she/her
As well as co-organising the 2021 event, Gayle chaired the 2023 event and ran creative activities for it. To see/hear reflections on the latter event, click here.
I am Honorary Professor of Sociology at the University of Plymouth and Visiting Professor at the University of Greenwich. A sociologist, alongside substantive interests in reproductive and non/parental identities; gender, health and wellbeing; loss and bereavement; travel and transport mobility, gender and identity within institutions and food poverty, I have always been fascinated by research methodology, including auto/biographical, feminist and creative practices.
Over the last few years I have been experimenting, both within my academic work and with reference to other non-academic activities (including political activism), with different ways of working; including collage and zine making and fiction and memoir writing. I owe my renewed, and continued engagement, with this sort of creativity not least from being inspired by the work of Kitrina Douglas and David Carless (see for example Douglas and Carless 2013) and to the experience I had at a conference I went to in 2017 –Thinking Through Things – organised by Magali Peyrefitte and Carly Guest at Middlesex University. In one of the sessions during the day participants were asked to make a collage representative of their ‘work self’. I found this activity and the discussion that took place during it both personally enriching and intellectually stimulating. Since then I have initiated, and been part of, collage and zine making in several academic settings and created another zine, focusing on political story writing, of my own. This creative doing has surprised me and I have been amazed and delighted at how enjoyable and valuable I, and others I have worked with, find such activity.
Although, my fiction and memoir work began as part of the griefwork (Davidson and Letherby 2015) I undertook following the death of my husband, John (1948-2010) and my mum, Dorothy (1931-2012) and were at first separate from my academic work, these writings are now also often embedded in my scholarly pieces. Additionally, I now also run workshops with colleagues and at conferences on creative writing for academics. Throughout my career I have always delighted in and learnt a lot from collaborative working. Newer, creative arts-based collaborations, are especially joyful and enriching. For an example see https://collaborations-in-research.org/ which emerged out of, and followed, an Independent Social Research Foundation (ISRF) funded residential (awarded to Julie Parsons and facilitated by Julie and myself). A related and issue of Methodological Innovations https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/2059799120942054) (guest edited by Parsons and Letherby) focusing on creative and collaborative approaches to research was published in 2020.
My auto/biographical feminist sociological work has always been explicitly political and my collage/zine making and fiction writing are too. Some of the stories, of self and other(s), I write are explicit sociological (written specifically to generate sociological knowledge), all of it is informed by my sociological and personal self.
I have been an active member of the Methodological Innovations research group at the University of Plymouth since its’ inception in 2005. For me it is, as I hope for others, a positive place to engage, to network, to learn and to play.
For examples of writing beyond the academy see http://arwenackcerebrals.blogspot.co.uk/ and https://www.abctales.com/user/gletherby