Queering the City: A LGBTQI Perspective on Safety and Mobility – 3 March – 17 November 2022
Queering the City: A LGBTQI Perspective on Safety and Mobility
A webinar series in 2022 organized by KTH Safeplaces network and RFSL – The Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Rights
A sustainable city is a safe place, one that allows movement without fear of crime, victimization, or harassment, regardless of sexual orientation and gender identity (UN-Habitat, 2019; Swedish Government, 2021). Current dominant approaches to public safety and feminist urban planning have not yet been fully employed to accommodate the safety needs of LGBTQI individuals. The involvement of LGBTQI communities in public safety conversations to influence planners and decision-makers towards more inclusive public safety is essential to the process of achieving 2030’s sustainable development goals. This seminar series invites you to reflect upon what happens in public places in terms of incidences of discrimination and crime and why planning theory and practices are failing to ensure the safety needs of LGBTQI individuals. We delve into the meaning of places of vulnerability and victimization but more importantly, of places that represent an individual’s resistance, activism, and empowerment. We wish to unravel forms of resistance that manifest against structures of power in everyday queer lives in the rural-urban continuum. We hope to create an arena for an interdisciplinary discussion about the safety needs of LGBTQI individuals by engaging practitioners and researchers as well as groups representing lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex rights.
*Queer is an umbrella term for the LGBTQ+: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning.
Webinar 1 – Cities and Queer spaces: Learning from the past and the present – 3 March Webinar 2 – The LGBQTI experiences of public places in the urban-rural continuum – 12 May Webinar 3 – CPTED principles and the safety needs of LGBTQI people in Poland and Sweden – 29 September Webinar 4 – Constellations: Limits and Inspirations of Mapping A Queer New York – 10 November |
WEBINARS
Webinar 1 – Cities and Queer spaces: Learning from the past and the present – 3 March
Speakers
Lynda Johnston – Professor of Geography and Assistant Vice Chancellor Sustainability at the University of Waikato, Aotearoa New Zealand.
Lynda focuses on geographies of gender, sexualities, and social justice. Recent publications include: Transforming Gender, Sex and Place: Gender Variant Geographies (2019); and, Routledge Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies (2020).
Stina Flink – museum educator, Upplandsmuseet
Stina works as a museum educator at Upplandsmuseet, the county museum in Uppsala. Focus of interest are ethnology, 19th century and contemporary history, human rights, accessibility, national minorities, and LGBTQ history. She has also been an on- and off bi-activist for 25 years, on both a local and national level.
Alexander Volk – The Most Colorful Guide in Stockholm, proprietor of Flaming Viking Tours
Alexander is The Most Colorful Guide in Stockholm and the proprietor of Flaming Viking Tours. He specializes in LGBTQ History, Vikings and prostitution tours. He studies Nordic Languages at Stockholm and Uppsala Universities and is a researcher in Onomastics. In 2021, he was a recipient of an Uppsala Toponymy Society grant for his thesis on nicknames and epithets for homosexuals used by the Stockholm Constabulary 1880-1920.
Webinar 2 – The LGBQTI experiences of public places in the urban-rural continuum – 12 May
Gilly Hartal – senior lecturer in the Gender Studies Program at Bar-Ilan University.
Gilly’s research and teaching interests include geographies of sexualities and gender, queer theory, qualitative methodologies and specifically the production of spatial belonging through discourses of inclusion and exclusion along national, ethnic, gendered, class and sexual trajectories.
She has published in journals such as Urban Studies (2018, 2020); Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space (2019); the Journal of Homosexuality (2018); Social and Cultural Geography (2017, 2020); Gender, Place & Culture (2016); Sexualities (2016); ACME (2016) and more.
In April 2018, along with Adi Moreno, Gilly co-founded the LGBT/queer research community in the Israeli Sociological Society. Her current research focuses on lesbian, bisexual and transgender women’s political subjectivity is the Israeli periphery.
Signe Bremer Gagnesjö – PhD in ethnology, Researcher in gender studies at the Department of Gender Studies, Lund University
Signe´s background is in ethnographic research on trans experiences of urban spaces and gender-affirming health care. The dissertation “Body Lines” (2011) concerns trans experiences of Swedish gender-affirming health care. Recent research concerns transactivism in the 1960s and how trans people created space for activism within the framework of pornographic press.
Maria Tillquist – Case Worker at RFSL Support Service, part of the The Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Rights.
SLIDES
Maria has a bachelor in Social Work and a long experience working for RFSL as Case Worker for LGBTQI people who experience violence and abuse. She is specialized in counselling for victims of hate crime, intimate partner violence, honour-related violence and sexual violence.
Webinar 3 – CPTED principles and the safety needs of LGBTQI people in Poland and Sweden – 29 September
Vania Ceccato, Prof. Department of urban planning and environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Emilia Bogacka, Zakład Geografii Społecznej – adiunkt, Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań
CPTED principles and the safety needs of LGBTQI people in Poland and Sweden
In this webinar, we assess current models of public safety planning by casting light on the safety needs of LGBTQI people. Compared with other groups in society, relatively little is known about the safety conditions of LGBTQI people. Inspired by principles of Crime Prevention through Environmental Design (CPTED), a conceptual framework is proposed to compare the safety conditions experienced by LGBTQI people captured by survey data from Poland and Sweden—two countries that reflect the extremes of the spectrum of LGBTQI ’s rights in Europe. We finalize the webinar by challenging the legacy of current planning public safety frameworks and suggesting a new research agenda.
Webinar 4 – Constellations: Limits and Inspirations of Mapping A Queer New York – 10 November
Jack Jen Gieseking – cultural, digital, and urban geographer.
Jack Jen Gieseking is an urban, cultural, and digital geographer, feminist and queer theorist, and environmental psychologist. Jack recently resigned from the University of Kentucky over a lack of equitable healthcare for trans people and LGBTQ student support, and he is now a Research Fellow at the Five College Women’s Studies Research Center at Hampshire College. Their first monograph is A Queer New York: Geographies of Lesbians, Dykes, and Queers, 1983-2008 (NYU Press, 2020), and they are working on a book on dyke bars. Jack is Managing Editor of ACME: International Journal of Critical Geography. They can be found on Twitter at @jgieseking or via hiswebsite jgieseking.org.
Constellations: Limits and Inspirations of Mapping A Queer New York
Hosts
Prof. Vania Ceccato – KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Mikael Jonsson – RFSL – The Swedish Federation for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex Rights
in cooperation with
