Queer University is a forthcoming educational organization that provides virtual and face-to-face classrooms where faculty and students can critically preserve and transmit knowledge within an academic world that centers LGBTQ+ perspectives. We offer classes across disciplines, and strive for new ways of creating, learning, and listening to enact a world free from homophobia and other forms of oppression. We are a queer organization that champions people of diverse sexual orientations and gender identities, and a world where inclusive policies and practices through intersectional justice frameworks are the norm. We are guided by five principles:

 

·  Question the exclusion of LGBTQ+ contributions to all fields of study;

·  Unite isolated LGBTQ+ students and allies;

·  Educate all on the contributions of LGBTQ voices;

·  Empower the broader LGBTQ+ community and engage diversity within;

·  Restore health and develop resilience for LGBTQ+ populations.

 

At Queer University, we aim to create an educational space that unifies transformational queer theory with embodied practice. Queer University battles the erasure of queer histories by creating a space that resists existing power structures and a world that incubates the possibility of a place that is entirely queer, inclusive, and safe. We hope to bring forth connectivity—linking bodies, culture, and history. Our pedagogical passion draws from liberatory education frameworks.

 

“…[T]he classroom becomes a dynamic place where transformations in social relations are concretely actualized and the false dichotomy between the world outside and the inside world of academia disappears.” (bell hooks, 1994, Teaching to Transgress, p195).