July 20, 2022

Towards universities as safe, inclusive, and accessible spaces

An interview with Sam Message and Kolbrún Inga Söring of Status Queer

Status Queer is a non-profit organisation that sparks connection between members of the LGBTQ+ community in Gothenburg through art and culture. They focus on bringing some of the most marginalised and excluded groups (within the LGBTQ+ community) together, giving them a space to express themselves and make their voices heard. What do they contribute to the Learning Space? A whole lot! Status Queer helps us shed light on topics often neglected in higher education pedagogy courses and help us zoom in on the challenges that students and staff who do not identify as heterosexual and/or cisgender face within and outside of the classroom. They share how we can make higher education institutions more inclusive spaces and practice active allyship – in our roles as teachers, administrative staff members, fellow students and leaders.

You can choose to listen to the feature in the player below or to read it on this page… or why not read along as you listen? Enjoy and share your feedback with us.


 
Photo by Sara Lindquist

Meet Inga and Sam

In this edition of the Learning Space, you will meet Sam Message (they/them), a drag performance artist with „a background in working with museums and galleries“ and Kolbrún Inga Söring (they/them), an artist with a background in „photography, large scale spatial installations and community building“. Together, they founded Status Queer to empower members of the LGBTQ+ community – one event and one project at a time.

Click here to meet Sam and Inga

Photo by Sara Lindquist

 

A quick glossary

  • Cisgender “is a term used to describe people who identify with the binary gender (informed by their genitalia) they were assigned at birth. For example, if you identify as a woman and are designated female at birth, you are a cisgender woman.” (taken from the Pronoun Go-Round Guide).

  • The acronym LGBTQ+ stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and Queer. The ‘+’ represents members of the community whose identities are not captured in the aforementioned letters.  

  • Queer designates gender and sexual identities other than heterosexual and cisgender.

So, what are the correct terms to use? It depends on the context and the individual students and staff members you interact with. Simply ask what they prefer. The same applies to pronouns – he, she, they? Den, hen, hon, han? Asking which pronoun they prefer does not only facilitate your life but shows respect for students and staff.

 

Words that matter

“Language has the potential to make or break our relationships” (‘Pronoun Go-Round Guide’, p.14) - between teacher and student, among students as well as among colleagues. From 2019 to 2021, three European art schools - HDK-Valand in Gothenburg, ISBA in Besançon, France as well as ERG in Brussels, Belgium – joined forces in the transnational research and study programme Teaching to Transgress Toolbox (TTTToolbox). One of the goals of the programme is to „generate literacy on the issues faced by transgender and gender non-conforming students and staff in educational settings“. TTTToolbox is broken into different working groups. Inga contributed to the working group ‚Who is in the classroom?‘. Alongside Åke Sjöberg, Eva Weinmayr and Flo*Souad Benaddi, they created a Pronoun Go-Round Guide. A what? “A pronoun go-round is an introductory round at the start of a meeting [or classes], where everyone shares the name and pronoun by which they want to be addressed. It’s a great way to get to know everyone and simultaneously to reduce the projections and assumptions that people bring to one another.” (definition taken from the Pronoun Go-Round Guide)

In spring 2022, Status Queer hosted a workshop on pronoun use and access needs in collaboration with TTTToolbox's working group 'Who is in the classroom’. The workshop brought educators from high schools and universities, but also “those voices who this actually affects”, the members of the LGBTQ+ community, together. A workshop on pronoun use opens up the possibility of “asking things that, maybe in other settings, [participants] would feel uncomfortable asking“. To Inga, icebreaker questions kick off a workshop and help create “a positive group dynamic and an open learning space in which people can feel comfortable”. Then every workshop can be adapted to its participants – from covering the basics to focusing on how participants can apply a pronoun go-round at their workplace or in the classroom.

Pronouns are but one aspect of language use. Particularly with regard to reproductive health, „not using inclusive language […] can be very damaging for trans people or people who are questioning their gender identity“. Moreover, it neglects the „two percent of the population [who] is intersex. So they have a mixture of different sexual characteristics. So we're really talking about not a huge amount of people, but more than you would think.“ Sam emphasises the importance of „going from fireman to firefighter, from mother to parent“, of degenderising the language: „At the end of the day, it's really not relevant what people have in between their legs, like 99% of the time. And in that 99% of the time, it is just unnecessary to bring people's gender into it.”

 

Photo by Lucy Wilson

 

The curriculum as a negotiation

Studying at Leeds University in the UK, Sam encountered the initiative „Why is my curriculum white”. While this initiative was launched seven years ago, its focal question has not lost its relevance. Reading lists, curricula, and the examples we select in class promotes a particular construction of knowledge. In order to not only talk but live diversity, higher education institutions need to include students and staff in a discussion on the representation of race, age, class, sexuality and gender identity. Sam remarks that „people have been producing and holding knowledge all over the world for thousands of years“. They wonder „why our curriculum only represents such a small percentage of the population and such a specific intersection of the population“.

Understanding the curriculum as a negotiation is an important step toward making the curriculum more inclusive. No matter if it is Sami people as representatives of a national minority or queer people, Sam „firmly believe[s] that they have a right to have an educational system, which also reflects their histories and their stories.“

By „moving more towards this kind of negotiated style of teaching“, students can challenge the top-down structures often in place at HEI. Instead of perpetuating the idea of the teacher as „this infallible source of knowledge“, Sam encourages students to question academic power structures.  

 

Higher education institutions as safer spaces

Research shows that students from the LGBTQ+ community are more often victims of harassment and violence than heterosexual, cisgender students (see for example Andersson & Mellgren, 2016). Staff and students play an important role in making higher education institutions safer and more welcoming spaces. Using inclusive language, making the curriculum more inclusive, and enforcing a safer learning space are three important contributions by teachers. Enforcing a safer learning space means for example standing up for and supporting students that are misgendered, are addressed by the wrong name or face other forms of microaggressions.

While “calling out blatantly bad behaviour” or obvious discrimination may be a given, “a lot of problems that come up are connected to microaggressions. These kinds of small things that rub people the wrong way. On their own, they might not seem like a big problem, but when it's happening to you maybe hundreds of times a week or maybe just a few times a week, it just really builds up on you over time, so that you have an experience of feeling unwelcome.“ Moreover, as the concept of minority stress suggests, (unintended) prejudice and implicit bias can negatively impact the health of those affected (Meyer et al., 2021). Facing microaggressions makes it “really hard to stick up for yourself every time. It is much easier if someone else can help you in that”, Sam argues. Standing up for a fellow student - what can that look like in practice? Even if the person that is subject to microaggressions is not there to hear you, “it is important to just chip that in. It does not have to be confrontational, it does not have to make anyone feel bad, but it is just a little reminder. Then you're building this kind of space where this person's identity is being recognized and they're more likely to feel validated and safe. So yeah, I think that's what students can do: have each other's backs.“

Currently, there are no national rules on issuing a new degree certificate for students who have changed their legal gender. It is up to the individual higher education institution to develop policies and guidelines. (Statens Offentliga Utredningar, 2017) To Sam, it is key that „the administrative system has the kind of flexibility in it to accommodate people, specifically trans people“. Still, big public institutions take time to move. What can be done before there is systematic change? „It is about making people feel like they're heard, and they're seen“, for example, if a person wants to change their name. As Sam expresses, „this kind of situation to feel that someone is hearing you and is your ally, even if the system is not accommodating, can be really, really powerful.“

While every single person can contribute to making higher education institutions safer spaces in their day-to-day work, “university leadership has a duty to make a very clear and public stance […] to back that up with a clear action plan of what they are actually doing to live up to these values“. Sam stresses how important it is that leadership does not only talk the talk but walks the walk – through allocating sufficient resources and time, but also actively involving people from the community “who can help articulate the needs of that community“. Peer groups or focus groups representing communities at the intersection of sexuality, gender identity, class, racialisation, age, or ability can help leadership translate overarching inclusion goals into actionable points. The resources allocated by higher education institutions should also include fair compensation for all peer group members, Inga adds.

 

Change has to happen on every level

“Accessibility and inclusion is an active process”, Sam summarizes. “Organizational change and making institutions and educational structures accessible and inclusive: it has to happen on every level“, involving academic and administrative staff, student representatives and rectors. “Everyone needs to play their role in making sure that change is happening as fast as it can”. Understanding inclusion and accessibility as an active process also means “consciously think[ing] about gender and sexual diversity” to not “instinctively sit within the heteronormative and cisgendered frame which is the most predominant in our society” (Ward & Gale, 2016, p. 15).

Visit Status Queer online – on their website or on Instagram.

 

Sources cited in this article:


Author: Alice Srugies
Copyright © Pedagogisk Peppare 2022