Sexuality, Equality and Local Governance

Project Details

Our recent work has continued to build on the ESRC Sexuality, Equality and Local Governance Project, which informed Impact Case Studies submitted to the Research Excellence Framework (REF) 2014 at both Newcastle and Huddersfield Universities. More recent impact includes providing an overview report of country studies for the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights ‘Public Authorities and Fundamental Rights of LGBT Persons’, Professionally Speaking. The report addressed how policy makers and practitioners are addressing the fundamental rights of LGBT people in a wide range of countries, such as Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, France and Greece. Professor Surya Monro continues to develop research in the area of sexualities and gender diversity.

The ESRC Sexuality, Equality and Local Governance Project highlighted the social marginalisation of bisexual people, and Monro conducted a subsequent research project about bisexuality in India, Colombia and the UK as a result. This produced a monograph: Bisexuality: Identity, Politics and Theories (Palgrave MacMillan 2015) which has been on the Palgrave Bestseller list since it came out. She is currently working on a paper about the invisibility of bisexuality in the social sciences, funded by the Society for the Scientific Study of Sexuality (USA). She also represents bisexuals in the UK on the Equality and Human Rights-funded project to address the under-reporting of hate crime against LGBT people, and has drawn on insights from the ESRC project in carrying out this work.

Professor Diane Richardson recently completed work on her Leverhulme Trust Major Research Fellowship 'Transforming Citizenship: Sexuality, Gender and Citizenship Struggles', which developed some of the themes that arose out of the sexuality, equality and local governance project, as well as a more recent ESRC funded project on women and citizenship post-trafficking in Nepal. She has published a book title Is bisexuality invisible? A review of sexualities scholarship 1970–2015. This work is the basis for her latest book Sexuality and Citizenship (Polity, 2017). For other new publications here.