Employment Rights Act 2025 harassment changes – a fresh perspective from the high seas

Robert Shore: Hello, and welcome to the Brightmine podcast, formerly known as the XpertHR podcast. Brightmine is a leading provider of people data, analytics and insight, offering employment law expertise, comprehensive HR resources and reward data to meet every HR and organisational challenge and opportunity. You can find us any time of the day or night at www.brightmine.com.

Hello everyone. My name is Robert Shore, and today our subject is the Employment Rights Act 2025 (surprise, surprise!) and specifically the strengthening of the harassment laws. As a quick reminder of what’s happening there, on 6 April this year the ERA amends the whistleblowing provisions so that complaints of sexual harassment will be treated as protected disclosures, and then from October the RA will place an obligation on employers to take all reasonable steps to prevent sexual harassment of their workers instead of reasonable steps (the change there is the addition of the word ‘all’) and also introduces employer liability for third-party harassment. This liability is not just limited to sexual harassment but extends to harassment on the grounds of age, disability, region or belief, sex and sexual orientation.

And of course, on the Brightmine website we have all sorts of supporting materials, and we are tracking the changes as the secondary legislation also comes through. You can look at our feature On Your Radar, our Employment Rights Act 2025 hub. I will put some links to those in the show notes to this episode.

So that’s setting out the legislation. But we thought we’d take a slightly different approach to the question of workplace harassment today, a more narrative approach, and cast off for the high seas to think about the question of workplace harassment in one of the most intense and unrelenting professional environments you can imagine – abord ship.

And to do this, I’m delighted to be joined by Georgie Williams. Hello skipper!

Georgie Williams: Hello Robert. How are you doing?

Robert Shore: Very well, thank you. Now, as I tried to establish there, you are a licensed skipper.

Georgie Williams: Non-commercial, yes.

Robert Shore: Non-commercial. Good. We’ll get into the difference between commercial and non-commercial, okay. But before we get to your seagoing experience, tell us a little about the other work you do. You’re a regular Brightmine contributor, of course.

Georgie Williams: Yeah, I am. I have been contributing to Brightmine through predominantly articles and also training for several years now. My background actually started out in the field of gender and sexuality research. I started out in psychology, went and did a Masters’ of Science in Gender, and in 2019 I deferred my PhD in Social Justice to start /Queer, which is a community-led, volunteer-led research project which archives oral histories of gender and sexuality diversity from all around the world.

So I’ve done a lot of travelling as part of that, and I’m supported by my amazing team of volunteers. But obviously off the back of this I got very involved in DEI training. And this is intersectional work; I’m not just looking at gender and sexuality. We look at all matters of inequality and all power dynamics that are present in the workplace and the wider world.

Robert Shore: Right. Which brings us to harassment as a theme. I mean, this is obviously one area in which this is a very important lens to have. But I’ll tell you what. Why don’t we head straight away for the high seas? And so you’ve described your sort of academic background. How did you end up crewing the largest ocean-going ship in the world, the Götheborg of Sweden, I believe?

Georgie Williams: Yeah, the Götheborg of Sweden, if we’re really getting technical about it! So, all of these things are inextricably interlinked. I actually wanted to travel in a way that was better for the environment during the second season of my project.

So the first season, during 2019 right up to March of 2020, took me through the US, Japan and Indonesia. I then conducted research during Covid in the UK and also in Ireland. But for the second season I knew that I wanted to be doing work around the Mediterranean. Particularly I wanted to travel to Malta to conduct research there because Malta leads Europe for LGBTQ+ rights, has for several years now, and was one of the first countries in the world to try and intersex bodily autonomy in their legislation.

So I was looking at better ways to travel than travelling by air. I spent a little bit of time on the water as a kid but not a huge amount. So I actually went away and I got a day skipper licence, which is non-commercial, which means that I’m not skippering any large vessels for anything like transportation but I can take out one of these vessels myself if it’s just for kind of taking people around on trips or things like that.

But in the middle of doing this I was told by a taxi driver about a ship that was coming into London that would be travelling around the Mediterranean. And so I had a look. It turned out they were travelling to Malta and so I told myself that I would travel for this research about this ship if they took me, which they did. And it was a transformative experience. And after conducting some of my research through Malta, Turkey, South Africa and to the border of Lesotho, I actually rejoined the ship and was part of their crew for well over half a year. And I’ve been going back to work with them ever since.

Robert Shore: So obviously this is quite a different experience, working at sea, from working on land. And I think you actually then ended up writing the anti-harassment policy for life on board the ship. Tell us a little bit about actually what you saw there. What’s the difference between working on sea and on land? And what can people who are landlubbers learn from that?

Georgie Williams: So you’re right, it is different. One of the most notable differences is that the majority of us who work in office spaces clock off at the end of the day and we go home. When I was sailing with the Götheborg I was sleeping in a hammock which was basically touching other people’s hammocks in our sleeping quarters, the skuns. And yeah, what that means is that when you clock off you are still surrounded by all of your colleagues. And so it’s a very different dynamic.

Something that I noticed, being in that environment, that very much informed the rewrite that I did for our anti-harassment policy on the ship, was the very explicit power dynamics that exist. And we have power dynamics in every single workplace, right? But they are very explicit in an environment where you are so inherently responsible for everybody’s immediate safety. This is a ship where we’re doing a lot of manual work 70ft up in a rig or we’re hauling on very heavy lines or…our mainsail when it’s wet weighs two tonnes and we haul that by hand. You have to trust the people around you with your body in a very explicit way. And so although we don’t have that as much in office spaces, we still very much have power dynamics that we need to be cognizant of, and responsibilities we need to be cognizant of, at all times for the safety of one another.

In many ways the ship was quite refreshing in that sense of you knew exactly what those dynamics were. If you were part of a watch – we had three watches, so three groups on the ship and every watch had an assistant watch leader and a watch leader who were basically telling you what to do at any given time – you didn’t really have a lot of opportunities to be doing something independently if you were a deckhand. And many times that was a very good thing. It took away that burden of responsibility.

But when I was creating this rewrite of the anti-harassment policy, what I really wanted to focus on goes beyond that kind of duty to create safe avenues for reporting. Because we all know that’s absolutely essential to avoiding harassment in the workplace. But a lot of that addresses the symptoms and not the cause, and why it felt like a huge part of writing this policy for a ship like the Götheborg of Sweden was we needed to focus on building healthy cultures because that addresses the cause of harassment.

A culture on a ship is very, very obvious, especially because you spend so much time together. You sleep in the same places, we had very few bathrooms on the ship so you’re all close quarters at any given time. Yeah, you become a lot more aware of the role that culture plays, of how you respect one another and demonstrate that respect. And maybe because of the kind of division and separation we have in office life sometimes where we clock in and we spend time with each other and we tend to go our separate ways, we don’t recognise the value of culture as much in preventing harassment.

Robert Shore: That’s opened so many sort of avenues to go down. First of all actually, in terms of the drafting of the policy, how did you draft that into the policy?

Georgie Williams: So a lot of it was informed by conversations that I had with the crew. We’d been very fortunate that by and large the people who had come through the ship – because some people do pay to sail; I paid for my first leg and then sailed the rest of my journeys for free – I was aware of the fact that occasionally people would come through who were not a good culture fit. And so part of fostering a good culture was also appropriate screening as well, making sure that when we talk about culture fit it’s also to do with the respect that we have for our peers as well, and how we assess that. So that was a huge part of the conversations I had with the crew members.

Robert Shore: So can you give me an example there?

Georgie Williams: So for example, the Götheborg of Sweden when I sailed was a female-majority crew. Absolutely delightful. Not too uncommon with Scandinavian ships, which is very nice but still quite a novelty. And so I was aware of the fact that when we screened people we did talk about their experience on ships but we didn’t talk about, ‘What’s your experience working with different dynamics? Are you used to traditional crew culture? What’s your experience with, you know, working with female sailors?’ These are the kinds of conversations I do think we should have been having more explicitly. And I think they make people nervous, but I also think it’s very important to be upfront about, ‘This is the culture that we have here.’ The majority of us were taking direct orders from women. The crew also had a very strong queer culture as well. And being very open and upfront about that, I think, is important for screening.

One of the things we actually joke about is every year our ship uses social media to post something for Pride Month, and we end up losing a small number of followers and getting a bunch of difficult comments from people but we also say, like, ‘This is the purge, right? This is where we lose the interest of the people who are not a culture fit, who we wouldn’t want to sign up.’ Signalling those values feels really important for making sure people fit.

Robert Shore: Yeah. And I mean, obviously in terms of that kind of culture fit, if you are all living together as well and you are not able to walk away, obviously that’s incredibly important. Has it made you reflect, though, actually on the kinds of questions that people ask when they are on land and you’re talking about a more, you know, what we think of as a more ordinary environment and the kinds of ways that you might want to talk to people about the culture of the place that they may be joining?

Georgie Williams: Yeah. I think there is something about the seafaring culture for professional sailors that is very explicit and overt because that is the way of people there. My crew were very neurodiverse as well, and so in spite of some of the cultural norms about particularly Swedish people being quite indirect, I was surrounded by people who thrived in indirect environments. And I think there is a culture fostered in the kind of modern, office-based working place where we are a little more indirect about our values. And I think that that comes from a place of wanting to create cohesiveness, where people meet as equals and feel respected in each other’s values and opinions. But I actually think that that can be counterintuitive. After all, inclusive spaces are not about saying everything that people bring to the table in terms of their opinions is valued equally. It’s about saying, ‘Let’s recognise the people who are under-represented, whose voices aren’t upheld, and let’s amplify that a little bit more and be explicit in that.’

Yeah, I think it’s taught me a lot about what it means to be brave in our convictions as an organisation and say, ‘Yes, this is what we do in terms of our work, but also this is what we represent in terms of our place in society.’ Workplaces are microcosms for wider society but they’re microcosms that we have much more control over, and that’s where we have an opportunity to champion important values.

Robert Shore: Yeah. So a question there before we head back to the high seas, are there sort of ways in which you think organisations on land could do more and actually, what practical form does that take? How do you do this amplification?

Georgie Williams: So it looks like many different things. I think it looks like being upfront about marginalized voices in the workplace and giving them avenues to communicate their perspectives. I championed a little programme at a previous workplace where during certain months where we were celebrating a different aspect of history, we were celebrating the experiences of different, more marginalized and under-represented communities, we actually had a newsletter where our colleagues who could speak to this experience would contribute, and this was available within the organisation.

I think as well, creating a safe and healthy environment is also about making sure that those channels for communication are as protected as they can be. Coming back to that idea of kind of, you know, reporting concerns, I think there needs to be ways to report how we feel about a culture as well, without it being a major escalation. You know, how do we open access to the kind of wider workforce to contribute to the culture in different ways? I’m a firm believer that everybody should have part of their job description that involves them doing something for the culture of their organisation and having that time protected to do so. Culture is not a top-down development. It comes from the bottom up and we need to facilitate that.

Robert Shore: And can we define culture there?

Georgie Williams: Wow. I mean, I feel like we could do a whole separate episode about what we mean by culture, right? When we’re talking about culture, we are talking about power dynamics, we are talking about shared values and shared missions, we are talking about…I think building on that idea of power dynamics, we’re also talking about ease of conversations, dynamics of conversations that happen, distribution of power in general throughout an organisational hierarchy. And culture of course is about who is represented as well. We all bring a bit of our own personal, societal kind of experiences of culture with us, right? I’m acutely aware of the fact that being somebody of seafaring background but also somebody who grew up in a South African household, I bring a bit of confrontational-ism and directness to a culture, where I like those transparent channels and I like to believe that what we bring to that idea of culture proliferates. It is like a multifaceted living organism.

Robert Shore: And you mentioned culture fit before. And obviously this is a sort of thing that goes in different directions, isn’t it, in that I think, you know, we’ve become more aware recently of not always seeking a culture fit because sometimes the culture of a workplace or whatever needs to be modified and ought to be open to different voices. But obviously when you are at sea together in that way maybe that doesn’t…or it’s a specific kind of culture fit we’re talking about, isn’t it, rather than… It was just that that term ‘culture fit’ is quite awkward, in a way.

Georgie Williams: It is, because it can mean so many different things. Being a good culture fit can sometimes mean aligning yourself with harmful values or harmful workplace practices. I think when I talk about culture fit, I talk about fitting into institutions that are upholding certain values that we consider progressive and open-minded and very much in that kind of diverse, equitable and inclusive spirit. And that’s not to say that everybody needs to come into a workplace well-versed. But they do need to come into a workplace with a willingness to have open and frank conversations and take leads from people who they might not be used to taking leads from.

There were many people who sailed with us who, yeah, were not part of the queer community. They did not identify as women. They were not neurodiverse. But what they were willing to do was learn from those people around them, and that’s what made them a great fit.

Robert Shore: Mm. Right, now we’re then going to get onto the idea of risk and risk assessments. And of course risk assessments are largely about avoiding risk as far as possible, from an employer’s point of view. But at sea it doesn’t quite work that way, does it, necessarily? I mean, that’s not to say you do crazy risks, but at the same time it’s quite a risky business.

Georgie Williams: I’ve seen a little bit of crazy in my time at sea! But you’re right. I think it’s something we’ve talked about, kind of…I’ve talked about this with crew members. If we avoided all risk we wouldn’t sail. The act of leaving port is a risk, right? I think it’s very easy for us to get anxious about what risk looks like in the workplace and yes, of course we want to avoid risk as much as possible. But we cannot let that get in the way of progress and development in the right direction.

You know, talking about it in a practical sense, there’s so much that we do at sea where we do have to allow others to be responsible for our safety in a way. Some of these lines that we’re pulling on, you know, the ropes basically that we would use to make maneuvers on our ship – because we do everything pretty much by hand – I have to risk some kind of injury trusting the five or ten people behind me on that line to put their body weight into holding that line with me.

We do want to avoid risk more when it comes to issues of things like harassment, right? Because there is no benefit to people being harassed. You know, when we talk about the risk of, like, ‘Oh yeah, I might scuff my hands up a little bit hauling a line,’ it is still worth it, and I’ve made that judgement call. We never want to put somebody in a position where they say, ‘It’s worth me being harassed to be in this workplace.’

I’ve experienced workplace harassment myself. After my Master’s, as many students do, I ran out of money studying in London and I moved down to Portsmouth. And I was working in a restaurant on minimum wage, where I was being harassed by the manager. But I had to make that call that I needed the money. We want to avoid people in that position in any circumstance.

So it’s not about eliminating risk but it’s about saying, ‘What’s the cost-benefit analysis here?’ Can we get people to say, ‘There is a small risk here and I am willing to take that chance for the sake of what we’re doing as an organisation,’ but we never want to put somebody in a position where they’re making that call in terms of their own psychological and emotional safety, and especially in the case of harassment, physical safety in that context too.

Robert Shore: If you’re on board ship and there’s that sort of sense of something beginning to happen or something does happen, I imagine it’s quite difficult to find a private space. You know, you can’t make a call after work or send an email in quite the same way. You know, actually how is reporting organised in that kind of environment? How is it optimised so as to be the best it can be? And I think you sort of were talking before about the need to talk about things before they get out of hand as well. I mean, that is that it’s about making sure the culture is working better so that you don’t have terrible incidents, so that you’re able to talk about things at a lower level beforehand. Is that right?

Georgie Williams: Absolutely. And you’re 100% right, we never want to be reporting when there’s a problem. We want to be reporting before a problem exists. I have experienced this on my ship. We did have a particularly difficult deckhand. This was actually on my first leg and this was how I ended up getting involved in writing this anti-harassment policy for the ship.

I will say when you’re sailing – or at least on my ship when we were sailing – because we had these three watches we all worked different hours. So the first leg that I sailed I worked 12pm to 4pm and 12am to 4am. So you sleep twice a day. And that meant that other watches, where they were clocking in and clocking out after us, were sleeping at different times. And so even though at any given time there were between 60 and 80 crew members on our ship, there were opportunities for you to take assistant watch leaders and watch leaders aside and have conversations. You know, you ate your meals together, but you could absolutely find spaces. There was a separate part of the ship that was specifically for crew members who were being paid. So there were spaces for meeting, and that was taken advantage of.

But yeah, a huge part of de-escalating something like that was just having regular check-ins. So with my assistant watch leader and watch leader, I was waking up twice a day and we would have an opportunity to do a debrief before we went on watch. And that was a great opportunity to say, ‘Hey, this thing has been going on with Person X, and I don’t think this is a problem yet but it should be on your radar that this dynamic has occurred or this relationship is happening,’ and making sure that there is, in many ways, a paper trail. I think issues I’ve seen before in terms of harassment reporting is that it is only reported when it is an immediate threat, you know, when the fire has proverbially spread through the building. And unfortunately, what happens is the question is often raised of, ‘Well, you know, how do we know that all of this has happened and how long’s it been going on for?’ and we have no evidence.

And so it’s not just about having a clear chain of command for who you report to. It’s also about facilitating an environment where somebody can regularly report something or escalate something or nudge someone about an issue before it becomes a crisis. Making sure that you have that one-to-one time with that person in confidence, I think, is really essential for avoiding problems before they escalate.

Robert Shore: Yeah. And obviously that works as much in an office in a city centre or wherever as at sea where things are quite intense, presumably. I don’t know. Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re more relaxed. I don’t know how you manage to sleep twice a day! And you can only do four-hour shifts because you have to be really alert?

Georgie Williams: I think it’s because it’s hardcore manual labour. I think you want to do two separate stints of that. Like I was saying, I mean, our mainsail, two tonnes when wet, and it’s a case of you are standing on a little rope that runs underneath the yard, all grabbing two hands of it and then leaning back over nothing and pinning it between your body and the yard, you know. I was absolutely jacked. It was brilliant! But yeah, you know, it was an environment that was very taxing on the body. And in many ways that was very good for the mind as well. Coming from a background in psychology, I know that the best thing that you can do for stress is to proverbially ‘help run the line’ and so yeah, moving your body was also great for your mind.

But yes, it was also really important to be in an environment where you had high levels of contact with people. Because in a context like that where things can be very risky very quickly (I actually sailed through the Atlantic and that was a very high-risk environment), you want to make sure that there are always opportunities to have those conversations.

And you’re right, it absolutely does apply to office workspaces as well. I think we sometimes treat…or at least HR gets a reputation for being firefighting instead of being a constant presence that people can check in with before there’s a massive issue. And I want to see that be part of the culture shift around anti-harassment movements.

Robert Shore: In light of your seafaring experience, things that you’ve seen before in an office environment, in a more mundane sort of setting, has it made you think, ‘Oh, if I’d known what I know now because of seeing what I’ve seen and how things can be done when you’re part of a crew and it’s much more explicit and more direct, are there things you think back to where you think, “Actually, if I’d have known this at the time, I would have done this differently or, you know, done some training in a different way”?’ How has it affected how you think about every day?

Georgie Williams: I think one of the biggest takeaways has been that knowledge is important; confidence is more important than that. You can educate people about what harassment looks like and who to report it to, but if people don’t feel confident in their position within the workplace, if they don’t feel confident within their team, if they don’t feel confident in their own knowledge of what they’ve experienced, none of the rest of that matters. Seeing people during my seafaring experiences talk about issues in a much more head-on way really emboldened those people who were reporting the issues because they saw action happen. And I think I’ve seen in workplaces before people know if they’re experiencing harassment most of the time. But there might be an element of self-doubt. ‘Did I cause this? Did I behave in a way that was inappropriate?’ Or they might be concerned that it won’t be escalated in the way that they want it to. Making people feel confident in their own experiences and confident to move forward and escalate things I think is more important than the knowledge. In many ways it’s about teaching self-worth. What do you bring to the workplace that means that you deserve to feel safe? That’s why you should be escalating this.

Robert Shore: And so one way in which you give confidence is obviously by seeing that things are taken seriously. What else can you do? Obviously you get management to model all of these things as well, make sure that happens. How do you give people confidence?

Georgie Williams: That’s such an interesting question because I think confidence also looks like different things to different people, right? I think it tends to be more of an issue – at least in my experience I’ve seen it be more of an issue – with people who are under-represented in the workplace. And so confidence can look like even having some kind of role model for them that they can talk to, almost like a mentor in the workplace that says, ‘No, actually you belong in this space because I carved the path before you,’ which is where I actually think that I’ve seen quite effective initiatives around anti-harassment where actually your designated person that you can report this to is someone who’s a mentor who has previous lived experience that’s very similar to your own, instead of maybe reporting it to somebody who’s better representing the workplace where you maybe don’t feel that they understand your perspective on this.

So yeah, confidence is also about being able to look at someone else in the workplace and go, ‘Well I feel like I should be able to feel safe here because they’ve been here before, they’ve experienced a lot of this and they’re still here as well.’ Yeah, finding that connectedness and seeing ourselves in others in the workplace I think does help build that confidence to report issues when we see them.

Robert Shore: As you say, you sail around in part in order to conduct the research that you do, and so I’m going to ask you to tell us a bit more about your research and how that feeds into sort of teaching us about human connection and the role organisations play in fostering it.

Georgie Williams: It’s a joyful thing to have been part of this project for such a long time. And it has taught me a lot about what it means to deal with inequality and to deal with feeling like you don’t belong in an environment. So this project, /Queer, so obviously I disseminated this work as a podcast starting in 2019 because I really believed in open-access research around gender and sexuality.

So yeah, as I mentioned, US, Japan, Indonesia, UK and Ireland, Malta, Turkey, South Africa, Lesotho and then seafaring communities. And the idea was to de-centre myself as a researcher and take a deeper learning approach. So instead of, you know, when we think about very old-school, harmful approaches to things like anthropology, where people from, you know, the kind of global north from these much more privileged backgrounds would go to countries and study people without actually having conversations with people or telling them, you know, that they could steer the research. It was very exploitative. And so my research was very much focused about going to communities, putting a microphone in front of people and saying, ‘You tell me what matters in the world of gender and sexuality. You tell me what we need to archive here.’

And since then we’ve archived at the Kinsey Institute in Indiana in the US, which is the biggest archive of gender and sexuality resources in the world, and it’s been a teaching material in many places. And the substance of it, of course, I care about deeply. I’m deeply invested in the history of gender and sexual diversity. And I use that term as well because the term ‘LGBTQ’, it’s an English-language acronym, so it’s a very western-centric term. So I talk much more about ‘gender and sexual diversity’.

But outside of the substance of it, what I learned about was the power dynamics of sharing knowledge and sharing experiences. I have seen DEI initiatives go wrong because they feel performative and they feel exploitative and they don’t give the people most affected by it agency and power and control. And that is where we see communities break down, is when there are these aggressive hierarchies that say, you know, ‘These individuals have the right to say what matters in our society.’

Robert Shore: When you talk there about DEI initiatives feeling a bit performative, again can you just give us an example of how it can be performative.

Georgie Williams: I’ll give a good example. I was working in an organisation where I was one of the DEI champions at the time, on the side of another role that I had. And myself and a colleague who also identified as part of the queer community, as I do, we were both asked about ideas for Pride Month. And the suggestion that was made by our DEI lead, who was not part of the community, was that the budget would be spent on buying a load of balloon banners and cupcakes for the office, which I was offended by. And both myself and my colleague stressed that the history of Pride is a protect for human rights. And speaking as a non-binary person as part of the trans community, especially right now in the climate that we’re in, it is an ongoing fight. Our rights are being stripped away, our dignity is being threatened. It felt incredibly shortsighted to say, ‘No, our budget is being spent on making it a fun party,’ instead of addressing that inequality. And instead we agreed on the budget being spent on educational books that were put into our office’s library that talked about the history of gender and sexual diversity and the political struggle based around that, especially in the UK and the US. And we did an initiative where we did these newsletters, and people from the queer-identifying community talked about their experiences, and that was disseminated amongst the organisation.

So this is where it feels really essential that instead of what we call ‘virtue signalling’, making an organisation look good by, you know, changing our logos to be rainbow-coloured, we actually say, ‘Okay, recognising an ongoing issue of inequality, recognising a political struggle is about us deferring to the people with lived experience and saying, “What benefits your struggle?”’ Because an organisation doesn’t get to benefit from looking inclusive unless they’re actually willing to put the effort in and help change happen.

Robert Shore: And this is, possibly just to bring it right back to the harassment changes that actually…there’s how you deal with incidents when they happen, but actually in the end the first thing to do is to address the culture so that they don’t happen or that things at a much lower level can get reported effectively and that you bring about change in that way. Is that an approach?

Georgie Williams: Yeah, and that approach has to be led by the people who are most affected by any risks to that culture as well. There was a point at which our ship was potentially going to be sailing past Saudi Arabia, and the concern of many of our crew members was, ‘Well, it’s not safe as queer people to disembark in that place,’ and that was a conversation that needed to be had with the people who were most affected. A healthy culture is about addressing the status quo that exists outside of that workplace. It’s about saying, ‘In this environment, in this bubble that we have so much agency and control over, we create the parameters to make people feel safe, to make them feel listened to, to give them a platform.’ And so confronting that has to be about doing things differently to the outside world. Who doesn’t usually get a voice in the room? Who’s the person being spoken over in those meetings? How do we take those people aside and say, ‘Okay, what do you need to see change here in order for you to feel safe and feel comfortable continuing to contribute and continuing to escalate issues when you see them arise?’

Robert Shore: Georgie, you’ve mentioned your podcast and I will put a link to that in the show notes. There are various things that you’ve written for us as well. If people want to discover more about the work you’re doing, where can they find it?

Georgie Williams: So I am still, unfortunately, all over social media. Everywhere except Twitter, obviously. But my handle on Instagram is @slashqueer. That’s S-L-A-S-H-Q-U-E-E-R. The website is also www.slashqueer.com, once again S-L-A-S-H-Q-U-E-E-R. That obviously has access to all the podcast episodes. It also has transcriptions of all of those episodes as well for people who don’t want to listen and would rather read. We also have a few local translations for some of those episodes as well, for anyone who wants to read this in the language that it was originally conducted in. I’m also on LinkedIn as well under Georgie Williams, so if you’re interested in learning more about the role of kind of de-colonial approaches and DEI data as well – data’s a huge part of what I do – you can come and find me on LinkedIn and I’m always happy to chat.

Robert Shore: Wonderful. Thank you so much for joining us today. You’ll be heading back to sea, I imagine, any minute now.

Georgie Williams: I would really love to. We’re currently off-season. We have no set date for when she sails again but our crew is currently scattered over many different ships. If you do want to see a little bit of our ship, actually, in the mainstream, Amanda Siegfried’s new film, The Testament of Ann Lee, was filmed on my ship.

Robert Shore: No way!

Georgie Williams: It was indeed! My crew helped set up the rigging for that so you couldn’t see the Gothenburg skyline. If you can’t afford to travel to Gothenburg, which I do strongly recommend, you can see part of the ship in that film.

Robert Shore: That’s brilliant. Okay, I didn’t know that was coming! Right, so as I say, I’ll put some basic links in the show notes as well so you can begin to trace all of this out. Thank you so much. I hope that for everybody listening to this it also is a good way of beginning to reflect on more mundane sort of settings as well, and that was certainly part of the goal. But also to take you on this exciting adventure. And with that I’ll just say, until next time.