ASPECTS
university, equality, inclusivity, politics
TEAM
Gue Hyun Lee, Arto Schudy
YEAR
2023-24
ABTRACT
As part of Studiengruppe Informationsdesign’s (SI) WiSe23/24 project “Weltoffene Hochschule?”, our subproject “BURG IS SOOO GERMAN” critically questions the internationality and openness of our school. We decided on this approach based on the wish to make clear that the problems of international students, and those perceived as such, don’t take place on the individual level but that they affect everyone because they are caused by structural issues at the school. Our intention is both to create awareness about this among the majority group at our school who don’t suffer from these problems and to empower those who do.
We chose a participatory process, setting up a weekly conversation series where experiences can be shared in a trustful setting, because we wanted to investigate the problems as well as we could and to speak from their perspective in order to amplify their voices. In total, we held around 15 conversations with international students, ranging from 30min - 2hours, taking as much time as was needed for everyone to freely express and explore what they wanted to say. We then collected these voices, anonymized them and evaluated the material. There have been no content changes to the quotes, and the original tone was preserved. We only made cuts and smaller changes to increase understandability.
As a communication method, we chose to create a poster campaign to make these voices as visible as possible. Here, a bold neon was chosen to catch the eye, interrupted by a silver structure, symbolizing the school making way for marginalized voices. Next to the posters we created a corresponding website, which is available to be accessed with the tablet and the computer on the desk or by scanning the QR codes with your phones. The website aims to collect the posters, document our process, but also show an archive of a lot more student voices than what we were able to include on the posters. All of the quotes in our campaign have been consented for publishing by the students, with the hope of getting heard.
These voices reveal the problems of systemic and social exclusion, a language barrier, discrimination, and racism at our school. Examples of things that are missing are safe spaces and support systems, a culture of critical self-questioning, diversity of teachers, and sufficient anti-discrimination structures. We invite you to read through these quotes and view this body of student voices as a source, on which discussions around change should be built.
With our campaign we are addressing everyone at our school, hoping to create awareness about these problems and about the urgent need for structural change. Through this, we hope to constructively contribute to the conversation around change that is currently starting to be recognized due to the recent development at our school.
FILES
