ProjectQED: Building an Inclusive Department for Queer and Trans Students, Staff, and Faculty

Abstract

Inclusivity efforts focused on gender and sexuality in higher education often fail to identify and address the specific needs of queer and Trans Students, Staff, and Faculty of Color. In this program description, we report on ProjectQED, a student-organized event series at the Stanford Graduate School of Education that sought to address these unmet needs using intersectionality theory as an organizing framework. ProjectQED centered LGBTQ+ and same-gender loving (SGL) perspectives from Asian American, Black, Latinx, Native American, and Pacific Islander communities through a series of invited guest lectures and film discussions between 2016 and 2019. The broadly inclusive nature of these events expanded opportunities for building community and solidarity across campus, bringing together interest groups and affinity groups centered around gender and sexuality, racial and ethnic identity, and multiple academic departments and disciplines. We share this program description as a model that staff and faculty at other institutions might replicate by centering the experiences of queer and trans People of Color in programming for LGBTQ+/SGL campus communities.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ Connoting both queer educators and the Latin Q.E.D. (quod erat demonstrandum), meaning “that which was to be demonstrated”—in this case, the existence and importance of queer educators, whether visible or not.

² A Native Hawaiian identity that has sometimes been likened by māhū themselves to the identity of a transgender woman (Boellstorff et al., 2014).