Cogent Arts & Humanities

The Ethics of Proximity: Violence Against Women and Girls and Researcher Wellbeing

Cogent Arts & Humanities is pleased to welcome you to submit your research to the Article Collection "The Ethics of Proximity: Violence Against Women and Girls and Researcher Wellbeing".

Violence against women and girls (VAWG) constitutes one of the most pervasive and systemic human rights violations of our time, cutting across geographic, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries. Scholars who dedicate their work to understanding, documenting, legitimising, and challenging these forms of violence occupy a distinctive and underexamined position within the academy: they engage repeatedly and intimately with accounts of harm, trauma, and structural injustice, yet do so within institutional and epistemological frameworks that were not designed with this work in mind. Feminist and Gender studies, as fields historically committed to reflexivity, situated knowledge, and foregrounding the political dimensions of knowledge production, are particularly well placed to interrogate what it means to research VAWG; ethically, methodologically, and politically. This collection proceeds from the recognition that the ethical obligations entailed by this work extend beyond the research encounter itself, raising fundamental questions about accountability, care, and the conditions under which feminist scholarship on violence can and should be produced.

The ethical stakes of researching VAWG have received insufficient attention within academic discourse. Scholars working in this field navigate complex and often uncharted ethical terrain: questions of accountability to survivors, the politics of representation, the risk of reproducing or inadvertently legitimising the very power structures they seek to challenge, and the moral weight of bearing witness to experiences of violence. These are not incidental concerns but constitutive features of feminist research on VAWG, yet they remain largely untheorised within institutional and disciplinary frameworks. When the ethical complexity of the work goes unacknowledged, feminist scholars, particularly those with lived proximity to the issues they study, are left without adequate conceptual or institutional resources to navigate it. The field risks losing not only researchers, but the critical, ethically grounded perspectives that make feminist scholarship on violence and prevention irreplaceable.

This Collection invites contributions that engage critically and reflexively with the ethical, epistemological, and political dimensions of researching VAWG from feminist and gender studies perspectives. We welcome work that interrogates the ethics of care as it applies to research relationships, between knowledge producer and the communities whose experiences are at stake. Contributions that theorise questions of positionality, accountability, and the politics of representation in VAWG research are particularly encouraged, as are essays that examine how intersectionality shapes both the experience of gendered violence and the conditions under which it is studied and legitimised. The Collection also welcomes critical reflections on the epistemic and ethical costs of conducting this work within academic structures that remain ill-equipped to support it. We invite scholarly articles, theoretical essays, reflective research accounts, and review essays from scholars across feminist theory, gender studies, and related humanities disciplines.

Meet the Guest Advisor

Dr. María Herrera Cárdenas is an interdisciplinary scholar in literary and cultural studies whose research explores Violence Against Women and Girls (VAWG) in contemporary Anglophone and Hispanophone literature and performance. She holds a Double Ph.D. in Languages and Cultures from the University of Jaén (Spain) and the Università degli Studi di Siena (Italy), with an international mention from Université Bordeaux-Montaigne (France), where she graduated summa cum laude (2020–2024). Since 2025, she has been a Postdoctoral Researcher at Bielefeld University (Germany) and the University of Jyväskylä (Finland).

The Guest Advisors declare no conflict of interest regarding this work.