The spatial experiences of transgender and gender non-conforming ("trans") people continue to occupy the margins of geography, especially compared to the amount of work centred on lesbian and gay lives. Though research on trans geographies in educational and health settings is expanding, most literatures stem from the USA. This paper shares findings from a study about the experiences of trans people who study and/or work on a specific university campus in northern England. Our findings demonstrate how particular spaces of the campus are generative of interactions which enable micro-aggressions and misrecognition. K E Y W O R D S feminist geographies, higher education, Northern England, qualitative interviews, trans geographies, university campus 1 | INTRODUCTION In this paper, we explore the experiences of transgender staff and students on a university campus in northern England. University campuses are sites of meaningful encounters (Andersson et al., 2012) and those who identify as transgender and/or gender non-conforming are some of the most marginalised students on campus. We contend that it is important to give voice to the experiences of transgender staff and students and we set out to do so in this paper. We offer a brief introduction to debates about transgender geographies before setting out the Foucauldian and queer perspectives framing our research. We then detail findings according to the three spaces in which trans students and staff felt most marginal: bathrooms, residential accommodation, and spaces of learning and conviviality. A final part of the paper summarises how campuses may be made inclusive of trans people. 2 | TRANS GEOGRPHIES OF THE CAMPUS British anti-discrimination laws have only been extended to trans people during the past decade, partly thanks to Press For Change and similar advocacy groups (Mitchell & Howarth, 2009). There remains no Census data on the trans population in England, Wales, and Scotland but estimates suggest there are anything from 65,000 to 300,000 trans people in the UK. A 2014 survey of 4,000 lesbian, gay, bisexual, and trans (LGBT) students by the National Union of Students highlighted that only 20.6% felt "completely safe" on campus, while a third had suffered bullying and 56% considered "dropping out" (Acciari, 2014). In June 2019, the Metropolitan Police confirmed a doubling of hate crimes against LGBT people in the past five years in wider society (Marsh et al., 2019). Historically, universities have been seen to provide people with an opportunity to experiment with alternative gender and/or sexual identities away from constraints of "home" and school (Marine & Nicolazzo, 2014). However, Formby (2015) posits that there remain few qualitative studies that detail the specific challenges faced by trans students and staff in the UK. Research on trans lives is usually US-centred (Ullman, 2018) or situated alongside "sexual minorities" (Ellis, 2008).
We use feminist and queer theorisations of precarity as emotional and embodied to explore how trans people experience and negotiate university campus spaces in North East England. Through analysis of 15 interviews conducted with university students and staff, we highlight how precarity is lived and felt through an exploration of the ways in which different spaces of the campus become contexts of hope, comfort, and belonging, as well as anxiety, fear, and violence. We detail the specific ways in which university spaces can come to shape feelings of precariousness and how these are relational to experiences of being trans in the wider city. We conclude by highlighting what an emotional and felt approach to precarity can offer geographers interested in power, marginalisation, and place.
Recognising their growing role in public services, this article draws on the notion of ‘enactment’ to argue that the internet and social media (I&SM) need to be understood in particular institutional, organisational and social contexts. Focusing on street‐level bureaucrats who deliver frontline services, we explore efforts to integrate I&SM into youth work with clients who are thought to be ‘digitally savvy’ but also in need of protection from the ‘online world’. As clients can be vulnerable and trust is a key relational component, organisation–practitioner–client boundaries are complex and under continuous renegotiation. However, the layering of new virtual channels of interaction adds extra complexity. This change necessitates the development of innovative routines, practices and protocols, but these are being developed in a wider social context where the norms of using social media have not caught up with practice and the use of these tools is still often surrounded by moral panic.
Tweet My Street is a cross-disciplinary project exploring the extent to which data derived from Twitter can reveal more about spatial and temporal behaviours and the meanings attached to these locally. This is done with a longer-term view to supporting the coproduction and delivery of local services, complaint mechanisms and horizontal community support networks. The project has involved the development of a web-based software application capable of retrieving, storing and visualising geo-located "tweets" (and associated digital content) from Twitter's Firehose. This has been piloted in Newcastle upon Tyne (UK) and has proven a scalable tool that can aid the analysis of social media data geographically. Beyond explaining efforts to analyse pilot data via this software, this paper elucidates three methodological challenges encountered during early collaboration. These include issues relating to "proximity" with subjects, ethics and critical questions about scholars' digital responsibilities during the neogeographic turn.
Digital media scholarship is burgeoning. However, there remains a paucity of queer geographies accounting for hybridity and multi‐directionality of coexisting, variegated and embodied spaces produced through spatial media nor the technologies that enable these media (smartphones, tablet computers, and self‐tracking devices). Bringing together literatures on sexuality and the first and second iterations of the internet, this article extends debate about the uneven and paradoxical queer geographies of location‐aware applications (Tinder and Grindr) and other spatial media now often taken as “composite” of queer cultures globally. The article encourages those with interest in the interrelationships between sexualities and space to emphasise further the historical, cultural, and political specificities of the places in which these diverse media are designed, developed, and consumed. The purpose of doing so, I contend, is to deepen knowledge of heightened commercialisation whilst unravelling complex questions of data ownership, privacy and cultural norms that could exacerbate disparities in sexual citizenship.
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