Edinburgh University cuts ‘queer’ honours course a week after teaching starts

[Igneococcus]

I do wonder how many students actually did sign up for this:
https://www.thetimes.com/article/16f1a83b-48fc-4882-a6e6-811bca0bc231?shareToken=cbb8ae547b2d37c8972c7da351bed548

I wasn’t being rude-I just didn’t understand your comment. Yes, of course there are lots of other courses. I just think we need to be wary of allowing the low hanging fruit to be culled. Universities should be facilitating risk taking and exploration. I mean, it does sound like a bit of a bollocks course. But maybe allowing the study of it will help young people learn to recognise bollocks when they see it?

Yes you were.

Some new definition of the word “rude” that I have previously not come across. Fair enough.

Well I wasn’t expecting the School of Geosciences.

Geography is a fascinating, wide ranging and useful subject. This is just stupid.

I don't think that an Anthropology/Human Geography module about sexual orientation, cultural gender norms, and cross-sex gender expression would lack value, and there's plenty of material to work on (any aliens studying us right now must be having a field day). But them calling it queer makes me think it would be relentlessly focussed through the lens of RightThink.

I wonder what the offered course actually was.

http://www.drps.ed.ac.uk/25-26/dpt/cxgegr10141.htm

Martin Zebracki, chair of the Space, Sexualities and Queer Research Group at the Royal Geographical Society, said: “This type of course would help students understand the processes of social marginalisation, including in relation to legislation, and encourage students to consider how social norms could be challenged — not only in theory but also in everyday life. Courses like this really seek to develop critical thinkers of the future.”

But I wonder exactly how much critical thinking would have been tolerated.

On completion of this course, the student will be able to:
Have a firm understanding of the theoretical perspectives and underpinnings of queer and trans geographies, and how sexuality and gender are operationalised as a means of spatial analysis.
Apply a critical analysis to structures of power that manifest in diverse contexts of sexualised and gendered geographies, including heteronormative and cisnormative spaces.
Grasp how race, colonialism, class, and geopolitics shape sexuality and gender in different geographical and world settings.
Be able to interpret the diverse ways that sexuality and gender are enacted in everyday spaces and processes of placemaking.
Appreciate the role of sexuality and gender as elements of human geographical thought, study, and knowledge production.

Word salad.

cisnormative

Maybe Edinburgh need to critically, and self-reflexively, consider the imposition of concepts of gender through university course descriptions?

I think this has the makings of an interesting unit. Social marginalised is obviously linked to geography - 'the wrong side of the tracks' and all that - so class is an issue. The other big issue is sex. Or gender, since it's a university🙄
The design - or gradual development over time - of towns and cities has not involved women, or women's interests or safety. The idea of re-thinking urban environments so they take the 'other' half of the population into consideration would fit well into:

Be able to interpret the diverse ways that sexuality and gender are enacted in everyday spaces and processes of placemaking.

-but only if they replace 'sexuality and gender' with 'sex.

There might well be an interesting niche area of research into how sexuality and gender are 'enacted in everyday spaces', but the glaringly obvious issue is how women are not 'enacted in everyday spaces' .

This just reminded me that Edi had plans to turn itself into a "feminist city". I wonder how that is going
https://www.thetimes.com/article/8448faf0-0c40-4cc4-ba31-8cb81f9c647b?shareToken=a37b29c118c1eeaa88b34034a851f1d8

Back in the day when the world was young and I still had a waist, I used to volunteer on the local Lesbian Line. In between the more harrowing, serious clients by far the most frequent calls were from first year students, freshly landed in our fair city and wanting to know where the other lesbians were. If we were still running now I'd obviously have to pass this module or something like it before I could arrange a chaperoned meet-up in the Forest Tavern or let them know when the lesbian socials were on at the Women's Centre. Life was much simpler then..

Written by ChatGPT…

That course spec is full of ideological claptrap. In a sane world it would never have got through university validation processes - heck, in a sane world it would never have been proposed in the first place.

The axing of the course this year may be a complete non-story - as others have said, it's not unusual for courses to be cancelled if there's insufficient sign-ups in any one year. I remember it happening when I was doing my degree in the 90s. What would be more newsworthy is if a pattern emerges where the nonsense ideologically-driven courses get cancelled every year and become unviable, leading to them disappearing altogether due to lack of student interest. The so-called academics who teach them would then have to find something else to do, and stop peddling their ideology and calling it education. I haven't seen anything to indicate that's happening. This one instance could, hopefully, be a step in the right direction, but time will tell.

But they wouldn't be allowed to meet today. If you had the audacity to suggest where women could meet other women there'd be men in dresses there insisting they were lesbians and you're a bigot for asking them to leave.

To be honest those men in dresses were at least partly responsible for the closure of some of those venues back then, too. Obviously economics and changing politics haven't helped, but my local Women's Centre proudly announced that TWAW in about 1998, and an awful lot of us voted with our feet and haven't been back since.

Surely it's just a module/unit that's not running this year as @Fgfgfg said? The article says as much. Talk of 'cutting' it is being dramatic. Though I do hope the reading list includes Invisible Women.

Back in Ye Olden Days, where the word 'gender' was often used as a polite way of saying 'sex', modules on 'geography and gender' were really important in Human Geography. A friend of mine who was very into it (& who knew I was both a feminist and a (physical) geographer) explained it in terms of spotting the way cities and towns had been designed in a way that excluded or marginalised women, particularly those who were staying at home to look after children, and improving urban design to reduce that exclusion/marginalisation. To pick an example from further back in history, the urinary leash - tying women to being within walking distance of home so they could get back to the toilet - would have been an issue of feminist geography, because it concerns urban design and the way in which this impacts differently on people with male bodies compared to people with female bodies (or 'men' and 'women' as we used to be able to call them). So IN PRINCIPLE the idea of a module that looks at sexual orientation and geography seems reasonable. But, personally, I hate the use of 'queer' in this context, mainly because it is a word I knew as an insult so hate using it but also because it is also increasingly a word that means 'LGB or spicy straight', which is meaningless.

Yes, I initially thought of the importance of sex on geography too. One of my favourite examples of looking at feminism and urban geography is how bus routes are designed.

Most bus routes assume that a person wants to go from one location (home) to another (work), so the routes tend to go like spokes in a wheel, from suburbs into centre. However women are more likely to need to do multiple short journeys to drop children at school / childcare, possibly get shopping, before heading on to another location (home / work), so the spoke system doesn't work for them, and can result in them needing to journey inwards to journey outwards.

It's new to me and it made me chuckle! I hope your daughter shines brightly in her niche.

Thanks, Pachacutis, she is doing great, she's in her final (4th, at a Scottish university) year and loves what she is doing. She is also an ace barrista, so there is a back up plan.

Oh that blurb gave me 'Nam - style flashbacks. It looks like a 20-credit module i.e. one fifth of a single year 3 or 4 of an undergrad degree. Very probably one of the optional modules. It could easily be that the person offering the option is hourly paid and not returning because of the financial cuts or has to teach something else for the same reason.

There's no reason degrees shouldn't include elements of what you might call fun weird shit i.e. philosophy, theory and pop politics. But the problem IME was that everything became weird shit. Students love it - it's a lot more congenial extemporising on weird shit than learning how to conduct a viable empirical study or reading the founding scholars of your discipline.

Love the reading list. 'The tyranny of gendered spaces: reflections from beyond the gender dichotomy.' would once have been a sideways read, before serious people started actually enacting the weird.

Absolutely this.

The word “queer” has been reclaimed, donchaknow! But usually, IME, by straight, middle-class people who want to make out they’re experiencing oppression.