Shoutout to Child and Adolescent Development Department faculty Robert Marx and Counselor Education Department faculty Kyoung Mi Choi, who – with the support of a Lurie College of Education Strategic Plan grant – have established the “Creating an Inclusive Climate: Queering Our Classrooms & Our Campus” initiative, which aims to offer introductory and advanced trainings at the department and college level around topics like pronouns and vocabulary terms, the hidden curriculum in our classes, and creating opportunities for authentic self-expression!  Listen to an overview and update about their initiative below.

“I want to start by giving an overview of what the phrase ‘Queering Our Campus’ means because it’s not a term that is always used and it’s not always immediately understood.  When Kyoung Mi and I put this proposal together, we were thinking about the ways in which our campus – and our college in particular – sometimes unintentionally uphold certain hierarchies and power imbalances.  What it means to queer something is to trouble those hierarchies, to think critically and consciously about the power that’s in place, to think about the dynamics that are always circulating around us, and to think about what we can do to trouble that, to make that more capacious, to make that more inclusive, to make that a little less stable and a little more interesting for those of us who don’t necessarily fit into the norms of our society.”