Welcome to the Beyond Opposition research project website.
The Beyond Opposition project is now complete, and this website was archived in September 2026; for further publications, please visit Kath Browne’s Google Scholar resource
This website provides an overview of the project, its purpose and ethos. Here you can find the project outputs including:
- reports
- peer-reviewed publications
- project publications,
- conference papers,
- our newsletters and blogs.
- You can also visit our virtual exhibition Imperfect Utopias, which gives a real sense of the complexities explored through our research.
This project sought to move ‘Beyond Opposition’ in the face of increasing social polarisation in Ireland, Great Britain and Canada. It considered how recent social and legal changes to sexual and gender rights impacted different people within these countries.
This first phase of the project ran from 2020 to 2022. We collected 973 questionnaires and 161 interviews in Ireland, Great Britain and Canada. These led to findings that are reported in our research outputs.
The second phase brought together people with a range of different views and perspectives on these issues to take part in discussion groups and artist-led workshops. In these research activities, participants imagined new ways of sharing space that do not aim to overcome difference. These activities informed our virtual exhibition, Imperfect Utopias.