The Gender, Justice and Security Hub: A Poetic Inquiry Reflection
Over the course of the Gender, Justice and Security Hub’s final year, I asked fellow Hub researchers, practitioners and activists a short but deceptively complex question: What is the Hub? Technically, the Hub is composed of 150 members, 40 partner organisations, 38 research projects, 7 focus countries, and 6 research streams. But I wanted to know, on a deeper and more experiential level, what does the Hub mean to Hub members themselves? And importantly, what can we learn from these insights?
The answers to this question were scribbled down on the back of napkins, written in phone note apps and documented in interview transcripts. Inspired by innovative examples of arts-based research across the Hub and drawing on my background as a poet and poetic inquiry researcher, I combined and transformed the collective responses into a single-narrative, multi-vocal poetic reflection. To be clear about the approach taken here, the words in the poem are those of Hub members that have been mixed, fractured, stitched and mended together to create a poetic mosaic (McInerney, 2023). The poem brings the voices of Hub members into conversation with one another, revealing the resonances and dissonances in their individual and collective understandings of the Hub as a feminist web weaving network full of friction and possibility.
In collaboration with Nicky Armstrong and Evelyn Pauls, this work is part of the Stories of Research project. The Stories of Research critically examines feminist participatory methodologies. We also look specifically at how creative research communication practices, like poetic inquiry, can be used to promote analytic and affective praxis that counter the narrow epistemological boundaries of conventional academic research (Archer et al. 2023).
The poem was first published in Chapter 10 of Gender, Justice and Security: Structural Challenges, Feminist Innovations and Radical Futures. This chapter explores Hub members reflections on the Hub in depth and analyses how such insights can help inform future large-scale, transnational and interdisciplinary feminist research. The poem was performed at a launch event for the Hub’s Report in August 2024. A recording of that performance is included below, followed by a full transcript of the poem.
The hub is…
the hub is a grant
an opportunity
a multi-million-pound chance to do the work
of gender and justice
in a broken, unjust world
the hub is work
a lot of it
the hub is a network
a tapestry of 40 organisations braided across 24 countries
and time zones
the hub is an international intergenerational bridge
from the past to the present
the present to the unknown
the hub is six research streams diverted into 38 tributaries
an ecosystem trying to bring about a radically transformed
future that still feels beyond our grasp
and that may never well be
the hub is 150 people
a mosaic of life bending boundaries and disciplines
a cartographic atlas of lived experience
it is professional, political, personal
the hub is a community embedded
a platform and a home
the hub is built within the walls of academia but barrelling
beyond the academic box
the hub is the liminal space between
the hub is ambidextrous
a clarion for justice and compromise for what we can get
the hub is a match lit from within trying to find a way out
it is surviving this world and trying to change it
the hub is an outstretched hand as the border closed
a voice of solidarity belted in the face of backlash
the hub is knowing that is important, and that’s not enough
the hub is contradictions, inconsistency and conflict
the hub is everything we wanted
and all the things we wished it wasn’t
the hub is a web
powerful but vulnerable
cemented and fragile
funded and then un-funded
visionary but uncertain
transformative and deeply imperfect
the hub is a potentiality
a seed yet to fully lay its roots and bloom
the hub as a project will end, but the hub still is
still weaving its web within the shifting winds
still connecting our ideas, our tensions, our work and lives
a constellation of lights
friction into fire
just trying to hold on
the hub is
the hub is
the hub is us.
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