#162 Feminist Academic Jo Phoenix is Standing Her Ground and Moving Forward
We are delighted to speak with the academic Jo Phoenix. Professor Phoenix is the Chair in Criminology at the Open University, a Trustee of the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies and the Co-Convenor of the Gender Critical Research Network at the Open University.
In September 2019, Professor Phoenix was invited by the Centre for Criminology and the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex to give a talk about trans policies in the prison estate in December 2019. Following a vilification campaign by students and staff members and the security concerns they posed to feminists (primarily to Dr Phoenix), the event was first postponed and eventually cancelled.
Professor Phoenix speaks with FiLiA about the rights of women in prison, her decades-long work in Criminology and her personal experience being in the centre of this particular storm regarding academic freedom.
Listen here (Transcript below):
Professor Phoenix has been a jobbing academic for nearly 24 years. She researches violence against women, prostitution, child sexual exploitation, sex, gender and justice and youth justice. She also writes on ethics, politics and professionalism in academia.
Professor Jo Phoenix
Professor Phoenix has previously held academic posts at the Universities of Middlesex, Bath, Durham and Leicester. Her research interests include sex, gender, sexualities and justice, youth justice and punishment, the production of criminological knowledge and research ethics. These general interests have meant that she has studied and written about a wide variety of subjects including managerialism and ethics in the production of criminological knowledge, prostitution, prostitution policy reform, child sexual exploitation, sex and its regulation, youth penality and youth justice practice and policy.
She has been and remains particularly interested in understanding the changing conditions in which (some) women and (some) young people are criminalised and punished as well as the challenges facing those people who work with them. You can read Professor Phoenix’s written evidence submitted to Parliament’s Women and Equalities Select Committee regarding the proposed reformed of the Gender Recognition Act in which she focuses on the rights of women in the prison system.
Following the cancellation, and as a result of Professor Phoenix’s determined insistence on clarification and accountability, the University of Essex hired discrimination barrister Akua Reindorf to conduct a thorough review of their no-platforming of feminist academics.
The Reindorf Review stated:
“As for indirect discrimination, the decision taken in relation to Prof Phoenix may contribute to indirect sex discrimination against women at the University, on the basis that more women than men tend to hold (and publicly express) gender critical views140. If that can be shown, it can be argued that women are more likely than men to be put at a disadvantage by a practice of excluding gender critical voices.
Whilst the University does not owe a duty to Prof Phoenix personally in discrimination law, pursuing policies of excluding gender critical external speakers might very well be of evidential value in an indirect discrimination complaint by a gender critical female staff member.”
One of the recommendations of the report was for the University of Essex to issue issued a statement about this matter, including apologies to both to Professor Phoenix and to Professor Rosa Freedman, a fellow academic whose event was also cancelled. Professor Anthony Forster, the university’s Vice-Chancellor, issued the statement on 17 May 2021. However, two months later, Professor Forster issued a second statement apologising for the earlier apology and backtracking his previous statement.
Jo is bringing an employment tribunal claim to hold the OU to account for the public campaign of harassment that has made my working life unbearable. Read more about the case and donate to her crowdfunder here.
Transcript:
Raquel: Hello, everyone. Welcome to the FiLiA podcast. My name is Raquel Rosario Sanchez, and I am the spokeswoman for FiLiA. Today we are delighted to speak with Jo Phoenix.
Raquel: We are delighted to speak with Jo Phoenix. Joe Phoenix is the Chair in Criminology at the Open University, and she has been a jobbing academic for nearly 24 years. She is a trustee at the Centre for Crime and Justice studies. She researches Violence Against Women, Prostitution, child sexual exploitation, sex, gender, justice, and youth justice.
She writes on ethics, politics, and professionalism in academia. Her research interests include all of the above, and that has meant that she has studied and written about a wide variety of subjects, including managerialism and ethics in the production of criminological knowledge, Prostitution policy reform, child sexual exploitation, sex, and its regulations, youth penalty, and youth justice practice in policy.
Your work is very broad and there are a lot of people who will be listening to this podcast will be associating you with something a little different or very much familiar.
I want us to dwell into it. But first of all, how are you?
Jo Phoenix: Today I'm very well. It's been probably the rockiest that I've had in my professional career. I've been at this nearly two and a half decades, and things have happened in the last three months. Well since May 18th of this year and preceding that since December 5th 2019. Things have happened, that I honest to goodness never thought would happen.
How am I? I'm good. And in a reflective place, if you like trying to figure it out how on earth I ended up at the centre of such a media storm.
Raquel: Before we get into the media storm, let's go back to the very beginning. You are an academic, you specialise in criminology and you are at the Open University doing your job.
You receive an invitation from the Centre for Criminology, along with the Department of Sociology at the University of Essex. This is an invitation to give a talk on the 5th of December 2019. Eventually that talk was titled Trans Rights and Justice: Complicated Contours in Contemporary Sex, Gender, and Sexualities Politics.
You received the invitation from those to the centre and the department, those academic centres and departments.
What was your initial reaction?
Jo Phoenix: I have a long standing relationship with Essex University.
So, when I very first began two and a half decades ago, I was a young lecturer at Middlesex University and Professor Nigel South, who at that point in 2019 was the Head of the Centre for Criminology, he and I go back a very, very long time. And of course, within criminology, it's fairly standard practice that we offer invitations to other academics who are doing research to come and talk about their research.
So, the actual original invitation was in 2018 and for that, I was going to talk about prostitution policy reform and why, even when we're talking about child sexual exploitation, we still need to talk about prostitution, but sadly, I was unable to give that particular seminar because that morning I'd been involved in an accident and had to spend the most of the day in hospital.
So the December 5th 2019 invitation was, if you like, making good on the previous invitation, but by 2019, my own research interests had moved on. So, by 2019 I was involved as an expert, if you like, in analysing issues of gender in the context of prisons with a collaborator at the university of Newfoundland.
So what I wanted to talk about in December was about some of that new research. And of course, you know, one of the things that was coming up from the field work that have been done in Canada was that actually how we think about trans rights and how we enact them, if you like, in the context of prisons, was riddled with all sorts of complications and contradictions. And generally there were just a lot of problems if you like with, with how we cater for trans individuals in the context of prisons.
So I offered that as a talk to the University of Essex and they said, yes, please come along.
They said, yes, we agreed the title in the September of 2019. and they started advertising the talk on Twitter and other places in the September of 2019. And everything was just hunky dory, basically, you know, I did explain to them that this was a controversial area, they duly noted that, but you know, it looked like everything was just going ahead fine.
Raquel: At that point, how involved, or how much did you know about the ongoing debate about sex and gender that was going on?
Jo Phoenix: Well, this is where Raquel, we have to go back two and a half decades. Right. I have been involved in research on sex, gender, and justice of one variety or another for the entirety of my academic career.
I cut my teeth. I got my PhD doing field work in the area of prostitution and was I am known for the fact that I often offer both/and type analysis. So, you know, women involved in ‘sex work’ are often both exploited and ‘working’ in inverted commas.
So I go back a long time in this and of course I keep my eye on the debates and the politics and my entry, if you like into the very contested areas of trans and well, gender identity shall we say? And feminism.
It was over the course of the summer in 2019 when I signed the two infamous letters that Kathleen Stock put together in the Sunday Times and in the Guardian, in which we, a group of academics in particular were expressing concern about Stonewall's undue influence in the academic arena, or more specifically Stonewall's insistence that no debate can take place about the shape of trans rights.
I, you know, that self-identification that was going to have a chilling effect on academic research.
So I was there from that beginning stuff. And then in the October of that year of 2019, I gave a talk for WPUK Women's Place UK in Leicester and in that talk, I put it on the table that actually trans rights in the context of prison needs some very careful thought.
That's not to say that trans individuals shouldn't have rights. I absolutely fully support trans rights, but women's prisons are very specific contexts. So, you know, self-identification for a trans individual into a female prison is not without its problems.
So how aware was I about the contested nature? Pretty aware.
I didn't do this blindly. I wasn't an accidental bystander in this. I wanted to be able to talk about how difficult it had become to talk about these issues.
Raquel: And it sounds from what you were saying, that the people who, the academics, who contacted you with this invitation, they were also aware.
Jo Phoenix: I don't know.
I mean, I made them aware, you know what I mean? But you know, how much people take? by the time we got to the end of November, beginning of December, I think that the academics in the Centre for Criminology had some indication because I had been asked by, I think it was Nigel, it was somebody, whether I was going to give ‘just another TERF talk.’
Now I was insulted by that email, I have to say, and I sent back an email saying no, I was going to give an academic talk. So yeah, I think they grew to know and certainly by the time we got to about December 4th. Boy, did they know.
Raquel: So at that point December 4th, you're out to give your talk. Could you tell us what happened on that day?
Jo Phoenix: So December 4th is the night before, so it was either the night before or very early on the morning of December 5th I can't remember exactly, which, I was informed by one of the academics at the Centre for Criminology, that there had been some Twitter activity and that, that activity was negative. now by the time we got to eight o'clock in the morning of December 5th in fact, let me just interrupt my own story here for a little second. On the morning of December 5th I woke up in Leicester. Leicester is nearly five hours away from Wivenhoe where the University of Essex is.
I was driving to give that talk. So I needed to leave by, I think I'd worked out like 11.30 in the morning in order to get there for the four o'clock start.
I didn't actually drive in the end. I'll tell you why. That's not unusual, I would far rather drive to go give a talk, depending on where it is, than take a train because sometimes the trains are actually problematic plus I have a disability, which makes it a little bit more difficult sometimes.
Raquel: The organisers knew what they were asking of you when they invited you then.
Jo Phoenix: Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that, and that's fine. I've given a talk in Hobart Tasmania and flown around the world just to give a talk.
So it's not unusual in my world to travel to give these talks. In fact, the talk that I was due to give it Essex I'd given in St. John's Newfoundland only a month previously in Canada.
So we get to the morning and it's clear that there's some Twitter campaigning starting. And in fact, there was one, I was made aware of, a tweet by Matt Lauder, who is an academic and historian in fact, so nothing to do with criminology, basically putting up a ‘bat signal’ to get people to pile in and ‘ask tough questions’ Now this particular individual had also done a running tweet commentary thread on my WPUK talk, and it was an absolute bad faith reading of that WPUK talk and he accused me of mendacity and all sorts of hideousness transphobia, et cetera.
That tweet thread was gathering a lot of energy within the University amongst academics and amongst student population. So by the time we get to nine in the morning, Nigel, the colleague that I've known for what feels like centuries, for a very long time, was contacting me via, it was either WhatsApp or email, saying that students were threatening to blockade the sociology department or boycott the sociology department if I appeared on campus. And then by 10 o'clock in the morning, the messages coming from Essex were that students were threatening to barricade the entrance.
Now I never knew whether that was the entrance to the university or the entrance to the room in which I was going to speak.
Now, whilst all of this was going on, this was around the time that Julie Bindel had been assaulted outside Edinburgh and where there was a lot of dirty protests if you like for the WPUK talks. So at this point I was putting a lot of pressure on Essex University to ensure my safety and security. Should I drive five hours to give this one-hour lecture? And I was also putting pressure on them to ensure that the people who wish to attend my talk could actually get in that talk without being harangued and harassed and bullied and hectored. By the time we got to, I think it was 11.00am, possibly 12, Nigel agreed that we had to pull the plug on the talk and cancelled that lecture, because at that point there was no way to get the appropriate security in place.
Now I have to stress this, and this is an important part of the narrative. When I was cancelled originally at Essex, the cancellation ...
Raquel: I want to say, I just wanted to say that the talk that you mentioned where Julie was assaulted, there was seen a university, right? It was the University of Edinburgh, Julie Bindel, who is a feminist campaigner.
She was assaulted outside of that institution. So when you say there are safety concerns, you were not just, it was not hyperbole. It was a recent fact that feminists were being assaulted.
Jo Phoenix: Yes, and you know, of course at that point too, I think Helen Steel was tweeting about the anarchist book fair she went to. One or two trans individuals assaulted an older woman. She was in her sixties.
And I say that because, you know, if we recognize bodies, we have to recognize that older bodies can be a little bit more frail than you know, somebody who's in their twenties, so to assault an older woman at an anarchist book fair, I think Helen herself was pushed out of that.
Anyway, there was a lot going on at the time where, where feminists were being physically assaulted and manhandled for lack of better words. So yeah, my concerns about safety and security, weren’t just idiosyncratic, it wasn't me being just a little tender. They were real. So where did I get to Raquel?
Raquel: You were saying that day there was a campaign essentially of vilification. I wanted to ask you, do you think that there was a decision to do it on the day of the event to sort of hype support for this campaign in a way that was coordinated to make, to amplify sort of that message just sort of happens or that someone realised that is happening today with this academic let's cancel it.
Jo Phoenix: Personally, I think that everybody was caught unawares. I think, I don't know. I actually can't answer that question. I've never thought about that because what happened afterwards was far more devastating than what happened on the day.
So let me just return to the story here for a second.
When Nigel cancelled that talk, the idea wasn't that I would be disinvited, so not cancelled as in how we understand cancel culture. That talk was in effect postponed until the appropriate security could be put in place.
However, in the course of the week, between December 5th and December 11th, the department of sociology, which is the employing department for the people who are a part of the Centre for Criminology, decided to have a staff meeting in which they voted, whether or not I should be blacklisted as a disinvited and never allowed onto the campus again.
In the course of that meeting, I have come to understand, that a trans student appeared and told the academics how profoundly unsafe I would make the trans population feel if I were to appear on campus, in which, other academics within that department and within the Centre said that had they known that I was such a transphobe, they would never have agreed to invite me.
And in which, fellow academics, people that I've known and worked with, maybe not directly, but we've been part of the same academic community were, going through my Twitter feed to vet my politics. Prior to that meeting as well, I was asked to supply a transcript of my lecture, so that they could vet it for thought crime, in effect.
Now that to me, is far more devastating, far more devastating than students wanting to protest a talk. On the day on December the fifth, everybody was caught unawares. I didn't want to go to a campus that didn't have security, my colleagues in the Centre for Criminology didn't want an event to take place where there wasn't security, where it was clearly controversial or have become controversial.
But by the time a week goes by that space to keep the space open for discussion was absolutely shut down and it was shut down by professional academics, not students. And that's the really important part here.
Raquel: There's two elements here. And you said that you were caught unaware by what happened on December 5th, but then something that I may want to add is, well, actually the people who are targeting you, they were not unaware, they knew what they were doing when they were typing this sort of campaign of vilification around the woman who is an expert. So I think there's two elements. One is this is very disturbing scenario in which your colleagues, fellow academics are questioning whether your thinking is correct, like that kind of inquisition, and that's disturbing.
But then the other element is you just mentioned, you're an expert you've been, working on this issue for over 25, for 25 years. The fact that either people who were in other fields like historians, but also the fact that students were able to say, this woman is an expert, but my feelings are hurt by her talk or whatever it is that they said that in itself needs unpacking because that's not normal and it would not be respected if we did it in any other field. Like if I went tomorrow to a physics departments or to a nuclear engineer and said, you know what, like, yeah, you may be the expert on all of these particles and atom stuff, but I find this whole thing very offensive, I need you to cancel your talk. People would laugh at me.
Jo Phoenix: They certainly would.
Raquel: No one would, no one would be issuing apologies. No one would be cancelling an academic or sort of reprimand an academic because I feel offended by their work. I think that what you're mentioning is that there's another element, an undercurrent between why it is acceptable to do this to you, even though you are an expert and it would never be acceptable to do that same thing to any other experts in male dominated fields.
Jo Phoenix: No. One could argue, I don't know about the male domination within criminology, but if you mean in more traditionally scientific fields, then, of course those tend to be male dominated then yeah, I'm going to agree with you entirely. Yet it also happens in other fields that aren't so male dominated.
If you think about English and History, Selena Todd is a great example.
The thing that really strikes me from that suggestion that you make there is that - I mean two and a half decades I've been doing this and this subject and the manner in which both students and staff act when they are against what you want to say or what you want to do, is in my mind, violence.
I don't mean that in that kind of literal metaphoric violence that people like me often get accused of. This is hectoring. It's shouting down. It's threats of violence.
One of the things that happened that Essex have never apologised for, and we can come to Essex and what they did after they, so egregiously treated me. There was a violent and profane poster circulating. I think it was circulating for the whole week. It was never taken. It was never investigated. The poster accuses me of all manner of things, from hating trans people to eating trans babies, do you know what I mean? It's like it is hyperbolic in its accusations and of course, it's got ‘shut the fuck up TERF’ with a cartoon image with a gun.
I've heard people talk about the fact that, because it's a cartoon image, it's not that violent, it's just a cartoon, but bollocks to that, if you pardon my language, that is absolutely not the case. These posters, anime as they are, are guaranteed and designed to intimidate and intimidate because they rely on violent tropes.
It's the first time in my academic career where I have been subject to the threat of violence.
When I was talking to a very old dear friend about what was happening back in 2019, she just kept saying the same thing. Why weren't the police called, you know, when the threats to blockade and harass and harangue, why did Essex never call the police? I'd like to know the answer to that question.
Raquel: It's all very disturbing because there's something very profound happening in academia. And your example, your experience through this whole past year or two years just demonstrates that there's something really rotten in the way academics are functioning when instead of supporting the experts, they do something different.
The point that I was making is in the sex and gender debate, it's mostly women who are the prominent voices or having these conversations. The campaigning groups are organizing like WPUK for example, is made up of trade union women on the left. There's an element of: all these women have experiences and expertise in areas that are relevant to this debate. But we, as the very entitled students feel that we can shut them down because we don't like what they have to say. And they would never do that to a chemist who was 30 years into his career. You know, that's what I was trying to say but then there's another flip side of that.
That is, our academic colleagues, that meeting in which you're probing another person's thinking to see if you find them agreeable when they're perfectly lawful opinions and most importantly, your opinions as an expert based on the work that you did it, wasn't like you woke up one day and said, you know what? I want to talk about criminology. You know, that's just so bizarre. Did you lose your faith in the debate in academia at that point?
Jo Phoenix: Look at that point, it's been nearly two years and my faith, my understanding, my place in the academic world has changed so much in the course of the last two years.
When this happened, I was furious. Proper, good old fashioned righteous anger. because I thought all of that, which you said. How dare they do this? This is against all of our professional ethics as academics. It's anti expertise, it's anti academic. The one thing that universities should be for, is debate.
The one thing that's social sciences should be for is to understand both the politics that are out there and how that relates to people's social experiences. But also how all of that relates to policy reform. I mean, the social world is our laboratory, so, to me it was so deeply offensive.
It wasn't that it lessened my faith in academia, although it has, over the course of the two years. At that point, I was just really angry. Whereas now I'd say that the academic world has fundamentally changed from the world that I grew up in to this place now, where we have an entire cohort of students and academics who think that within social sciences, within social sciences who think that their job is the equivalent of exposé journalism, which it isn't.
Our job isn't to promulgate a particular political ideology and then expose all of the instances where whatever group it is that you're supporting is done badly.
Our job is to understand the conditions that make that happen, which is a different task. So in this world where students and the academics are thinking that they're going to progress well, if they, but expose all of the elitists and the transphobes and whatever other politics it is that offends. In that world, those basic principles about what is knowledge, what is politics, what is our role, get shattered.
Now here's the thing coming back to sciences. One of the reasons I think that social sciences and the humanities and liberal arts is a little bit different is because we don't deal necessarily in observable fact, quite like scientists do.
So, you say it would be crazy going into a nuclear physics class and go, and guess what, you know, particles don't exist. It wouldn't because within science, there is more of a trend to accept the notion of a fact. Even though we recognise that if you pursue it long enough, those facts begin to fray in and of themselves.
But within social science, it's like the world of questioning has fallen apart, and all we're supposed to do is repeat the same mantras.
Raquel: But the policies that we deal with in social sciences, like they affect human people, they affect real people with flesh and blood, you know?
So when you submitted written evidence to parliament regarding this topic, when you talk about, there's evidence of self-harm in prisons and these higher in a women's state, and there is evidence that women prisoners are more likely to be primary carers for young children, those are facts.
So when you look at that as your evidence to base your opinion, that we need to protect single sex spaces for women in prison, that kind of stuff. When you do that, you're not talking out of something that came to you in a dream. It’s actual evidence.
Jo Phoenix: Quite. That's all I'm going to say.
This is why I say to you that this world is not a world I recognise and understand very much anymore because for me, I was taught by some of the best, my PhD supervisor was an amazing woman called Pat Carlen who probably opened the field for women's imprisonment.
She set up an organisation along with others called Women in Prison. So I was taught by some of the best in the business. And so for me to now be shouted down because evidence no longer counts instead, what counts, and, and forgive me for saying this. It's a phrase that people use as a kind of magical thinking, and that's: if we say something is so then it becomes so. Which is not how reality works. You know what I mean? I could say that my body doesn't matter, but I can tell you Raquel, after four joint replacements and spinal fusion, my body does matter. It has a very real physical presence in this world and my journey through this world, as you know, as a lesbian as somebody who's disabled, as someone who's done research on this subject for a lifetime, my journey through this world, how I think about it, it changes over time, but it doesn't change the facts of that journey.
And I think one of the things that so deeply offends me about this moment in time is that you can't talk about facts without getting into a lot of trouble, quite frankly.
Raquel: We talked about your meeting, which was originally postponed. And then staff members decided that this would just would not go ahead.
I wanted to give you an opportunity to very briefly explain to our FiLiA audience. What is it that you wanted to say that night of December 5th? A very short summary though.
Jo Phoenix: It's very simply to introduce the basis of Canadian research, introducing policies of self-identification into a prison context, that prison context being one that is segregated by biological sex, creates massive problems.
And it doesn't necessarily, not necessarily, suit the women, the females who are in the female estate, but nor does it necessarily provide the full range of rights for trans individuals who find themselves in prison.
And that's one of the most important, well, not more, it's really important to recognize that just because we cater to somebody's subjective sense of themselves doesn't necessarily mean that that translates to rights and protections.
So that's, that's all I was going to say. Not terribly controversial, really.
Raquel: But what’s interesting is that you don't get to speak, then some people can carry on the delusion that everything's fine because no one's complaining. Yes, because your silencing the people who want to object to it, like that's the whole point.
We’re dealing with a political initiative, like gender identity policies that depend on saying, well, no one has reported any problems, but then the facet behind it is that no, you can’t hear those voices because the women who do want to speak out who are experts such as yourself, the opportunity to speak out about it gets taken away. There must be many others.
Jo Phoenix: Yeah. Can I read you a quote here? And you're going to say, well, this is odd that I want to read a quote. This is from an article that I published about this issue. I published it along with a couple of other people.
This is a participant to a piece of research. This is a prison officer talking about self-identification policies in the context of Canadian federal prisons. So this is from the mouth of the people, rather than myself, if you follow. When asked, whether placing people according to their biology could increase the risk for some trans prisoners.
Now one prison officer said: “I don't know. I mean, there obviously needs to be a place for them, [meaning trans individuals], but where that place is. I don't know. I don't think a woman should be in a men's institution. No less than a man being a woman’s prison. If you have all the working parts, [meaning anatomically], which would enable you, I mean, women are going to rape women and men are going to rape men.
So it's just going to happen. I just don't know. I think that that's going to come with a whole bunch of complications”.
Now, the point that I want to make there is when he's talking about women going to rape women, he's talking about trans women. And then men are going to rape men, he gets a little bit confused as he's talking about that, but you know, the people who were on the ground actually having to do these policies and enact them know full well that actually we have to be able to talk about the complications. We have to be able to talk about potential violence. We have to be able to talk about the fact that there is a contradiction here.
Raquel: So there are experts like yourself who are saying there's a lot of policy matters in place. And we need to think about this very carefully
There are people on the ground who are doing direct services with people in prison who are working directly with people in prison. And they are saying, this is a problem. Meanwhile, you have this sort of bubble of hysteria that is created to prevent both set of voices from being heard?
Jo Phoenix: Well, I mean, yes, absolutely. Raquel, would it be helpful if I talked a little bit more about some of the challenges of putting biological males into a female prison?
Raquel: I have your written evidence regarding the Gender Recognition Act I wanted to mention it. If you would like to talk about it?
Jo Phoenix: You mention it.
Raquel: You wrote your opinion and you wrote to the Government regarding this reform of the Gender Recognition Act, which would have permitted self-identification sex in a sense.
And you'd talk about how community-based single sex and separate sex provision for community services were created so that probation could address the different needs of women. And especially those needs that relate to the link between being victimised by men and criminalised woman’s offending histories while never fully implemented. In the report that you were citing the one that was talking about how women are more likely to commit self-harm and their place in institutions, the prison state, which is built essentially for men, right? And how that affects women, right. So you said while it's never fully implemented the course on reports still forms the basic framework for criminal justice provision for criminalised women on probation.
Most of the day-to-day work now focuses on male and female trauma on a first childhood experiences on childcare issues and the provision of basic social welfare.
So this is the things that you wanted to talk about as an expert, instead we get cartoons vilifying an academic.
Jo Phoenix: Yeah. That sums it all.
I mean, I'm going to go back in history here and it's going to be a little bit self-serving so forgive me please.
When I said that I was supervised by the best, I came into criminology because of my interest about women who are both victims and offenders and how we deal with them. I originally wanted to do a PhD on women in prison but, Pat Carlen had just written her books. So, you know, kind of spoiled that one.
Pat was hugely influential on my early thinking. And of course we had no problem back in the eighties and the nineties. At beginning of the two-thousands, it became a little bit difficult, but we had no problem recognising that the constituency of women who find their way into the criminal justice system are often more victimised than they are offenders.
And most of the crimes, most of the women we're talking about who are in our criminal justice systems have these profound histories of abuse at the hands of men.
Raquel: The recommendation that you made to the Women's Equality Committee was:
‘I urge the Committee to provide explicit guidance on the importance of single sex, women only provision and spaces in the criminal justice system, including the prison and community rehabilitation centre in its reports and recommendations. I also urge the Committee to provide explicit guidance on the need to further develop policy, practice and services based on respect and dignity of justice involved for trans and gender diverse people’s needs and requirements. These surveys for rehabilitation and resettlement, but to do so in a way that does not impinge on the provision of single sex, women only services and space.’
Could you expand a little bit on this opinion regarding the rights of women in prison?
Jo Phoenix: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things we know, as I said, women who are in prison are in a very, very particular constituency. One of the things that research in the 1980s and early 1990s began to tease out was the fact that actually, there are no women only prisons. Prisons who house females also have male officers in them.
So we have to remember that. But there is something quite different about a female prison than a male prison in that in female prisons, a lot of the issues that we're dealing with are welfare issues, self-harming and depression and trauma informed responses and so on and so forth.
In male prisons, what we're dealing with, when we try and create a well-functioning prison are issues of security and violence and things like that. I mean, there are a lot of welfare issues for men as well. Don't get me wrong. But there is much more of an effort at keeping people secure and not fighting with each other in male prisons than in female prisons.
So one of the effects that we often see of putting women in women only, services or female only services is there's the ability for those women to heal for lack of better words. To come to terms with the violence’s that they've experienced, to express themselves about what's happened in their lives and to be able to, to spend some time reflecting and thinking about how to move forward in a less lawbreaking sort of fashion.
Or for them to be able to make connections between their identities. It's an interesting thing I want to talk about, but their identities as victimised women and how they're going to move forward in their life in a way that doesn't get them into trouble with the criminal justice system.
Now that's based on two centuries of research that tells us about these women's histories.
Can we talk a little bit about trans people in the justice system? We haven't really done much research about their needs, their backgrounds and so on and so forth. We don't know a lot here, but we do know that for a lot of trans individuals, their experience of the justice process can be very denying of their trans identities, which is fine, or it can be quite punitive.
We do know, for instance, if you look at some of the policing studies that young trans individuals will often be over-policed for their, I don't know, they're kind of acting out in public places. We know, for instance, that they can be defined as doubly deviant and doubly damned in the courts.
So not only have they offended the law, the criminal justice laws, but the manner in which they are made sense of is seen as being some sort of deviant.
So we know those issues happen, but here's the deal, we don't actually know and cannot say, at this point, the research base does not tell us whether trans individuals, let's say trans women would suit the, sort of a woman centred trauma informed regimes of rehabilitation and therapy that have developed up in the women's centres and that are trying to be developed within female prisons.
There's no reason to assume that that is the case. And in fact, if you look at these statistics, thank you, Nic Williams, Fairplay for Women, who is an expert at doing all the FOIs and finding all of this information. We know there are approximately 160 to 170 trans identifying males in the male estate. So, individuals who claim that they are trans women, who could, if we had a self-identification policy move from the male estate to the female estate. We know that more than half of those individuals have committed one type of sexual crime against a woman or a child at least once, at least once.
So, to put it fairly bluntly, we wouldn't have a problem saying people who have committed rape against women, shouldn't be in the same sort of programs that are designed for rape victim. If that's transphobic, I'm going to have to stand rightly accused of transphobia. In my mind it isn't.
It’s simply a statement of fact.
Raquel: There's a real element of power that is playing out in this conversation, because if you think about it, women in prison, they oftentimes don't have voting rights, so their political power is very limited. So politicians don't really have an incentive to pay attention to the needs and interests of women in prison.
But then there's an element of, by the time a woman gets to end up in prison, there are multiple systems that have failed along the way, including obviously, in so many cases, male violence, there's something that is so grim about people who have not experienced this sort of issues and are not experts on this sort of issue. So they're not even letting the experts who do know about these issues, speak out.
You're doing it from a position of, you know what ‘I'm a 22-year-old student in art, but I know that I need to cancel. I need to bully and harass Jo Phoenix so that she doesn't give a talk so that she doesn't express these opinions that are extremely important, that are about the interest of a group of women who are so disempowered in society’.
From that point of view, the power imbalances are mental, right. But then add the added layer of the institution, the University of Essex ends up condoning that sort of behaviour, which is what ended up happening with the Reindorf report. And we'll talk about it in a second, but do you understand what I'm saying?
There's like this added layers of like, ‘ this is so completely disconnect from me. I'm not, I don't envision that I'm ever going to be in a female prison. So I don't really care about what happens to those women. When the expert wants to speak out let’s target her and really, really fight her. Meanwhile, this is something that will never affect me’.
And then instead of supporting the expert, the Vice Chancellor of the institution does this dance and at the end, he ends up saying like, he condones that behaviour.
Jo Phoenix: Yeah, well, I mean, so here we go. I think dance is the only way you can put it.
I'm going to refer to them by their first name, Anthony, Anthony Forster, Vice Chancellor of Essex University and Akua, who is Akua Reindorf, the independent barrister who conducted the Reindorf review and Bryn Morris, Bryn Morris being the registrar of the University.
And since the apology has been offered well, since I was egregiously and unlawfully treated, Bryn Morris has been the main person who I have been in contact with.
Raquel: Could you give me one second so that I can give the context for the people in the podcast who may not be aware please?
Yes. So as we mentioned, you know, there was this invitation, it was postponed, then it was withdrawn. Now in, I think in May of 2021 there was a report conducted by a barrister, a discrimination barrister called Akua Reindorf.
The report was commissioned by the University of Essex to look into the events around in both Jo Phoenix, and another professor called Rosa Freedman.
So the recommendations at the end of this report is Professor Phoenix should be offered an open apology and an opportunity to give a seminar at the Centre of Criminology, but essentially it is a very long report, 108 pages in which this barrister does a forensic examination into what went wrong in this university regarding these issues.
And as a result of that report, the University made a statement in which they talk about academic freedom and how important freedom of speech was. And you were offered a public apology.
My first question to you is: Did you know that this report was being conducted? And when did you hear back about the incoming storm that was headed your way?
Jo Phoenix: I knew that the report was being conducted and I knew the report was being conducted because from the moment that I got blacklisted, I jumped up and down and made all sorts of noises and complaints to, to Essex and they came and told me, they emailed me in the January saying that they were commissioning this report.
I was then invited to give evidence. I gave three interviews of evidence to Akua and the University about what had happened to me and then everything got kicked into the long grass. And by that, what I mean is everything seemed to just stop.
At this point I'd never met Rosa. I still haven't met her, but I didn't know what had happened to her. I thought it was just me. So about once a month, I would send an email to Essex University and say, what on earth is happening? Because of course, you know, in this area, mud sticks and, you know I have had all sorts of troubles as a result of Essex.
So it has, it has damaged my career quite frankly. Um, and you know, and I won't go down that route.
Raquel: There's something that is important to point out is that maybe if it wasn't because someone kept insisting no, no, no, you have to address this. You're not going to just like push this under the rug maybe that's why they ended up having to take action because I'm sorry, but in my experience, they just kind of hope that you go away.
And it's like, they just tell you things so that you can just like drop it.
But then the thing with women who are campaigning on this issue is that we never drop it.
Jo Phoenix: You know, Raquel all hats off to you. You are a PhD student I've got 25 years in the game. So a lot of my approach here has been, if I don't stand up, how on earth can I expect younger academics or indeed students to stand up? Because quite frankly, at this stage of my career, there's nothing a university can give me or take away. I have done everything that I set out to do career wise. So if I can't stand up and be counted, then it's a sorry world that we live in. So let's come back to where we were –
I was pinging them emails. What's happening with this report what's happening. Then we get to March of this year, March for me was a terrible, terrible month.
I discovered that my mother was dying in America. I had to apply for an emergency visa to go and visit. I spent some time there whilst I was there I had a crippling back injury, which required medical treatment and meant that I, as soon as I could get back from America, I had to have spinal surgery.
My mother died towards the end of April. I got back from America and something like April the 28th and I was scheduled for surgery on May the 11th. The next thing I heard after March was an email on May the 17th. Saying that the Reindorf review is being published. And I was out of hospital by five or six days at this point. I was whacked out on all sorts of drugs because I was in a lot of pain and I had texts from Anthony Forster asking to speak to me urgently, urgently.
So, did I get given any thought about how being dumped into the middle of a media storm was going to play out in my life? No. Essex did not grant me the grace to give me any forewarning.
Raquel: What the public could see, is this report just came out and I mean, I felt a little bit, Akua, she's just so great.
What the public could see, from our point of view is this report is out, the university has taken a position in support of academic freedom and freedom of speech. And it seemed at that point, May 17th, that they were supporting women's rights to discuss these issues freely without being harassed, without being bullied, without being targeted.
But what you're saying is that from your point of view, you were going through something very different and the fact that you're not an employee at the University of Essex means that they can say, well, we had no duty of care to you. So what do we care about your spinal surgery? But there's a human element on it. It blew up, this thing blew up.
Meanwhile, at the end of this, there was a woman who was in a lot of pain, actual physical pain, and grieving your mother.
Jo Phoenix: Yeah. And what happened afterwards? So there were 10 days of life that I have never experienced and care never to experience again.
Rosa reached out to me or I reached out to Rosa. I can't remember exactly who or I think Julie Bindel put us in touch with each other. I've known Julie for 1,000,007 years.
So we got in touch with each other and we decided very rapidly, once I realised that she had had the same egregious treatment and she realised that I had, we decided that we would act in lock step with each other because the simplest way to make women like us go away is to divide and conquer.
So, we agreed that we would only do joint interviews. We decided to talk about how to approach Essex. Rosa was a tremendous support to me. She was undergoing her own surgery at the time, ironically, but she was a tremendous support to me and she certainly knows how to play the media more than I do.
I've just been a boring, dull academic, most of my career. So yeah, we got dumped into an international media storm, gave interviews for Russian TV. That was a career first for me. We were even interviewed for the Economist, , every single newspaper I mean, literally the story just ran and ran and ran.
In the beginning, Raquel, I wanted to give Essex credence because I thought they were offering a genuine apology. And certainly Anthony Forster, the VC of Essex, had said in the personal telephone call to me that this was the beginning of a conversation, whereas it became evident over the course of the summer. That that was not true.
Raquel: You're talking about the media storm and people were asking to interview both of you. But at that point, the narrative was:
University of Essex supports freedom of speech and the academic freedom of people who want to discuss sex and gender issues.
So that was the narrative then. So, I'm assuming you were given interviews based on that Assumptions. Right.
You didn't know that there would be this coming up?
Jo Phoenix: Oh God. No, no. And in fact, you know, I grew up in Texas. There's an old phrase that might not be Texan, might be English. I don't know,
Fool me once shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.
In this case, I feel you asked how I feel, I feel aggrieved in the extreme because I feel like personally that I was hoodwinked by Essex university's promises or apologies because after that narrative and I was happy to give Essex, I genuinely hand on heart I was happy to give Essex some good press over this, because I genuinely thought that they would make good, the invitation. I genuinely thought that we were going to start having a conversation, not so much about restitution. I don't mean that like, you know, they will pay a fine and they will do this. I mean, to broker and heal the damage that had been done in the best restorative justice fashion.
I genuinely thought that the institution was up for that but then we, I say we, because at this point, Rosa and I were acting in lock step with each other. We both got side-lined by hearing about Anthony Forster's apology for the apology and at that point it was like, what on earth is happening?
You know, has Essex become a basket case of a place? Were they lying to us? How on earth could this possibly happen? And if you read that apology for the apology. Do you want to say something about that?
Raquel: I just don't understand what he's doing, why would you? You supported, you receive all of the support from people saying ‘at last breath in academia’ and then you sort ….
Jo Phoenix: Of backtrack.
Raquel: Why? Okay. But I wanted to ask you, in your conversations with the vice chancellor, at the University of Essex, did you feel that you were being reassured and that it came across as genuine? Or looking back, can you think and see, they were only given us this narrative so that we would go to the media and speak very well of them so that then they can believe deliver the second blow.
Jo Phoenix: I have to admit, I know Anthony Forster well. He and I used to work together at Durham University. And in fact, he may be even the person to say this, it's probably him better placed to say it. He appointed me at Durham University. He was the chair of my interview panel and he and I worked relatively closely for a number of years.
So when he rang, I believed him, I hate to say it in retrospect, but I tried to convince Rosa that he was genuine as well. So I feel a burden of guilt over that because, you know, as it happened, no matter what Anthony says, Anthony is not Essex University. And I suspect that what happened after May the 18th was that holy hell let loose in the university and that people were challenging the outcome of the Reindorf review, that people felt that actually apologising to us was basically giving a green light to transphobes and so on and so forth. And I think that's why he issued the apology.
The apology for the apology came in a blog called ‘our commitment to our trans and non-binary staff and students’ in which Anthony says:
‘My personal view is that the current law in the UK does not fully respect and protect identity of trans and non-binary people. I understand that in meeting our obligations to respect academic freedom and freedom of speech within the law. We have given the impression that we might not care about the lived realities.’
And so on and so forth. Well, to me, that second bullet point basically says, okay, yeah, so we apologise to these two women because we broke the law, infringe their freedom of speech and infringed our obligations for academic freedom broke our public service legal obligations. And not only that never bothered to investigate the violence prevention poster against professor Phoenix. So not only did we do all of that, but actually, we did that. We've apologised for that begrudgingly because actually what happens is that we haven't fully respected and protected trans people enough.
So to me at that point, that was a slam dunk, ‘by the way, we take the apology away.’
Raquel: Of course. And it's such a bizarre thing to say, as I mentioned, I'm so sorry I'm being so petty. I wanted to read quotes from his original apology. But when has a vice chancellor said ‘my personal view is that we should increase maternity provision for women who are in academia’ like policies for women who are breastfeeding.
When have they ever said ‘my personal position is that we really need to work to ensure that women who have young children can have spaces on campus’. That kind of stuff never happens. Why are you doing this?
Jo Phoenix: Well, I think the vice chancellor, so let's just think of him as the vice chancellor of an organisation rather than an individual, because, I have no doubt, Anthony and I worked well together in the past and I have no doubt that, whatever, there is a history here and that's one of the reasons I feel so aggrieved.
But in addition to that, I recognise that he occupies a role within the university. So in his head he may be saying, yeah, my primary orientation is with the University of Essex, not Jo Phoenix. Now for me, the University of Essex can go jump, quite literally, because I'm not their employee. They have broken the law.
Bryn and Antony have done nothing to heal the rift that happened. And when I say heal the rift, I mean, make good their institution’s illegal behaviour. All they did was offer a piece of paper apology that is, as someone put on Twitter the other week, not even worth the paper it's written on, because it does nothing.
Raquel: No, but more than that, it's not that you didn't address the policy issues that led to your rights being violated, is that he sort of like created this chasm in which now every student and staff member who targeted you feels emboldened because now they know, you know what I can get away with it. And not only that, the vice chancellor himself is going to issue an apology for an apology.
It is a supreme act of cowardice from the institution itself, but there's an element of it that feels very undignified in which I am telling these women, knowing that they're going to go on the Economist and Russia Today and The Times and all that kind of stuff, they're going to do the media circles talking about how we respect their rights so that then I can turn around and say, never mind everything that I've just said. Actually, our concern is with the people who targeted that harassed and bullied those two professors. And that feels very low.
Jo Phoenix: Well, as they once said on a sitcom in the eighties, in this country, Yes Minister, you could say that; ‘I couldn't possibly comment’.
Raquel: Yes. Sounds fine. Don't worry about it.
So this happened and initially I think you accepted the apology?
Jo Phoenix: No, we're never publicly accepted it. I mean, the most hilarious thing of all. And in normal human relationships, when somebody apologises, you check in with them to see if they accept the apology, you try and figure out if you need to do some more work around that in order for everyone to move on past. That was never done.
Raquel: Was it only a public apology, but not a personal one.
Jo Phoenix: Oh no, he personally apologised to both of us on those personal telephone calls, we had either more than an hour long conversation with Anthony separately, me from my sick bed and Rosa just before she went into her sick bed.
I said there was one email that I sent on the morning before I'd spoken to Rosa and it was like, I think I minded to accept it, but I'm not sure. Now here's the deal. We have, you know, you may know this by now, last week or the week Rosa and I put out a public statement formally not accepting the apology. Because the last instalment in the saga is that the University of Essex had consulted several legal experts who redacted an awful lot of the report, including our personal data. So stuff about us in that report has been redacted. And I was happy with that. I was happy with that because one of the things that's in there are all the accusations that were made against me.
Now there've been a ton of FOI requests so that people can assess for themselves whether or not Rosa and I are or are not transphobes and whether or not the apology was, or wasn't warranted and whether or not Essex did or did not break the law. So in other words there's been a lot of push back against Essex.
You know, they want to try it in public and a lot of the people who stand by what happened to Rosa I, want to be able to say, oh look, but these people are transphobes and the university did not act that badly and the poster was only a cartoon anyway. So why is she bitching.
Now all of that's going to be released, we understand on August the 28th, that is against our consent. We have expressly said that to the University of Essex that we do not give consent for our personal data to be released. I've had an email, in which I have been, I want to say instructed, but that's not quite the right word, told that our consent doesn't matter, that legally they have another obligation to square and that's the obligation for freedom of information and so they would like to get our comments.
Now I've said, consent does matter because if you're trying to heal the breach of something, if you're trying to bring people back into the fold and try and move forward and you're genuine in your apology, then whether somebody consents certainly matters.
And for me, you know, I've been a feminist since I could eat pretty much, certainly since I was 18 years old. Consent to me as a woman is something extremely dear to my heart. So the fact that we have said, that I have said, I do not consent. And they've said it doesn't matter. It says everything we need to know.
Raquel: That's all you need to know about their apology then.
But aside from the consent issue, I'm going to read a paragraph from the Reindorf report about discrimination,
Akua Reindorf wrote:
‘As for indirect discrimination, the decision taken in relation to Professor Phoenix, the decision to postpone and then withdrawing the invitation - may contribute to indirect sex discrimination against women at the university on the basis that more women than men tend to hold and publicly express gender critical views. If that can be shown, it can be argued that women are more likely than men to be put at a disadvantage by a practice of excluding gender critical voices. While the university does not owe a duty to Professor Phoenix personally, in discrimination laws, pursuing policies of excluding gender critical external speakers might very well be of evidential value in an indirect discrimination complaint by a gender critical female staff member.’
So there's legal issues here. There are legal matters that are yet to be addressed and instead of clarifying, it seems that the position from the management of the university add more fire to it. It was like, just put more fire on it. It feels like a worse position than it was on May 16th before they published that report.
Jo Phoenix: Can you imagine being, not even a gender critical scholar, but just being somebody who wants to understand a little bit more and maybe someone who wants to talk with somebody who is a gender critical scholar. Imagine them in the Centre for Criminology. I don't know if there is anyone, but imagine that there is somebody there who wants to do that?
The context now at Essex is I think personally, I'm not there, but it's far more hostile than ever it was before. So I think, who knows how this is going to play out, and on one level you're probably the last person I'm going to speak to. Well, no, I'm going to speak at the Centre for Crime and Justice Studies. I'm not going to speak about Essex a lot in the future, because for me, they've had enough of my professional life. They've had two years of my time and energy and they have had an entire summer and they interrupted the grief I had for my own mother and my own healing.
So on one level I feel desperately, sorry, and desperately sad for anyone who is at Essex and who is a woman, who is a feminist and who is interested in gender critical work, because that is probably the worst place in this country that they could be at the moment.
Raquel: What did this experience taught you?
Jo Phoenix: Oh, no-one has asked me that, Raquel. That's a really good question. It's taught me that you're only as good as the things that you stand by. for as much as Essex has taken away from me, I find myself, towards the end of my career with a whole new set of friends, really. The second that I started reaching out to people both from the past and my own personal life, but also professionally, I have found an abundance of support. Julie Bindel and I haven't always seen eye to eye about prostitution and sex work and things.
But the second that I reached out to her she's been there. Rosa has been there, all of the other gender critical scholars, yourself, Twitter can be a vile place, but oh my God, it can also be really, really supportive. So, it's also taught me that universities have changed dramatically.
And it's taught me that sometimes in one's professional career, I hate to say it, shit happens. And when it does, you've just got to figure out whether that's a raft you're going to jump on and ride out to the end. And I think that's, where I am now. I'm 57 years old and my career has had an absolutely new injection because you know, people like me got to stand up, we've got to write about these things. We contain a memory and a history of, of both activism, but also research and we need to make sure that that history doesn't get lost. That was a really long answer.
Raquel: No, it's fine. I was just thinking that, you know, your work has reached an audience that it perhaps would not have reached before, and that's an unintended consequence of whoever was doing cartoons and vilifying you that night on December 5th.
There's this assumption that if you speak out your life will be shut down, and there are very material consequences for the women who do speak out. But then at the same time, there's this window that opens and this window is: there's a network and there's a community to support.
There's so many people who come to me and say like, oh, I want to talk to my best friend about how I believe that women are real and sex is real but I'm worried about what might happen and then I always say to them, you know, what, all of these horrible things that you think might happen could happen, but also some very positive things could also happen.
So your work is now being read far and wide in a way that perhaps it wasn't, or, exponential exponentially more than before that night.
Jo Phoenix: I'm totally with you. I mean, there is a real paradox in all of this, we do end up, for as much as we get cancelled, we do end up with profile now, and we end up in a place that we never expected.
And I'm speaking personally here, I'm using the Royal, we, I never expected to be here and isn't it amazing. but I'm only here because I was egregiously treated. So, if you were to ask me, was it worth at all? No, I would have rather given my talk and I'd rather slowly build up that research base. And I would have rather slowly, got involved in the politics and policy reform of things. And I'd rather have done things the way that I always did do, in a standard academic way.
But you know, this isn't a bad place to be. It really isn't, I've got support. I still would like some sort of restitution. A lot's been taken away from me and as much as I have the support of colleagues and new networks, nothing can make up for the things that have been taken away from me.
It's a double-edged sword, isn't it? A real double-edged sword.
Raquel: An apology or restitution, that's not going to bring everything that was lost back. And I think that's something that was demonstrated by the University of Essex is that, you know what women are being treated so horribly all over the UK by so many different institutions.
I have learned, at least in my experience that, that you sort of look up to this institution. No, no, everything's going to be fine. They will see the light. They will see that I should not be treated like shit. Everything’s going to be fine once that moment comes. And I think that part of the process is just understanding, you know, what? You don't need an apology from the institution that is violating your rights and validation. That apology doesn't validate you as a human being and you shouldn't go to the source of harm to try to find healing. There was an element when everything sort of broke out right at the beginning of like, wow, they are doing this report. They're going to be taking this actions, all this kind of stuff.
But now it becomes very clear that they have zero intention in doing any of that. And then I think: What is the point of trying to get an institution to see that they shouldn't be treating women like crap when at the end, what they will do is create some performance that they will then backtrack from because it's not genuine.
And it comes back to what Akua was saying. This could be discrimination against women. It's almost as if we're in this endless process of having to prove our humanity, to the institutions that are abusive. And at one point I think it's better to just stop, like you don't need to keep proving your humanity to those institutions.
Jo Phoenix: Oh, well, Raquel, can I kind of end our discussion with two quotes please? I'm sure you've heard it.
Audre Lorde: the master's tools won’t bring his house down.
Trying to look for an apology and restitution from Essex. I would really like one, but you know, that's the last place because in point of fact, I don't know what's going on there and I don't really care anymore. But what they can't give me is anything that they took away by their illegal actions.
But the other quote is a book title from, the amazing, the stunning Angela Y. Davis. Now she said constantly, freedom is a constant struggle. I've adapted that. Justice is a constant struggle. Since when did we, as women ever think that we didn't have to fight fucking tooth and nail for justice, in a context in which women are routinely denied justice now, by that, I mean, straight across the board, you know, professors who are treated unlawfully right the way down to women whose victimisation isn't recognized by the courts. So for me, you're right.
You're absolutely correct. looking for remediation for lack of better words from Essex is a fool's errand.
Raquel: Do you mind if I ask you one final question?
Jo Phoenix: Please do, by all means.
Raquel: How do you envision the way forward then? You know, I'm a student, you're an academic. How do you think that universities or people in academia can move forward from all the mess from all the mess that we have discussed in this podcast?
Jo Phoenix: I have particular views. I have been a senior manager in universities, so I have a kind of different viewpoint about how we can produce institutional and organisational change. And by God we need it. My own view is that we need to roll back on some of the ref metrics particularly about impact because one of the drivers of all of this is, is academics wanting to become almost celebrities to prove that they have had impact in their research. And I think that turns them more into to activists than academics. And it turns people on Twitter into hideous, social justice, keyboard warriors.
And by that, what I mean is people who are prepared to trash other people and other people's expertise on the basis of some preconceived notion of social justice and how that is achieved.
I think we need to go back in our undergraduate degrees and start teaching students about professional ethics, because I think one of the things that universities no longer have is a sense of what is professional anymore.
I mean, I've said this so many times, I feel like I'm a bleeding record you know, a constantly going around record. And that's this: In my work as an academic, the research I do is as a paid employee, I am not a hobbyist. I don't do this because I want to create a particular outcome.
I am paid as an academic, if my academic work can contribute to a wider debate, then that's great, but I am paid to produce knowledge. I'm not paid as a political activist. And if you could see me waggling my fingers all over the place here. So I think somehow we've got to help universities and people like me can do it, help universities understand that what we are in the business of is teaching and producing knowledge.
Raquel: Not censoring it not shoving it down.
Jo Phoenix: Oh, absolutely not. Not censoring it, not shutting it down, but encouraging it.
One of the problems that we have, because we all speak to the converted at the moment, because we've been excluded from the realm of the non-converted, if you like, is that we don't have a chance to present our ideas in front of people who disagree with us, and as an academic, I need the critique in order to be able to further my ideas and to communicate them better.
So yeah, we need to go back to being fucking professional academics, and work with our networks and work with our activist communities, but we need to be academics first and students first, and that means being committed to the open exchange of ideas and committed to the production and dissemination of knowledge.
Raquel: Well, thank you, Jo Phoenix, very much for speaking with us today. We’ve learnt a lot because there's their perspectives, your perspective, your personal perspective is not what we have seen so far. We have seen a lot of media headlines and statements and apologies, and then none apologies, but it's good to see the human element under all of that so thank you so much for speaking with us and for the work that you do most importantly.
Jo Phoenix: Likewise, thank you very much for the invitation, for the podcast and also Raquel for your lovely questions, you've made me think and just thank you to all the people who are listening, and most especially thank you for the energy and the work that you put into FiLiA.