The Centre for Law, Gender and Sexuality at Kent Law School has a new name – it is now the Centre for Sexuality, Race and Gender Justice or ‘SeRGJ’ (pronounced ‘surge’)
SeRGJ is committed to exploring the complex relationships between sexuality, race and gender with law and governance. Members study these relationships in multiple ways in their individual research and collaborative research projects.
The Centre was originally funded by a five-year Arts & Humanities Research Council grant from 2004 – 2009 as a partnership between three universities – the University of Kent, Keele University and the University of Westminster. Its aim was to stimulate critical, interdisciplinary research in law, gender and sexuality. It established a programme of working on social justice issues relating to gender and sexuality foregrounding an intersectional approach.
More recently, the Centre has hosted and worked with a range of international scholars working on, and across, areas of law and gender and law and sexuality as well as race and religion. Visitors have engaged with the scholarly life of Kent Law School, worked from the Centre’s visitor office in Eliot College, and presented their current research to colleagues and postgraduate research students.
The Centre has a tradition of engaging with contemporary scholarship and supporting early career scholars. In 2017/18, it undertook projects exploring the disproportionate impact of austerity on BME women in the UK; equal access to (higher) education; abortion and surrogacy rights; child abuse and sexual violence; and the legal recognition of gender.
SeRGJ is also home to Decolonise UKC, a decolonising research collective at Kent comprising a group of research students who hope to develop a manifesto focusing on education, inclusivity & identity.
SeRGJ centre Co-Directors are Dr Suhraiya Jivraj and Dr Sinéad Ring.
Dr Jivraj is academic lead on the ‘Dceolonising the Curriculum’ project and co-ordinator of the Decolonising Sexualities Network (and blog). She is co-editor of Decolonizing Sexualities: Transnational Perspectives, Critical Interventions with Dr Sandeep Bakshi and Dr Silvia Posocco (CounterPress, 2016), a book which is downloadable on a ‘pay what you can basis’.
Dr Ring is leading on research on non-recent historical child sexual abuse including co-authoring Legal Responses to Historical Child Sexual Abuse (forthcoming, Routledge, 2019) with Professor Kim Stevenson and Dr Kate Gleeson. She is a member of Kent’s sexual violence against students working group. She is also a member of the technical working group on consent and Higher Education institutions in Ireland.