Policy innovation in gender-based violence in higher education: a Legislative Theatre workshop

In May 2024, the authors organized a Legislative Theatre workshop to rethink and generate policy reforms that incorporated the principles of abolitionist feminism into university GBV complaints policies. Informed by our PI’s work on A pleasure and radical care-centered ethic of embodied and relational Otherness: Version 2.0, this article summarizes, analyses and reflects on our work during and since that workshop, with an eye to providing an experiential case study for academics and practitioners working in similar areas. It also articulates novel policy recommendations on the subject of complaint and gender-based violence as its central contribution to this area of research. The article begins with some context followed by a discussion of Legislative Theatre (LT) as a methodology, and an overview of the previous work on creative policy interventions that went into this project. We then engage in a descriptive and reflective articulation of the day itself and detail its outcomes. Our objective is to reflect on our experiences of using LT to intervene in GBV policy at the university with the hope that this innovative contribution will be helpful to other scholars and practitioners who want to use innovative, participatory approaches to address these issues.