Rachel Pain

Rachel Pain, Ph.D., is a social geographer whose research is founded in feminist and participatory praxis. Currently, she is a Professor in the School of Geography, Politics, and Sociology at Newcastle University, England. Most of her research over the last two decades has focused on fear, violence and community safety, with gender-based violence an enduring interest as it affects women, men and children (including transgender people). She has also worked with older people, young people, refugees and asylum seekers to understand experiences of violence, harm and trauma, and to collaborate towards social change using Participatory Action Research. The conceptual thread running through these projects explores the social politics of what are commonly seen as personal and private experiences of violence and trauma. Equally, international forms of violence, such as war and terrorism, are recast as having intimate roots. Through developing concepts such as ‘globalised fear’, ‘intimacy-geopolitics’ and ‘intimate war’, the work unpicks common ideas that persist about scales of violence and harm.