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This research was developed from a community needs assessment report that was developed within the context of a Community Engagement Course in our institution’s Information Studies Department; it includes a research report, a planning report, and action plan. This project was supported by mix methods that included group interviews and a student survey to gauge students interests, beliefs, and feelings to reflect on the inclusion/exclusion of Queer Studies in our school.
Connecting concepts from Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed along with Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, this research report builds on a praxis based in community informatics to consider what a Queer Community Informatics might look like in a time of continued attacks on the LGBTQ+ community and heightened attacks on Trans and Gender non- conforming individuals. Freire’s push for students to have an active role in their education
contrasts the Sedgwick’s imposition of the “closet” that queer folk are confined by both members of the society and the knowledge creation process which the “closet” reinforces. Community
informatics is “the application of communication and information technologies to enable community processes and the achievement of community objectives” (Gurstein, 2007).
Recording the ways in which queer people present themselves in various contexts along with the modes by which they participate in the community building process can reveal the complexities by which Universities seeking to establish a neutral ground for discourse reinscribe the closet onto those marginalized members of the LGBTQ+ community especially Queer and Trans People Of Color (QTPOC).
Following this project, QRAC will seek to implement the survey recommendations as they are based on institutional memory, data management, and community ethics and engagement.
Within the context of a Higher education institution such as ours that celebrates diversity, this report looks at how an academic community and queer community was able to form including what affordances they encountered via the design of a Higher Education Public Institution.
Due to the larger conservative backlash against Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Departments (DEI) across the United States, many LGBTQ+ student organizations, which are often hosted in DEI offices across many higher education institutions, are disproportionately targeted facing defunding, club elimination, or even anti-lgbtq+ discrimination. By looking at the ways in which LGBTQ+ oriented groups form a stable sense of community within the University yet outside of its normative paths, the trends in the use of ICTs can influence other modes of community organizing, and potentially develop a pedagogy for queer students by queer students similar to how Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed looked at the active roles students partook in their education.