Last week, coinciding with the Thabitha Khumalo Dignity! Period speaker tour, I was all over the country meeting with Women’s Officers and women student activists! It was awesome.

We started in the North at Sheffield, then at Lufbra in the Mids, down to Kings College London and finally at Sussex University in the South.

I met with women’s officers from HE and FE and we discussed policy, our campaigns, how we can help each other in our regions, and how I could support individual women and Women’s Officers with specific problems and campaigns on their campuses.

At each events we wrote some policy on a variety of issues from sexism in Higher Education to harassment in SU nightclubs. I’m just getting all of those policies typed up ready to be uploaded onto the Women’s Campaign website in the brand new POLICY FILE!!! This will be a bank of sample policies on a variety of issues that Women’s Officers can access if they want to pass some policy in their own Unions. Basically we’ve got better things to do with our woman hours than reinventing the wheel all the time.

I was very interested to hear about all the individual priorities and problems that Women’s Officers were facing across the country. One woman from Birkbeck Uni came along to discuss a very concerning problem. She was saying that in her course (Philosophy), there are hardly any texts written by women on the syllabus. She has made a complaint but has been told that they are studying the cannon and unfortunately there just aren’t that many women writers in there. What a surprise. The problem is though, that once again courses and syllabuses are re-writing women out of education, out of contemporary academic thought, and out of history. This must be addressed! Feminist thought must never be written out of any course because feminist discourses articulate vital perspectives on sexism within all areas of academic thought, and because patriarchy is hegemonic in every system we have - especially academia! So I was thinking about the Gender Duty and it’s role within Higher Education and Further Education and I have decided that something about this needs to be put to our Vice Chancellors and College Principals. I have a plan. Watch this space!

On route I stopped off at Goldsmiths (Thabitha was speaking there) and found out about one of their priority campaigns this year (obv other than Admission Impossible!!!!!!!!!!) which is about childcare and student parents. It’s amazing! Basically there are loads of aspects to the campaign but I think that some of the best bits about it simply mean that student parents are able to represent themselves within their Union for maybe the first time ever! Clearly, this therefore means that student parents’ issues are being articulated and taken up by Goldsmiths Union. Anyway, I’m going to make a good-practise sharing briefing thing and send it around the place cos I think it’s a really brilliant model that other Union’s would love to hear about and hopefully implement.

The policy bank and the regional events are just part of a wider agenda that Women’s Committee have this year to build and organise our campaign.

Thank you to everybody who came to the regional events, and I hope that we continue to build on them. The next time we do them in January (to launch the Women at Work Campaign which is literally going to be awesome) I hope there’ll be even more of you there!

And a special thank you to Jo Dawson (Women’s Committee) who held up the South Women’s Regional Event as I was too unwell to go (boo hoo!). She was amazing – as are all the committee! Thank you Jo.

Laters feministas,

Kat

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