Showing posts with label #babel15. Show all posts
Showing posts with label #babel15. Show all posts

Monday, August 17, 2015

Summer Digest 2015: Digital Publics, Diversity, Disability, Donuts

by JONATHAN HSY

[First, read all about JEFFREY's two new collaborative projects!]

 NOTE: UPDATED with a few more links on August 31, 2015.

 Summer is coming to a close and a new academic year approaches. It was productive and eventful summer for me, but the downside was I never got around to writing any new blog posts here at ITM.

In the spirit of trying new things, I present what I'm calling an ICYMI (In Case You Missed It) Summer Digest 2015: my own idiosyncratic listing of some interesting links and noteworthy things that happened over these summer months. (This list also gives you a vague sense of "What Jonathan Did Over Summer Break.")

ICMY Medievalist Summer Digest 2015


Conference Roundups:


May: International Congress on Medieval Studies, Kalamazoo, MI (#Kzoo2015):

  • This #Kzoo2015 blogroll is my earlier compilation of blog posts and links [last updated May 30]; the 2015 conference also marked the emergence of the silly but somehow oddly compelling #MedevalDonut meme. JEFFREY also played a big part in all this. (A brief resurgence of #MedievalDonut also occurred on World Donut Day; check out these tweets archived by Sjoerd Levelt!)
  • N.B. Leila K. Norako's writeup after Kalamazoo about the "Public Medievalist" roundtable and a lively session marking the 25th anniversary of the publication of Carolyn Dinshaw's Chaucer's Sexual Poetics.

June-July: The Middle Ages in the Modern World, Lincoln, UK (#MAMO15):

  • "Diverse Pedagogies of Medievalism" Roundtable (org. Helen Young). Presenters: Helen Young, Kim Wilkins, Molly Brown, Carol Robinson [virtually via recorded presentation], Dorothy Kim, and Jonathan Hsy. The full videorecording is available online (includes a link to Robinson's presentation and a link to the slides from my talk), and there's also bit more info at Medievalists.net.

July: International Medieval Congress, Leeds, UK (#IMC2015):

  • Panel of public medievalists (org. by the Grad Student Committee of the Medieval Academy of America). Presenters: Matthew Gabriele, Andrew James Johnston, and Erik Kwakkel: see Peter Konieczny's curated archive of live-tweets.
  • "Queer Manuscripts" thread: two sessions (orgs. Roberta Magnani and Diane Watt); check out Watt's archive of live-tweets from these conversations.

July: London Chaucer Conference ("Science, Magic, and Technology"), University of London, UK (#Chaucer2015):


Online Conversations and New Communities:


Public Medievalists (forum):

  • Open access (i.e., FREE) postmedieval forum on "The Public Middle Ages" (featuring Holly A. Crocker, Marion Turner, Brantley L. Bryant, Kathleen E. Kennedy, Matthew Gabriele, Bruce Holsinger, Leila K. Noriko, David Perry).

#ILookLikeAProfessor (twitter hashtag):

  • This twitter hashtag was created to combat stereotypes in academia and started a number of conversations about gender, race, class, disability, and the "public face" of university instructors and educators. Read accounts by co-creators Adeline Koh, Michelle Moravec, and Sara B. Pritchard; see also this piece by Kelly J. Baker (addressing gender as well as disability). The meme was also picked up by Buzzfeed, Colorlines, and Mashable (with a few medievalists featured each time).

The Lone Medievalist (community):

Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages (SSDMA): 

  • The SSDMA launched a Facebook group that is open to anyone interested in the study of disability, impairment, and varied modes of embodied difference in medieval culture.

Various other things (for academics on and off the tenure-track):


New Open Access Publications:


  • Interfaces: A Journal of Medieval European Literatures. Entire inaugural (2015) issue "Histories of Medieval European Literatures: New Patterns of Representation and Explanation" is available online; among a stellar international array of contributors are Simon Gaunt, Karla Mallette, and David Wallace.
  • The Medieval Globe (edited by Monica H. Green). The inaugural (2014) issue "Pandemic Disease in the Medieval World: Rethinking the Black Plague" features a range of interdisciplinary and international contributions. Green's essay on "Making the Black Death Global" is well worth your time.


Upcoming Dates and Deadlines:


  • Sep 15 (early registration ends): BABEL Meeting “Off the Books” in Toronto, ON, Oct 9-11, 2015 (featured speakers: Micha Cárdenas, Malisha Dewalt, David Gersten, Alexandra Gillespie, Randall McLeod [aka Random Cloud], Whitney Anne Trettien).
  • Oct 15-16: “The Provocative 15th Century” at the Huntington, CA (orgs. Lisa H. Cooper and Andrea Denny-Brown). Presenters: Anthony Bale, Anne Bernau, Jessica Brantley,  Lisa H. Cooper, Andrea Denny-Brown, Shannon Gayk, Alexandra Gillespie, Robert Meyer-Lee, Jenni Nuttall, Catherine Sanok, James Simpson, Daniel Wakelin).
  • Oct 30: “Futures of the Past” Conference at GWU in Washington, DC. Presenters: Kim Hall, Patricia Clare Ingham, J. Allan Mitchell, Julie Orlemanski, Coll Thrush, Henry S. Turner.

  • Nov 1 (proposals due): “Method and the Middle English Text” at UVA (plenary pairings: Alexandra Gillespie & Patricia Ingham; Andrew Cole & Kellie Robertson; Steven Justice & Emily Steiner), Charlottesville, VA, Apr 8-9, 2016.
  • Nov 1 (proposals due): “Romance in Medieval Britain” at UBC in Vancouver, BC (plenaries: Suzanne Conklin Akbari and Corinne Saunders), Aug 17-19, 2016.

  • Nov 2 (proposals due): Vagantes Grad Student Conference (including keynote by Diane Wolfthal on “Occupy the Middle Ages: Representations of Household Help”) at Rice University, Houston, TX, Feb 18-20, 2016.
  • Jan 31 (submissions welcomed from Fall 2015 term): Digital Medieval Disability Glossary, Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages (see the CFP here; if you you have difficulty reading the image file, try this link).
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Thursday, February 05, 2015

#GWDH15 and Embodied Digital Communities: Openness, Danger, Care

by JONATHAN HSY

[First read JEFFREY’s moving post about loss and spaces of care.]

GW Digital Humanities Symposium 2015: DISRUPTING DH (poster by Shyama Rajendran).
[Click image to enlarge]

Dear ITM readers: It has been a while since I wrote one of my “post-conference blog posts,” and here I’d like to offer my reflections on DISRUPTING DH: a symposium held on January 30 and organized by the GW Digital Humanities Institute, in coordination with many units/programs across George Washington University.

This event brought together activists, students, publishers, members of the public, academics, and librarians to think critically about how communities create and use digital archives and other online media. Enacting a “big tent” vision of Digital Humanities (DH), we invited speakers and participants varied in rank, gender, and background (activists, academics, grad students, para-ac and alt-ac folks) and the day as a whole deliberately centered women and people of color (including participants who in other contexts identify as queer or are involved in LGBT communities). We gave no proscriptive directions to our speakers and varied modes of presentation emerged: everything from scripted papers (with or without slideshows) to more extemporaneous remarks. Some presenters have already made their materials public (links provided throughout this posting), and the event had an active twitter presence with an engaged audience well beyond the auditorium. Note for instance this impressive archive of #GWDH15 and #DisDH tweets gathered by @alothian (Alexis Lothian) and a curated collection of tweets by @transliterature (M.W. Bychowski).[1]

Our invited speakers included medievalists who are no doubt quite familiar to this blog’s readers: ITM’s own Eileen Joy (director, punctum books), Dorothy Kim (author of some of the most widely read/shared/retweeted postings on this blog!), and Angela Bennett Segler (creator of Material Piers). Non-medievalists included Jesse Stommel (Founder, Hybrid Pedagogy), Roopika Risam (Co-Founder, Postcolonial Digital Humanities), and Suey Park (Co-Founder, Feminist Killjoys). The event also follows a recent MLA session on Disrupting the Digital Humanities with a related collection (edited by Kim and Stommel) forthcoming from punctum books.

CRITICAL SPACES

Final roundtable at #GWDH15.

The day’s events began with an overarching question: how can different kinds of people come together to transform the spaces of the ARCHIVE, CLASSROOM, and IVORY TOWER?

In my own opening remarks (with my hat on as Co-Director of the DH Institute), I echoed Dorothy and Jesse’s call to reclaim “disruption” from its (over)use in corporate culture and Silicon Valley tech circles, and I maintain that we can be observant critics of discomforting spaces that surround us. I mentioned, for instance, my own unease with the histories of locations on my own campus: a dorm formerly named “Ivory Tower,” and a performance venue that was once racially segregated. In my view, digital archives and platforms offer an opportunity to both confront the histories of such spaces and shape new kinds of open communities.

ARCHIVE. The first session featured Angela Bennett Segler on “Medium Data—Machine Reading, Manual Correction, and the End of the Archive” [check out her reflections on this session, along with her archive of session tweets] and Dorothy Kim on “Disrupting the Medieval Archive: The Ethics of Digital Archives” [her prezi presentation is now online]. On her Transliterature blog, M.W. Bychowski (doctoral candidate and former Graduate Assistant to the DH Institute) offers an excellent summary of the session:
Bennett Segler and Kim set the tone for the rest of the day by grounding the disruption of DH in social justice, the invisible labor and exploitation of women, people of color, and other under-paid, under-publicized radical librarians who have been leaders in the movement to digital archives but have since been erased as institutions, directors and users who recode these projects as typically white male spaces. This is perhaps not surprising, notes Bennett Segler, “today’s revolution is tomorrow's institution” but this domesticating of women of color's digital labor can be resisted. Kim added that by refusing to see archives as a politically “neutral space” of universal access we can redirect social and financial capital back towards the exploited and forgotten progenitors who continue to revolutionize the field and disrupt the digital humanities.
As Dorothy notes in her posting on “divergent bodies” on ITM (and also in her excellent posting on twitter ethics), no archive is neutral and users are not always benevolent (in her talk and in the ITM posting, she notes the harassment that the @medievalpoc tumblr blogger has received from internet users who resist anything but a “monochrome” view of the historical past). Digital spaces—even medievalist ones—can invite trolls, harassment, and abuse, and we must explicitly prioritize the safety of our various communities, digital and embodied. [Just yesterday, Twitter CEO Dick Costolo admitted that “we suck at dealing with abuse” (particularly harassment and threats directed at women) and we’ll see how the company addresses this.]

 CLASSROOM. This session turned to digital pedagogy and public humanities. Jesse Stommel’s “Stand and Unfold Yourself: MOOCs, Networked Learning, and the Digital Humanities” offered a preview of a MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) on “Shakespeare in Community.” This endeavor seeks to “invert” the MOOC by not thinking along the lines of a “sage on the stage” (one professor, bazillion students) but rather setting the stage for dispersed authority (expertise arising from varied experiences of students, actors, poets, academics, enthusiasts). A clear point from Jesse’s talk was that we must not police the boundaries of “what counts” as DH. Roopika Risam’s “Toward a Postcolonial Digital Pedagogy” considered how even more conventional classrooms can also crowdsource knowledge (her example was students creating on online map-based Cultural Atlas of Global Blackness). While the content and presentation styles in this session were quite distinct, a few shared themes emerged. Both speakers agreed that teaching can mean abdicating your own authority and letting expertise emerge from students, and discomfort (on the part of the teacher and students alike) can be a productive pedagogical tool.

 IVORY TOWER. The final pairing of the day included Eileen Joy who offered a forceful case for “The Importance of Illegitimacy.” In her artfully stylized talk, Eileen reflected on the need for independent “out-stitutions” and publishers (including open access venues) that can create new forums and new intellectual publics. In making a call to change a culture of authority into a shared ethics of care, her talk anticipated an intimate presentation by Suey Park. In “Theorizing Transformative Justice in a Digital Era,” Park not only revealed how activist communities can themselves engage in behavior that is bullying, controlling, or abusive; she also worked through racialized language of "toxicity" that has been used to describe activists and women of color on twitter, and she stressed the need to create online communities whose members safeguard each other and foster transformative (rather than reparative) justice. One of the most intriguing aspects of this pairing of speakers was how both talks revealed the intertwining potential of creation and destruction. In her remarks introducing Suey, my wonderful colleague and poet Jennifer Chang likened Park to a lyric poet, observing that tweets are an expressive and constrained form—beautiful, and dangerous.

The concluding roundtable including all the presenters was co-moderated by me and Lori Brister, founder of the DH Graduate Working Group at GW. The discussion quickly reoriented itself toward students (especially graduate students being cultivated as the “future” of the profession), considering the structural inequalities and constraints many DH folks can face. How do we remain committed to our various causes or “labors of love,” and how do we also address the realities of uncompensated labor or inequalities inherent in our various spaces?

COMPASSION, CARE, FUTURES

Conclusion of #GWDH15: roundtable participants conversing with audience.

I end with an observation about #GWDH15 from doctoral student Alan Montroso, who blogged from his experience as an audience member:
Although I had to miss the presentations by Jesse Stommel and Roopika Risam, it was a pleasure to see Stommel lead the collective of speakers out of their chairs during the roundtable discussion and onto the edge of the stage, thereby breaking the fourth wall that marked their bodies as authoritative and their space as exclusive. This act evidenced a real commitment to the democratization of information that each of the speakers desires, as well as the group’s willingness to relinquish the power granted them by the Academy – at least temporarily. Sure, the act was rather symbolic, but it was a risk nonetheless, and one which underscores the precariousness of our field and the digital humanities as a sub-discipline.
One of the aspects of #GWDH15 that will stick with me for some time were its moments of disturbance and discomfort. In the discussions that have unfolded in person and online (note JEFFREY’s public Facebook thread, for instance), I’ve been thinking a lot about how “breaking the fourth wall” (via blogging, tweeting, or otherwise putting oneself “out there” through publication or presentations) can be an empowering experience—but it can also make a person vulnerable. I do hope that our medievalist/academic/etc. spaces will increasingly become ones where we all feel safe and can be more adventurous.

CALL TO ACTION

The call for sessions at the next BABEL gathering (“Off the Books” in Toronto in October) has been extended to February 15, and the New Chaucer Society (NCS) Congress in London 2016 is now accepting submissions by April 15—and it’s very exciting to note that NCS includes some bold, risky options.[2] As the ITM community thinks ahead to these events, I hope we can all be more mindful of “divergent bodies” (to use Dorothy Kim’s coinage) moving through our professional / personal / public / digital environments. How can we be the change we want to see in the world?

I’m so very gratified that ITM has become a venue not only for talking about “medieval things” but also a way to provoke attentive, earnest conversations about what it means to be in medias res (“in the middle of things”)—to live with others in real life and also in variously mediated digital spheres.

If I can end this blog post with my own “call to action,” I’d just say this: let’s try to take more risks with how we think about our materials, experiment with writing styles and presentation formats, and carefully consider how we perform in our shared spaces. If you’re in a position of power (tenured professor, administrator, mentor, advisor, trustee, benefactor, journal editor, chair, peer reviewer, hiring committee member, the list goes on), support and defend people who take risks and chart different paths. Let’s create conditions where we can move out of our comfort zones and re-code what it means to work in/alongside/outside of humanist communities.




[1] For a summary of events note M.W. Bychowski’s overview on the GW English blog (with other links) and a more detailed summary on her Transliterature blog.
[2] Katie Walter and I are co-organizing the “Corporealities” thread at NCS which includes a number of great collaborative endeavors.
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Friday, October 31, 2014

Medieval Studies, Sexual Harassment, and Community Accountability

by DOROTHY KIM [Guest Posting]

[More post-BABEL postings (including more SCALE presentations) are to come! Meanwhile, check out this important posting from Dorothy Kim (twitter: @dorothyk98) with suggestions on how we can collectively create a better future for medieval studies.]

Medieval Studies, Sexual Harassment, and Community Accountability

After my last In the Middle post, I had a number of people reach out to me with stories about similar things happening at medieval conferences in regards to racial, gender, and disability microaggressions. In other words, my colleague’s public encounter was a normal part of the lives of certain divergent medievalists. On the interwebs, I also had several people tell me stories about other things that happen at conferences that I have decided to write about in this post. A number of female junior medievalists (graduate student and junior tenure-track and non-tenure track faculty) have told me that certain conferences have become the hunting ground for male, white-cishetero men. What I mean by this is that there have been witnessed incidents of sexual harassment happening at medieval conferences. Though conferences alone are not the only space where this happens. I think we have all witnessed sexual harassment at medieval talks, seminars, and in other professional spaces.  

In particular, all this was brought to my attention because at the New Chaucer Society conference in Reykjavik, a certain male, white, cishetero faculty member (who is also married) has been sexually harassing junior female medievalists at conferences in front of witnesses. Apparently, he did this at the previous New Chaucer Society in Portland and he struck again in Reykjavik. NCS is not the only conference that this has been happening, but I call on organizers—NCS, BABEL, MAA, Leeds, Kalamazoo, etc.—to seriously consider what their resources, statements, and consequences are for these events.

Feminism and Silence

In this great written piece in THE, the author writes: “As I learned intimately during my doctoral studies, the university is an intensely hierarchical space, and students are structurally positioned to seek the approval of the academic staff to whom they are entrusted. This makes students vulnerable to abuses of that power.” There are power dynamics and power abuses at play in sexual harassment in academic spaces. But the point is and what angers me the most is why must students and junior colleagues—often the most vulnerable and with the least resources in these situations—be the one who must fight to change the harassing and toxic environment? Why must they be the ones to do all the labor (both emotional, bureaucratic, and eventually legal) to call out, fix, and address these situations? Why is there so much silence? Our silence is not helping the victims nor creating accessible, safe spaces. The author of the THE further points out that “Secrecy did not protect me or the other women. It didn’t even protect the university management. The only person it protected was the professor, whose years of abuse were hidden from the public eye.” [Read the entire opinion piece HERE.] It is time to take it out of the closet, to air it out, to give it sunshine and let others hear and see. It is time to stop protecting the abusers.

Codes of Conduct and Only the Beginning

This issue of sexual harassment at conferences is not new—it has surfaced in mainstream media in relation to women at tech conferences. A very recent issue of ModelViewCulture looks at Codes of Conduct at Events and issues surrounding inclusive events. I encourage everyone planning to organize anything to read that issue.

Closer to home, there has also been an ongoing discussion amongst librarians because Joseph Murphy (@libraryfuture) is suing two librarians for libel to the tune of $1.25 million dollar in the Canadian courts. Nina de Jesus @satifice and Lisa Rabey chose to speak out against sexual harassment at library conferences (which eventually may have gotten the ALA to revamp their Code of Conduct statements). You can read more about this HERE and here and HERE. Nina de Jesus and Lisa Rabey have a funded site for donations for their legal defense and a call for witnesses to stand up: http://teamharpy.wordpress.com. Likewise, someone has organized a change.org petition asking Joseph Murphy to withdraw the lawsuit. I have already signed the petition. Nina de Jesus is a writing colleague of mine from ModelViewCulture and is also a DH Projects librarian. You can follow what is happening with them and this lawsuit at #teamharpy on Twitter.

Medieval Studies and Sexual Harassment

Several victims and witnesses have identified this serial sexual harasser. I will not name names here on this blog because I do not have the permission of any of my sources to divulge nor have I been the victim of sexual harassment at NCS. However, the problem with whisper networks is that in the end it allows the continued behavior to happen with no consequences. Likewise, recent events in Canada have been a conversation-starter on Facebook. Alexandra Gillespie recently posted a Facebook post about the Jian Ghomeshi firing at CBC. [EDITED on November 2 to indicate that thread is no longer public; instead the conversation can continue in the comments section below.] The commentary on that post speaks to a long, persistent history of sexual harassment in medieval studies spaces. As with many things I have written more publically, it’s time to break this silence, this medieval whisper network that tells particularly junior women and graduate students who are the sexual harassers in our field. I encourage people who want a community conversation to either post on Alexandra Gillespie’s public post on Facebook that already has numerous narratives being shared among female medievalists. I also call anyone who feels more comfortable with Twitter to use #medievaltwitter to share their stories of harassment at medieval academic events. We need to begin by speaking about what is happening. We have all been witnesses, heard, and or been victims.

Steps Conference Organizers Can Take

My question now is what should conference organizers and societies do about this? I have dug around the NCS website, there is no Code of Conduct on there anywhere about what the standards are for conferences in general (though feel free to correct me anyone if I just missed it). I would strongly suggest that all societies who have conferences write Codes of Conduct, but write ones with some bite. I will also say that though the Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship has never run its own conference, I will ask that an agenda item on Codes of Conduct be put on our Advisory Board Meeting for Kalamazoo 2015.

What I mean by this is that serial sexual harassers are not going to stop harassing young women at conferences unless there are consequences. NCS moves around the world every two years. Conference attendees show up, often foreign shores, at unfamiliar conference sites. There is no clear delineation of resources in relation to what happens when sexual harassment, sexual assault, violent assault happen at a conference. Along with a clear set of resources, conference organizers must be clear about conduct expectations and then what the rules are if these expectations are broken.

Nina de Jesus’s post on transformative justice addresses many of what we can do beyond Step 1—breaking the silence. Code of Conducts must be victim-centered at all times. This is one of the biggest steps our communities must address. As she points out in her post (I, not Nina, have bolded key sections): 
Frameworks and clear support for victims. One of the reasons why situations like this continue, despite the offender being known, is that, within our communities (both libraries and beyond), there is little-to-no support for victims and/or survivors. I don’t only mean support in terms of victim services (although these are important as well), but even the very minimal support of the benefit of the doubt. 
The problem with habitual abusers/harassers is that they tend to know exactly what sorts of things they can get away with. They know who to target. They know that, even if their targets voice their experiences, that the victim will be doubted (and blamed) or that, in the absence of ‘proof’, nothing much will come of it. And, importantly, they know how to engage in their abusive, harassing, and potentially illegal behaviour in ways that leave very little evidence behind.
The NCS’s known serial harasser in the whisper network of junior women has consistently harassed young junior women medievalists. These things are about power, opportunity, and a lack of consequences because sexual predators know they can get away with this behavior. If we want conferences and particularly NCS to be a safe space for all, more has to be done to support victims and call out this behavior. Nina de Jesus points out in her post that the gender statistics in fields does not necessarily mean anything: the harassment is happening in library studies (a field filled predominantly with women).

A transformative justice, community accountability, and victim-centered approach also means conference organizers have to stop imagining that “proof” is actually an issue. As Nina de Jesus eloquently writes:   
Many people think that these situations boil down to ‘he said/she said’ and that we can just really never ‘know’ what actually happened. Of course, this generally means giving tacit approval for the predator to continue abusing and harassing people. 
In case people have forgotten, we are neither the police nor the judicial system. We do not have to adhere to their evidentiary requirements. We do not have to assume innocence. We don’t have to build a ‘case’ against someone. We don’t, in actual fact, require ‘proof’ that would hold up in a court of law. We don’t need to gather evidence and conduct investigations.
This is about community accountability. Holding abusers/predators accountable to the community and holding the community accountable to itself.
So as a medieval community, I am calling on you to hold your colleagues accountable. Otherwise, your silence is tacit permission for sexual harassment and abuse to continue in these academic spaces.

If talking about it, getting it out in the open, not having it as a whisper network secret is the first step then step two requires concerted efforts for a victim-centered approach that at its bedrock is about community accountability.

Nina de Jesus’s community accountability post outlines exactly what these steps look like.  

1. Victim-Centered means actually supporting the victim.

•    “Don’t ask for ‘proof’.
•    Don’t treat ‘both sides of the story’ as if they hold equal weight.
•    Do not engage in any type of victim blaming behaviour.
Listen to the victim. Do it. And don’t judge.”

2. We need Codes of Conducts that are enacted when people break professional boundaries. 

There is no point writing such statements without actually making sure they are actionable. What are the consequences? What is the follow through for these consequences?

Her post makes excellent examples and I am sure conference committees and come up with other ones:
Did a woman just report getting sexually harassed? Eject the man from the conference. Don’t ‘ask’ him to stop. Eject him and let him know that he can try again next year. Did a presenter just make a racist joke?Stop the presentation. Call it out. If this manages to derail the talk (eg., the presenter gets defensive and is unwilling to apologize), then the talk is over. Does someone have a reputation for being a sexual predator? STOP INVITING THEM TO SPEAK. Essentially: hold people accountable for the harm that they cause. 
She concludes with this great point: 
The thing is, is that if we don’t hold people accountable for small, seemingly innocuous (microagressions anyone?) behaviour, we give them tacit permission to escalate this behaviour. If people are held accountable for their bad behaviour it also gives them a chance to learn and grow and (hopefully) stop behaving that way. If accountability becomes normalized, instead of silently accepting that abuse and harassment are something that we just need to grin and bear, then accountability doesn’t have to be this big boogeyman. It also doesn’t need to mean that a person’s reputation and career are ruined.
Because if accountability is what gets normalized, then we’ll all eventually have this experience (since there are no perfect people).
NCS London 2016 is a little over 2 years away. That is plenty of time to draft a code of conduct, get information out about resources, and set up victim-centered, community accountability measures. Inform your panel moderators, explain and give them training on addressing moments when the Code of Conduct is violated. I would also suggest that societies and conference organizers make sure that all conference organizers are appropriately trained in regards to sexual harassment and sexual assault. We must take responsibility for what happens in our communal academic spaces.

I have been asked and have agreed to be a part of organizing the BABEL Conference for 2015 in Toronto. So, yes, expect a Code of Conduct, expect victim-centered, community accountability, and transformative justice as a major component in organizing this conference. Feel free to send me your thoughts on anything via email (dokim@vassar.edu) or Twitter (@dorothyk98). I hope #medievaltwitter and the Facebook comment area can be a space where we can  discuss what kind of medieval community we want for the future.


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