In June 2018 LGBTQ+@Cam invited 25 academics from LGBTQ+ programmes at universities around the UK. We hosted people from Glasgow, Sussex, Oxford and more, in order to discuss shared experiences on the development of academic LGBTQ+ programmes.
After introductions which included sharing the strengths and difficulties of everyone's programme, Professor Sarah Franklin pulled out some key themes and we broke into groups to discuss the following questions:
- What are the arguments that we use (and don’t use) to get support for our initiatives within our institutions? Would it be useful to have a national resource to share ideas?
- What overlaps are there between our specific interests (research, intellectual exchange) and broader aims of teaching, culture change, institutional change, welfare... - and how we deal with it given workloads, multitasking, etc., do we e.g. mainstream in some ways etc.?
- What is the direction of LGBTQ+ studies in the future, particularly with changing universities?
- What is the role of links to the wider community? How do we widen access to the community, do we want to widen access?
The meeting was very well-received, and it was discussed that nothing like it had happened before. The event had an exciting conclusion: the development of a national LGBTQ+ research network, which will be called “QRUK” (Queer Research UK). The development of this website is underway, and the initial group hope to meet again in June 2019 to discuss the programme's progress.
