Jessica Ison

Dr Jessica Ison is a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Reducing Gender-Based Violence Research Group (ReGEN) in the La Trobe Rural Health School. She is a nationally recognised researcher in gender-based violence and sexual violence prevention, with expertise in alcohol and other drug-facilitated sexual violence, LGBTQ+ sexual violence, and institutional responses to gender-based violence. She is currently the Co-Lead of the Partners in Prevention of Sexual Violence (PIPS) project, which received $7.45 million in Australian Government funding to evaluate community-led primary and secondary prevention interventions, the largest initiative of its kind in Australia.

Dr Ison also currently leads the Embedded Researcher: Preventing and Responding to Gender-Based Violence at Universities project, a sector-first collaboration between academic researchers and university prevention and inclusion teams designed to strengthen institutional responses to GBV.

Alongside her GBV research, Dr Ison maintains an interdisciplinary scholarly interest in gender, sexuality, and critical animal studies. Her recent monograph, Queer and Animal Provocations: Homonormativity, Animal Exploitation & Sexual Violence (Bloomsbury), examines the intersections between queer politics, sexual violence, and animal justice.