About Us
The triple pandemic of COVID-19, expanding violence around the globe, and increased discrimination along intersecting raced-gendered axes has challenged researchers with new questions regarding how to ethically engage historically underserved and unserved communities. Separate from but interconnected with interpersonal and symbolic violence, structural violence is rooted within social, political, and economic structures. Discrimination (e.g., poverty, racism, sexism) in the structured distribution of social goods (e.g., education, food, housing, medical care) and spatialized inequities create violence when resources that could otherwise address basic human needs, are withheld and/or distributed unequally—and particularly for those already disenfranchised and/or considered socially undeserving due to contextual, identity-driven, and historical factors. Importantly, the normative internalization of structural violence at individual, group, and institutional levels can render structural harm invisible making it difficult to eliminate through social policy intervention, programming, and practice.
The GPL is a scholarly and policy practitioner incubator and forum for the development of policy solutions to structural violence and inequality—both that which is invisible and readily identifiable. More specifically, the lab engages in needed research and accountability mechanisms concerning gender politics, policy, and inequity. Here our collective research focus and interest is on the examination of how gender is addressed by the state, and related systems and organizations—and how gender rights and gender-specific harm is attended to within school governance, leadership, and pedagogical practice. Research across multiple fields documents that gender inequality and violence are connected. This linkage also is tied to power differentials along intersecting axes of gender, race, class, and nationality, among other identity markers, and normative values that marginalize and exploit human difference.
Policies that aim to further gender equality and eliminate violence, the agendas being championed, the goals of gender advocacy and citizenship, and the strategies to promote and achieve these goals are contested terrain. Those engaged in gender policy advocacy and research also currently are experiencing increased implementation gaps, policy actor resistance, and an overall backsliding of gender rights attained decades ago. It is with this context in mind that GPL research areas include (but are not limited to):
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COVID-19, and similar health crisis impacts, on young women's educational outcomes, physical health, and socioemotional well-being;
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feminization of migration and gendered harms within global displacement and resettlement patterns;
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gender violence within family, religious, and state systems (everyday and in humanitarian crises) and anti-violence movements and response;
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global neoliberal educational discourse, reform, and related raced-gendered public education and health effects;
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intersections between public systems such as the carceral state and public education, and related human rights violations and state action;
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new frontiers in gender politics, policy, and leadership, and new forms of resilience and resistance to gender equity backsliding;
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positive masculinity and related social norms and programming, which champion inclusivity and reject violence in communities, the home, and schools;
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school policy and programming targeting identity at the intersection of ability, gender, nationality, race, and/or other identity markers;
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schooling practices that address gender through culturally/linguistically responsive, trauma-informed, and/or social and emotional policy and programming;
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social determinants of health, and related inequities at the intersection of race, gender, and class, and intervention strategies.
GPL researchers and affiliates examine these and related topics through a range of critical qualitative, quantitative, and mixed methods approaches. This scholarship, produced over multiple decades, underscores the shared consensus that sociopolitical and economic (dis)advantages are created and distributed via predetermined policy understandings of what it means to be deserving and underserving. Thus, GPL scholarship and practice is intentional in critiquing well-established social problems and naming both intended and unintended consequences of policy. This work also is unified in our determination to bring about needed policy change and transformation with and not for communities.
The GPL is host to multiple academic disciplines, methodological expertise, and critical inter- and trans-disciplinary theoretical approaches to research and policy action. Our scholarship and advocacy is aligned with researchers and practitioners working across fields to strengthen a focus on structural inequality and gender in these spaces, influence change through capacity strengthening and coalition-building, and advance a healthier overall global ecosystem through empirical evidence. Concerned with advancing the overall health and well-being of its members and community partners, GPL researchers and affiliates recognize that social, economic, and political problems, respective policy change, and achievable positive outcomes are nuanced and interconnected—and gender inequality and the structural violence that accompany and maintain it, is not only a women's issue, but a shared harm that is the responsibility of everyone.