Social discourse and legislation are gradually opening up to gender and sexual diversity. Since 2013, for example, it has been possible to register a child as neither male nor female on their birth certificate. According to the judgment of the Federal Constitutional Court in the fall of 2017, a third gender status must be entered on the birth certificate for people born as intersexual.

Panel Discussion: How Can the University Open Itself to Queer Diversity?

But how do higher education institutions (HEI) deal with the existing gender diversity and the different sexual orientations? What importance is accorded to gender and sexual diversity at HEIs? Where is action needed? What do employees and students experience as discriminatory with regard to this issue and, in light of this, what does is mean for the university to open up to queer diversity? These and other questions will be the subject of a panel discussion to launch the public event series titled “Queering University.” Invitees include Bremen-based lawyer Professor Konstanze Plett, who has dealt with the relationship between law and gender for years and who has taken part in constitutional amendments, Professor Dominic Frohn from the Fresenius University of Applied Sciences in Cologne, Né Fink from the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, and students from the queer community at the University of Bremen.

Diversity in Everyday University Life

The focus “Queering University” will be continued in the 2019 summer semester. The discussions, lectures, and workshops will focus on, among other topics, the perception and anchoring of gender and sexual diversity in everyday university life. Specifically, the experts want to address the following aspects: addressing and categorizing people, the invisibility/visibility of diversity, and questions of normativity and discrimination. In doing so, “Queering University” hopes to illuminate the different levels of the university field, which refers to structural aspects, dealing with self-definitions and attributions, forms of representation, and interactions in research, administration, counselling, teaching, and study. The lecture series is also expressly aimed at an interested nonuniversity audience.

Additional Information:

www.uni-bremen.de/diversity-management/aktuelles/   (In German only)
www.uni-bremen.de

Contact:

Dr. Margrit Kaufmann
Academic Expert for Diversity
Faculty of Cultural Studies
University of Bremen
Tel.: +49 421 218-67631
E-mail: mkaufmprotect me ?!uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de