Queering Institutions
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The YouTube livestream of this panel is available above, broadcast on Tuesday the 27th of April 2021.
Queering Institutions
Institutions are built with certain bodies in mind. This speaks not only to their shape, but to their purposes, their loyalties, and to what can be imagined within the confines of their walls. We have seen the many ways in which state, cultural, and educational institutions have instrumentalised queer people to achieve their own ends. In this panel we ask how institutions can be put to queer use (Ahmed). What can be learned from the very shape of these institutions that can allow us to pervert them as part of an intersectional queer agenda?
Going further, in recognising “queer times” as end times, in harnessing the anarchist (apocalyptic?) nature of queerness, and in remembering Gilmore’s affirmation that fragments of the liberated future already exist in the experiments and possibilities of marginalised peoples, we ask what fragments of the future are being created across institutions today? What does queerness have to do with abolition? And is there anything that queerness can’t do?
Chair:
Waithera Sebatindira
Co-author of A FLY Girl's Guide to University (2019)
Speakers:
Abeera Khan
PhD candidate in Gender Studies (SOAS University)
Christine Pungong
Former CUSU Welfare Officer and a member of ‘bare minimum’, an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
Lola Olufemi
Co-author of A FLY Girl's Guide to University (2019), author of Feminism Interrupted: Disrupting Power (2020), and a member of 'bare minimum', an interdisciplinary anti-work arts collective.
Siyang Wei
Cambridge SU Postgraduate Access, Education and Participation Officer
Siyang is the Postgraduate Access, Education and Participation Officer at Cambridge SU for the 2020/21 academic year; in this role, they organise and advocate for the interests of postgraduate students at Cambridge, with a particular focus on access to and experiences of postgraduate education. They previously completed an MPhil in Political and Economic Sociology at Cambridge, where their research examined the role of anti-communism and Sinophobia in contemporary British 'Chinese' identity projects.