Centre for Gender Research
In a climate of increased migration, globalisation, and new technology, issues of gender remain paramount. Whether relating to the global economic climate, political and social movements and mobilities, changing power relations in the home, the promises and anxieties of new technology, or continued concern with issues of representation: gender permeates the entire spectrum of our society.
The Centre for Gender Research at City University is collaborative, multidisciplinary, and truly global, working with institutional and academic partners and clients from Europe, the Caribbean, India, and Latin America. We advise on questions of gender and contemporary social change at policy levels, but also practice and reflect on qualitative and quantitative gender research. The combination of empirical, theoretical and methodological interests produces innovative, exciting and cutting edge research which engages with conceptions, practices and theories of gender at every level.
Members and Interests
Carrie-Anne Myers
Carrie-Anne Myers is a lecturer in Criminology and Sociology in the department of Sociology at City University. Her primary research interests are around youth and adolescence, school violence and bullying, victims and victimology, gender and feminist criminology and media youth cultures of consumption. She is particularly interested in the roles the genders play in incidents of group violence and bullying and is currently looking at the significance of gender in cases of cyberbullying and public perceptions of young male subcultures.
Lorna Ryan
Lorna Ryan is currently a Research Manager for the European Social Survey's European Research Infrastructure Preparatory Phase Initiative (FP7), which is coordinated by the Centre for Comparative Social Surveys, City University London. She has had an ongoing interest in gender relations and has carried out qualitative and quantitative research, funded by the European Commission and national governments in Ireland, UK and Australia. Specific research projects concluded include a comparative analysis of women's labour market participation in Finland and Ireland; male violence against women in the Traveller community; the needs of refugee women in Ireland; and gender and HIV/AIDS. Her PhD considered the discursive construction of 'the prostitute' in the British and Irish press.
She has acted as a consultant for the Gender Equality Unit, Irish Government's Department of Justice, Equality and Law Reform and was the PI of an Irish study of gender mainstreaming and science subject uptake, funded by the Irish Governments Department of Education and Science. Additionally, she has been a Gender Task Expert for a FP6 Integrated Project (SEAMLESS-IF).
Current research interests include media representations of gender and science and technology innovation; EU science policy and gender mainstreaming.
Leah Bassel
Leah Bassel works on issues of gender, representation and political participation. She focuses on the politics of forced migration, citizenship and integration and the spaces for women's agency and participation within these processes. Her research explores the interface between normative and empirical approaches to citizenship and integration. She has compared debates over gender and cultural/religious accomodation - the French 'Headscarf Affair' and the Canadian so-called 'Sharia tribunals' debate - using the theoretical lenses of intersectionality and democratic theory, and has juxtaposed these debates with the lived experiences of refugee women to question who is able to participate and how. Her current research considers the parameters of participation for refugees and migrants in the global South and the ways in which gender, 'race', class, legal status and other axes intersect locally, nationally and globally to shape spaces for refugee politics.
Monica Magadi
Dr Monica Magadi is a Senior Lecturer in Social Research Methods at the department of Sociology, City University, London. Her substansive research interest is in the area of population and health, especially reproductive health in sub-Saharan Africa, including maternal and child health, HIV/AIDS, and adolescent sexual and reproductive health. Although she is not a gender specialist, most of her research has a strong gender element. Among her earlier studies included an investigation of the impact of women status on infant/child health in Kenya. She is currently the lead investigator of a Medical Research Council (MRC) project on HIV/AIDS and the well-being of children in sub-Saharan Africa, which includes an analysis of the gender disparity in HIV/AIDS infection across countries in sub-Saharan Africa, as well as the differential impact of the HIV/AIDS epidemic on the girl and boy child in the region.
Angela Coyle
Angela Coyle is Professor of Sociology at City University. She has a long standing interest in gender, labour markets and work organisation and has written widely on these issues. Her recent research has included felxible working in health care services; Polish women migrant workers in Europe and the transnational restructuring of call centre work. She is particularly interested in the impact of economic restructuring on feminised and migrant labour markets. She was the principal award holder of an ESRC Research Seminar Series 'Richer or Poorer' which explored the changing situation of women workers in the global economy, including the recent emergence of feminised labour regimes and informal labour markets in global supply chain systems. Alongside her research she has worked as an advisor and consultant to both government departments and women's NGOs in many parts of the world, including the Caribbean, South Asia and central and eastern Europe. Currently she is working in Turkey on a national women and employment capacity building project. She is also a trustee of Womankind International, a women's rights organisation that works with women in the Global South.
Carolyn Vogler
During her career, Carolyn has published widely on a wide range of different areas of sociology, including globalisation, social class, national and class identities, unemployment and gender segregation in employment. More recently she has been working on how couples organise money in intimate relationships and what that tells us about other areas of their lives together, such as the power relationship between them. This was published in a range of sociological journals, including, The British Journal of Sociology, Sociological Review and The Journal of Socio-Economics. She is about to begin work on a short theoretical book, which attempts to link both sociology and psychoanalysis together, in order to explain why money is often such a conflictual issue in intimate heterosexual couple relationships.
Liza Schuster
Liza Schuster works on migration, asylum and racism. Gender is a vital facet of work on migration and asylum, and in recent years Schuster has begun to explore the ways in which masculinity has lead to the isolation and marginalisation of undocumented migrants. Her current research investigates and documents asylum seekers in Europe in terms of policy and personal migration stories. She is particularly interested in how gender intersects with youth and ethnicity in constructing young men from outside the EU not in need of protection and support, but as threatening and dangerous.
Milena Chimienti
Milena Chimienti's research interests are focused primarily on areas of marginality linked to illness (HIV/AIDS, depression, addiction etc), legal positions (female migrant sex workers, transgender). Her last two research projects were on individual agency of sex workers and the collective action of vulnerable groups (undocumented migrants, sex workers and drug users) in four European cities. In this framework she is interested in how gender intersects in the agency process with other factors such as socio-economic origin, ethnic or migrant background, state of health.
Helen Thornham
Helen Thornham researches issues of gender, new media, youth and representation. She is interested in issues of performative identity, creative praxis and mediatory relations with media and technology across space, place and time. Her current research, funded by the AHRC, investigates issues of online 'performance' and creativity in relation to gender, age, identity and experience. More widely, she is interested in the processes through which media and technologies are gendered through language, representation and theory and the implications this process has use, policy, and perception of that technology.
Her forthcoming book 'Narratives of the Videogame' (2011) is an ethnographic investigation into adult gaming households which addresses the lived and gendered relations with, and mediations of, new technology.
Current Research
All members of the Centre for Gender Research at City University are active in their research and publications. For recent publications please see our department profiles.
Further Links
http://www.meccsa.org.uk/womens-media-studies-network
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