Faculty of Humanities & Social Sciences Annual Graduate Lecture 2026
When:
—
Venue:
Birkbeck Clore Management Centre
We are delighted to welcome Professor Tanya Serisier as speaker for the 2026 Annual Graduate Lecture hosted by Birkbeck's Faculty of of Humanities & Social Sciences (FHSS).
Chair: Professor Heike Bauer, Head of Research, Innovation & Knowledge Exchange
Welcome: Professor Sally Wheeler, Vice-Chancellor
Tanya Serisier, Surviving Rape in Public: Survival Politics and Feminist Justice Work
For at least the last fifty years, sexual violence has been central to the public politics of feminism and gender equality. We see this particularly in social movements around speaking out about sexual violence and the increasing prominence, from the 1980s onwards, of public survivors, mobilising their experiences of violence to advocate for social change. We also see it in increasing calls to listen to survivors, and growing claims to act on their behalf politically, including by far-right and racist political forces. At the same time, however, that society claims to listen to survivors, sexual violence continues to be an endemic problem compounded by social stigma.
This lecture reflects on the development of this particular version of cultural and political response to sexual violence, asking why and how it is that a particular form of ‘survivor politics’ has developed as a dominant response to sexual violence, what the impacts are for those who occupy the role of public survivors and how this politics produces a certain vision of what it means to believe and support survivors. In considering this I argue that feminists and survivors have a wider history of justice work focused on building collective political responses to sexual and other forms of structural violence. Building on the insights of black, abolitionist and anti-colonial feminists, I argue that this work can help us rethink visions of justice and collective survival.
About the speaker:
Tanya Serisier is a Professor of Feminist Theory at Birkbeck in the School of Social Sciences and Director of BiGS (Birkbeck Gender and Sexuality). Her work focuses on the cultural politics of sex, sexuality and sexual violence, looking especially at feminist and survivor activism and thought around sexual violence, including in her book, Speaking Out: Feminism, Rape and Narrative Politics.
Contact name: Heike Bauer
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