The Gender Hubcast provides an innovative platform for Gender, Justice and Security Hub members to reflect on feminist practice, knowledge production and ethics in the study and practice of peacebuilding. Hub projects revealed a range of methods and practices that are questioning – and sometimes disrupting – orthodoxies of researching (in) conflict. Hub members sometimes adopt methods that deliberately seek to challenge conventional approaches, seeking new, more elastic modes of research, accounting for and taking seriously the ethics, responsibilities and obligations of those who fund research that exposes participants to different levels of risk. Crucially, the Hubcast offers a unique space for shared reflection and learning on the opportunities, challenges, constraints and lessons accrued while driving an academically rigorous, policy-relevant and feminist-led multi-country research Hub.

To create this series, the Hubcast team invited Hub members to propose episodes based on their research and practice interests. Selected members then identified episode hosts and contributors to collaboratively develop the questions that guided the conversation. Each episode was recorded remotely and online (via Zoom). Written transcripts of the conversations were produced using software – Descript – allowing podcast hosts and guests to review and edit their contributions as needed. Hiring a podcast producer elevated the professionalism of the Hubcast, which sits proudly alongside established podcasts on Spotify, Apple and other platforms.

In this first Gender Hubcast series, academics and practitioners curate conversations reflecting on a range of themes, perspectives and experiences relating to their time on the Hub. The first episode, hosted by Kirsten Ainley and featuring Hub members Marsha Henry, Choman Hardi and Keshab Giri, explores the messiness of fieldwork through feminist lenses. It focuses on both the advantages and challenges that arise from incorporating feminist perspectives within research and international studies and beyond, highlighting the potential of feminist fieldwork to foster ethical knowledge production and contribute to a fairer global society. In the second episode, members of the Early Career Network share incisive reflections on what it means to be an early career member of the Hub, while navigating South-North relationships in feminist research, and the localisation of care responsibilities across different academic institutions.

The following three episodes centre on the Hub’s work in Afghanistan. Structured chronologically around three distinct time periods, these conversations recount the team’s experience adapting to a rapidly changing security landscape and spotlight the challenges that arise practising feminist research in extremis. In future episodes, contributors explore experiences of holding space for and producing knowledge with persons of diverse sexual orientations, gender identities and expressions, and sex characteristics (SOGIESC) as part of feminist research in conflict settings. Hub members also reflect on methodological innovations in curating the story of the Gender, Justice and Security Hub, reflecting on the extraordinary journey of the collective, the participatory work of telling this story and its lasting legacy. Our hope is that this inaugural series of the Hubcast will launch an innovative platform for important conversations to be sustained into the future.