perpetuate racial and colonial violence. This is expressed throughout our conversation as we shift between the political to the personal reflecting a feminist praxis. These normative commitments are also reflected in our methodological decision to draw attention to our redactions of the comments we felt uneasy about including. Despite having consent from all workshop participants, this choice reflects tensions between privacy, harm, frustration, and care that persisted far past the day itself, and which speak to the ongoing pressures feminist researchers face when talking about sexual violence in the neoliberal academy (Godden-Rasul and Serisier 2024).