99 Days of Something #7 – Pride
As Pride month is about to start, and there are a few Pride marches and celebrations happening this weekend, I am once again reflecting on my relationship with Pride. I haven’t been to many. I have never thought of Pride as somewhere I really wanted to be or something I wanted to be part of. I love seeing the pictures of the events, I love reading about them and I love that Pride events exist in a form that is celebratory, full of joy and love. I also understand the importance of visibility and protest and we need that now more than probably ever in my lifetime. I love seeing social media feeds from friends and colleagues who are involved somehow. I love Pride looking in from the outside. I just don’t want to be there. So I feel conflicted about Pride because I feel like I really should want to be part of it. I feel like I should be seeking out those spaces, be visible, take up space. I feel like I should be able to find fun, joy and power in those spaces. I also feel like I should be there to acknowledge that Pride is not just a celebration of love but that it is also a protest, that it is intensely political and a really important form of resistance. But somehow I also feel like I just want to watch Pride from the outside. I absolutely want it to exist, I want to be part of it in the same way that I want to watch some sport on TV – it’ll be fun as long as I don’t actually have to be there or participate.
I realise that is possibly selfish. I also know that it comes from a position of privilege. I don’t need Pride. I never have. I have always had support, I have always been seen for all of me. I never had to hide and have always been able to just be me. So finding and being part of a community and express that through events like Pride have never been important for my existence or my well being. Couple that with my dislike of big crowds, indifference about a lot of the music played and acts featured and generally having other things I’d rather do at the weekend, Pride never makes it to the top of the list of priorities. And then I feel guilty about that. I was vaguely thinking about joining the Leeds Pride march in July because it feels like I should, but I no longer have to worry about that as something else has come up on that date.
I have become increasingly aware of the importance of visibility and of resistance. I am conscious that as a pretty successful out gay woman I have both power and responsibility and a certain vulnerability. I don’t know if it is just getting older and wiser (ahem) that gives me some of that perspective or whether it is more to do with the political climate and all our rights being under threat in a way that I haven’t really experienced before. My consciousness of s28 for example was limited maybe because I didn’t go to school in England until I was 16 and I remember sex education, for example, being way way more useful in Germany. I don’t actually remember anything about ‘non traditional families’ but then there was already a lot on the school curriculum that I thought was nonsense. For example, I remember being one of only 2 kids in my class at grammar school whose parents were not seemingly happily married and together. And that was positioned as the absolute norm. All this talk of perfect nuclear families versus problematic single parent families made no sense to me because I was quite happy in my ‘broken’ family. I was surrounded by diverse family structures and living arrangements. In other words, I already understood that curricula in some ways are always political and always tell a particular story and that story might not at all reflect mine. I might not have been able to express that but I knew there was so much more to the world than the things we were talking about at school from a really early age. So because in my life outside school I was exposed to lots of different ways of living and thinking and because I was also encouraged to read a lot and to think and to not just accept what teachers or authority figures said, I was not looking to school to teach me anything about how families worked or who I was or should be. More and more I realise that while I am sure I have my share of internalised homophobia, it’s pretty limited and I have been incredibly lucky to have experienced exclusion, non acceptance, hate etc as rare exceptions rather than as something that is a constant in my life. In addition, for a lit of my adult life the story has sort of been one of progress. It saw s 28 abolished, it saw the introduction of civil partnerships and then equal marriage, it saw equality in adoption rights, the Gender Recognition Act was introduced, discrimination was outlawed. I am not saying that things were great but we seem to be heading in the right direction. I think taking all of those things together, resulted in it taking me an embarrassingly long time to realise that protest, resistance, visibility and using my voice are really important. Just because being gay and out has not been a struggle for me, doesn’t mean I am not part of the struggle.
But what does that actually mean in practical terms. What can I do that feels meaningful and doable. I am working on that and through June I want to really consciously think about that and maybe explore more queer literature, art and film (suggestions always welcome). I will continue to share snippets of my life and while I never hide and think I am fairly open, maybe I can be more explicit about who I mean when I see ‘we’ or about how I think about the family and life Kath and I have build. I will make more an effort to seek out queer spaces or queer owned businesses. And I will keep showing up as authentically as I can and I will try and really notice the occasions when I hesitate to do that, where the inevitable ongoing coming out that just happens when you chat with new people about your life (‘What does your husband do…, erm, he doesn’t exist) feels awkward or not really safe. Because those are the moments that require resistance and challenge. Those are the moments that doing it anyway is more important than ever – particular in my position of privilege and almost always physical safety.
Anyway, Happy Pride month. Let’s celebrate and protest in equally powerful measures in whatever way we can. I’d love to hear your plans or suggestions for other things I might like to try. Oh and also, here’s my ‘we’:
Feeling seen, feeling the history and feeling the possibilities
I have lost count of the number of Law Schools I have walked into over the years. I have obviously studied in and worked at several. I have visited many many more. But I can count the number of Law Schools I have walked into where the walls have been dominated by portraits or photos of women. Until earlier this month that number was precisely zero. One of my more famous (read public) tantrums came in one of my previous roles where, in a staff meeting, we had agreed that we should brighten up the hallways in the Law School with some law relevant pictures. A week or so after that meeting I arrived at work and pictures of long dead white men adorned the walls and I lost the plot. It was not one of my finest moments but I do think I was right. I am not suggesting that we erase history or that we should ban Law Schools from putting images of dead white men on their walls, I am saying that we should be mindful of whose history we are portraying, who we are championing and what it means if you can or rather if you can’t see yourself reflected in the imagery that the place you are working or studying in chooses to put on the walls.
So when, on the 12th February, I was ushered into a smallish room in the Law Faculty of Lund University alongside a group of academics working on various aspects of EU Law, Policy and Politics for our 2 day workshop, my breath was literally taken away. As I made my way down a few steps, I was facing pictures of 4 women. I had no idea who they were at this point but the impact felt almost physical. The room screamed ‘you belong here’. There we were, mostly female academics being encouraged by those who went before us, those who made us being here possible. The 4 women are Anna Bugge Wicksell (1862-1928), Gunvor Mallin (1911-2010), Anna Christensen (1936 – 2001) and Christina Moëll (1959 -) and they are important and impressive figures in the Swedish legal world. Look them up! The Svenskt kvinnobiografiskt lexikon which has biographies of important Swedish Women is a good place to start.
As I took my seat and looked back at the door I had just come through, I noticed a further picture. And this time I did know who the woman looking back at me from inside the frame was: Ruth Bader Ginsburg. I think I just stared. As it turns out RBG received an honorary jubilee doctorate from Lund University and the document is framed next to her picture. It was vaguely intimidating to give a paper with such a legal heavyweight, such a trailblazer, such a brilliant woman looking down at me with that iconic look but I hope she would have been proud of us and interested in our discussions.
Having the women on the walls made a difference. It is hard to explain why. Apart from immediately making me feel like I belonged in that room, genuinely. Apart from being in a room with pictures of important people on the walls and for once not having to roll my eyes about the choice of who is important and apart from the complete novelty of it, I don’t know why it made such a difference. It just did. It was nice and over the two days I think we all commented on it.
It made me think about the importance of representation which I have been thinking about lots lately but also about how far we have come since we saw the first female law graduates, the first female lawyers, first female professors, Deans of School… and how far we still have to go. There are still female firsts to be had and that’s before we even start thinking about intersections with other characteristics. But thinking about how much work there is still to do seemed less heavy with the 5 watching over our conversations. There they were, evidence of change and progress, evidence that we belong, that we are capable and important. I like how they are all different, the pictures chosen are not all the same style and they are not super formal either. They somehow felt more real and their roles and positions somehow more attainable. Ok, perhaps not RBG because, you know, she was RBG – but the others were just women doing their thing – just like we were in that workshop. It felt like by being there and by discussing work that had a focus on gender, we were honouring the work they had done, the way they had paved. It felt good to be seen, to see, to begin to understand our histories and think about the possibilities.
Turns out there were also some paintings of men on the walls – they were behind me throughout, I don’t know who they were, I didn’t bother to check. They just didn’t seem important over those two days. They probably are important, but not in this story and not today.
Student outreach work – why bother?
I have got a few things I want to catch up on – and you’ll be pleased to know it is not another Heated Rivalry post. It feels like I spent most of January asleep and most of February trying to wake up and catch up. I have not caught up, of course I haven’t. If I could actually catch up, that would suggest I don’t have a full time job… anyway. In the middle of my flu sickness absence, just as the coughing and snot production switched into crippling fatigue and stomach issues, I had a couple of days of almost coherence. Those two days coincided with the HELOA Conference I had agreed to go speak at with my absolutely brilliant colleague Jack Cooper. Here’s the blurb from the conference programme:
1.6: Working with academic colleagues to deliver effective outreach – Ballroom
Jack Cooper | Schools and Colleges Engagement Officer | Leeds Trinity University
Dr Jess Guth | Head of School of Business and Law | Leeds Trinity University
Engaging subject-level outreach is crucial to building meaningful relationships with schools and colleges and helping to breakdown barriers for students to access Higher Education. In this workshop, Jack Cooper, Schools and Colleges Engagement Officer and Dr Jess Guth, Head of School of Law from Leeds Trinity University will talk through their collaborative approach to designing and delivering high-impact subject outreach.
Honestly, I don’t really remember giving the talk that much. I remember struggling to breathe and being tired and struggling to hold onto thoughts. I also remember Jack being a really good presenter and setting the scene really well. In essence the argument was that Universities doing outreach work with Schools and Colleges is important for a variety of reasons – social justice, raising aspiration and widening access and participations and of course recruitment. I think I was the only academic in a room full of professional services staff. I think often running outreach sessions, travelling to schools and colleges or welcoming them to campus feels like another thing dumped on academics, another thing to do that doesn’t feel like it is really our job, something to be got out of. I have certainly worked with academics with attitudes like that over the course of my career. We argued that the relationships between the professional services team and academic staff is key to doing good, meaningful and effective outreach. We encouraged participants of the workshop to think about what they do, why, if it works, how it could be better and what maybe just needs to be stopped. It seemed to go well. It is also the only conference ever where, as a speaker, I received a thank you card.
Since the conference I have had cause to think more about outreach work for several reasons. One is that we are in the craziness of the student number planning cycle, workload planning and thinking about how many students we will have and when, where and how to teach them. Another is that I have recently received the outreach impact report from Jack’s team. As I have been working through spreadsheets my mind has been wandering off thinking about 2 different things in relation to outreach work: The first is a question about why I have never seen it as an add on. Even as a baby academic, I loved doing outreach sessions, I genuinely enjoyed going into Schools and Colleges, chatting to potential students, learning from their teachers. And I still do. But why? The second is about why we do this work and how we know if it works.
So first, why do I like this work? I think it is because I have never seen it as a recruitment activity as such. Of course that is usually how it is positioned for a university like mine. We need to be visible to the 17/18 year olds in our region. We need them to choose us. We are not a selective institution, we have to actively recruit. I understand that the outreach work is basically that. But to me it has always been the other stuff that matters more. I am a teacher at heart and outreach work is teaching. I have stood in so many classrooms in Keighley, Bradford, Leeds, Birmingham and surrounding areas and seen how the stories I can tell about my journey into Law or my friends’ journeys to university and beyond changes the perception of what is possible.
I taught a Law class at a local 6th Form in Keighley about a decade ago and was confronted by an angry young woman. She said ‘Why are you here? People like us don’t go to university. Go tick your boxes somewhere else’. I didn’t know what to say to her. I let her get in my face, I let her storm out. I said nothing when she came back in. I could have told her that I did my A-Levels in Keighley and I went to uni. Many of my friends grew up in some of the most deprived areas of Keighley, an already pretty poor town, and went to uni. I have told that story so many times and it always helps shift perspective. But somehow confronted with that anger, it didn’t seem right. It felt like I, we, had somehow got out and left a generation behind. We hadn’t made it better for those who came after us. It seems that the older I get, the more the ‘I sat where you are sitting now and look at me know’ narrative just feels smug and patronising. As I finished my session, I asked whether I could go sit with the angry young woman for a bit and ask her some questions. Of course her initial response was ‘Why do you care’. But she didn’t leave. In the end we talked for about 20 minutes. She wanted to be a lawyer but was already being told she needed to get that nonsense out of her head and go get a job. Finishing School was a luxury, going to university was outrageous. There was no money to support her, there was no understanding about what a university was, how it worked or what might be possible. I tried to explain, as best I could because I realised that explaining universities is hard – they’re weird! I can’t say that she was friendly but she was curious, she asked lots of questions. Then I left. I didn’t hear from her again. I don’t know what she is doing now but I do know that she went to a very prestigious university to study Law – her teacher told us. I think about her often. I hope that whatever she took from our conversation, she used it to help her get to where she wanted to be. She changed how I think about outreach work. It’s my opportunity to understand where today’s kids, tomorrow’s students, are in terms of their journeys, their understanding of what the future holds, their views on the world and their expectations of what comes next. She taught me to never assume anything and be prepared to abandon prepared sessions and activities and to focus on connection. Conversation is more important than content. Creating a space where the basics of degrees, universities, legal institutions and careers can be talked about without feeling embarrassed at not knowing and showing up in a way that makes clear that there are people out there, strangers at this point, who believe in them and are willing to take a chance on them are the most important things. I’m not there to persuade them to enrol with whatever university I happen to be working for – although I love seeing familiar faces arrive for welcome week – I am there to help them realise that the power to change their world is right there for them to grasp and if they let us in just a little bit, we will be right there with them.
Outreach work helps me design better transitions from College to Uni, it helps me create better teaching materials and use better examples, it helps me meet my students where they are and it makes me a better teacher. It also reminds me of my own privilege and the distance that can create and it reminds me that making the world a better place is our job and that while if often feels that way, it doesn’t have to be overwhelming. Even if it is just the one student encounter described above (and I think there are more), I am honoured to have been part of a little nudge that propelled her to jump into, what was for her and her family, a terrifying unknown, but one that had the potential to change her life. I hope it did.
I think in answering the first question, I have also answered the why we do it question. I guess I can’t speak for others but in summary, I do it because it changes the world for the better. Does it work? I don’t know. I know from the impact data that we have, that our outreach work generates applications for our courses. So for those who do it purely from a recruitment point of view – it seems to work. Does it change the world? Does it shift perspectives on what is possible? It often feels like it but actually I will never really know what impact I have. I like to think that sometimes I make a difference, that I am part of the spark that puts into focus that nothing is impossible and that whoever you thought you were, you deserve to go after your dreams. I don’t need data to tell me that I am helping to raise aspirations, creating the possibility to imagine a what if. And to be clear, I don’t care whether that what if is about becoming the next hot shot lawyer or rocket scientist or about living off grid and being self-sufficient or about finding your person and raising a huge family – or all of those things at different points in time. The power lies in the confidence to define your own what ifs. I know the power of being given the confidence and freedom to figure out my what if. I grew up in an environment where there was no real pressure to do well and no pressure at all to do anything specific, just lots of support for figuring out my dream and then living it. If I can be a tiny little bit of that for one or two kids I am lucky enough to cross paths with in those Schools and Colleges, then yeah, outreach work works.
My Conversations 