Elevating Feminist Inspired Knowledge for Prevention of Violence against Women: Interview with Lori Heise
Continually challenge Western notions of quantitative research as the only source of legitimate knowledge.
The UN Trust Fund to End Violence against Women (UN Trust Fund) has been working with grantee organizations and researchers to co-create a series of briefings on preventing violence against women. We were delighted to have Lori Heise, co-founder and Technical Director of the Prevention Collaborative as part of our core advisory group, providing invaluable advice and stewardship throughout the journey.
The Prevention Collaborative is a global network of practitioners, activists, and researchers, working to better equip themselves and others with the vision, knowledge, and skills necessary to end violence against women and their children. They strengthen the capacity of key actors to design, deliver, and advocate for cutting-edge prevention programmes informed by research-based evidence, practice-based knowledge, and feminist principles. The Collaborative has recently re-designed and launched a new website and knowledge hub, which has a wealth of resources for practitioners, researchers, and donors alike.
We spoke to Lori Heise, about the new website and about her collaboration with the UN Trust Fund.
Congratulations on the new website! Tell us more about it, why you decided to re-design it and how can practitioners engage with it and learn from it?
We launched the Prevention Collaborative four years ago to create an organisation that specifically caters to the needs of practitioners and folks designing and funding programmes to prevent violence against women and their children. Reducing violence at a community level requires strategies that are distinct from those used to improve services and/or document and protest gender inequality and violation of women’s rights. We wanted to better equip ourselves and others to focus on violence prevention, as a complement to efforts to support victims and build feminist movements.
Our initial website, however, tried to do too many things at once. We had talked to a lot of practitioners about what they wanted and needed. They emphasised simplicity, materials designed specifically for practice rather than research. Moreover, the issue was not about accessing information but knowing what to pay attention to.
Despite having this observation guide our vision, our website quickly became “overgrown” with content, blogs, stories, and articles. It was the classic case of trying to build the helicopter while flying it!
The COVID-19 pandemic forced us to take a pause. It offered us an opportunity to return to first principles and reclaim our original vision. We realised that one service we could offer busy practitioners, advocates and programme managers, was doing the quality control prioritisation, and synthesising of the ever-expanding array of resources in our field. So, we focused on curating the best and most useful resources on violence prevention and programme design. The new site also links to our Learning Lab, a one-stop shop for virtual courses on violence and program implementation.
Despite having this observation guide our vision, our website quickly became “overgrown” with content, blogs, stories, and articles. It was the classic case of trying to build the helicopter while flying it!
The UN Trust Fund has drawn so much inspiration from the Prevention Collaborative and its efforts to champion practice-based knowledge. Can you tell us how the new Learning from Practice Series might contribute to the existing state of evidence, and why documenting practice-based knowledge is important?
UN Trust Fund’s Learning from Practice Series is a perfect example of how to cull and apply practice-based knowledge. One of the challenges in our field is how to systematise learning and feed it back into programmes. The first step is to simply capture more of what is done in the name of violence prevention. The same handful of programmes are repeatedly cited as prevention models because they are one of the few that has been documented and evaluated.
By synthesising lessons learned across dozens of UN Trust Fund’s programmes, your series does a great service for the field. Lots of evidence comes from formal research and evaluation; but equally important are insights gathered from practice. The resulting knowledge comes from years of iterative practice, learning, and refinement. It is more than an anecdote. It is systematised knowledge that has withstood a process of critical reflection, replication, and testing.
How can we do more as a field to center policy, programming and funding in practice-based knowledge and learning?
First is to continually challenge Western notions of quantitative research as the only source of legitimate knowledge. The traditional hierarchy of evidence privileges certain types of knowledge generation over others: experimental over observational, quantitative over qualitative, statistical over indigenous. While some forms of knowing are better suited to certain questions, the use of multiple methods and varying standpoints helps triangulate toward truth.
As a field, one way to help elevate practice-based knowledge is to consider how best to evaluate the “trustworthiness” of its insights. Researchers have developed elaborate ways to evaluate the credibility of conclusions based on research. Imagine a journal of Practice Based Knowledge and process of peer review from practitioners! We are keen on exploring such ideas with others interested in advancing diverse forms of knowledge, so do contact us.
If you want to learn more, sign up to the Prevention Collaborative’s Digest for all the latest evidence in effective violence prevention.
