Career
My name is Shane Harrison, and I’m a gender specialist and qualitative researcher working in the development and humanitarian sectors. Born in Perth, Western Australia, I have two sisters, one brother, a wonderful loving family, and an incredible life partner. I completed my Bachelor of Economics and Commerce at the University of Western Australia in 2010, and upon finishing was steadfast in my orientation towards a career in diplomacy and international trade. Moving to Canberra in 2011, I began a Master of International Law at the Australian National University, whereupon I pursued subjects focused on human rights, refugee law, humanitarian law.
Halfway through 2011 a friend sent an article to me by William Storr on sexual violence against men in conflict: an article that wrenched my heart in a way that I had never felt before. In the following years, I pursued an additional Masters in Law, Governance and Development and built a thesis around the topic, one that was heavily entrenched in feminist and queer theory. As I descended into the depths of Connell, Butler, Sedgewick and others, my mind expanded and the way I saw and interpreted the world took an abject turn. Feminist theory exposed me to a field that I felt more passionate about than anything before. And as I looked around at advertising, media, sports, music, policy and infrastructure I started interpreting everything through a gendered lens.
The path I consequently took was tied to a desire to improve gender equality, in particular, through working with men and adolescent boys to address gender-based violence in all its forms. It seemed evident that the only way to really address the misogynistic and homophobic, power that underpinned gender-based violence was to reshape masculinities and redefine notions of manhood. Soon thereafter, I made the decision to leave my role in the public service to work for a women’s organisation in Sulawesi, Indonesia. At the same time, I began a Master of Applied Anthropology and Participatory Development specialising in gender.
The move to Sulawesi changed my perspective completely and I gained first-hand experience of the depths of social injustice. Spending so much time with local women and marginalised communities changed me in ways I did not expect. From then on, I could see no other career path than working at the intersections of gender and development. Following Sulawesi, I moved to Plan International in Timor-Leste, and spent the following two years working in Timor-Leste for Plan, the Australian Embassy, and Catalpa International. My time at Catalpa is one of my proudest, where I led a team conducting research on engaging men in maternal health. It’s not just the research that I am proud of, but the fact that it is being operationalised in Catalpa’s maternal health programming in Timor-Leste.
Since Timor-Leste I have had the privilege of working in numerous contexts. From 2018 to 2019, for example, I supported Swiss child relief organisation Terre des Hommes in their response to the Rohingya crisis in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh. This included mainstreaming gender into their child protection programming and participating in key humanitarian fora on child protection. Following Cox's Bazar, I conducted a gender programmatic review for Danish Refugee Council in Myanmar, supported the International Organization for Migration with a women's migration program in Laos, and conducted a gender analysis of displaced populations in Iraq for INTERSOS. Now, since July 2023, I have been supporting the Pacific Community in Fiji with their program for engaging women throughout the Pacific in growing renewable energy sector: a critical initiative as the region strives to adapt to climate change.
While each of these experiences has provided a wonderful set of life experience, my career is now shifting towards a focus on how gender affects adolescent health and protection in humanitarian and resource-constrained settings. This passion emerged from my PhD in Population Health at the Melbourne School of Population and Global Health at the University of Melbourne, with my topic looking at how humanitarian actors respond to the protection needs of adolescent boys in emergencies. I found that adolescent boys were subject to numerous different forms of gender-based harm and that support for adolescents was limited. What further built my passion was working on a baseline assessment for an adolescent sexual and reproductive health project in Kenya, Zambia, and Uganda. This reinforced how important gender is to adolescent health outcomes and how different the set of risk factors is for this age group.
Motivation
My motivation to address gender equality stems from the fundamental lack of fairness that it embeds in our society. It also stems from very personal reasons. A feminist lens has allowed me to look back through my years and see how norms of masculinity led to my social marginalisation among other boys, influenced my interactions with female intimate partners, and forced social expectations upon me that were incongruent with my personality. The express divorce between hegemonic masculine norms in Australia and my behaviour and values more often than not meant most assumed that I was gay.
Further reinforcing my motivation have been the events that have transpired since I first began reading feminist texts. During that time, a number of people that I am close to have been sexually assaulted. I have also had friends disclose to me their historical experiences of sexual violence, both male and female. This harm should not have happened, and the underlying reason why sexual violence occurs is tied to norms around power and gender. I have many reasons I am on this career trajectory and why I care: but the prevention and response to sexual abuse is the most personal and heartfelt.
As I have entered the field I have gained some incredible role models, most of whom are women. I am motivated by the personal stories of empowerment told by my female Indonesian, Timorese and Bangladeshi colleagues, and by working with other people who 'get' gender or are challenging gender norms. Most of all, I am motivated by doing applied gender work that informs programming and working on something I care so deeply about.
My trajectory is also one of continual personal reform. It means advocating for male caregiving and housework, being an emotionally supportive partner at all times, being responsible for contraception, countering sexism, racism and homophobia, and being ever critical and reflective on my own actions and sentiments.