Heike Pantelmann is Managing Director of the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She holds a doctorate in business administration. Her fields of work are the internationalization of gender studies and gender and diversity in teaching. Her research interests lie in the following topics: sexual harassment in higher education contexts; gender order/gender relations, power and control in organizations.

Panel “Uni_Diversity”: Somewhere between Safe and Brave Spaces: Fighting Sexualized Harassment and Violence in German Academia

28th May 03.30 – 05.00 pm | Sabina García Peter / Heike Pantelmann / Annelot Prins / Tanja Wälty

Sexualised harassment and violence is an impressively good example to illustrate the problems that universities have to implement diversity policies: It is a topic that is tabooed, normalized and silenced and has also been repeatedly removed from the diversity agenda in a way that makes it non-performative (Ahmed, 2012). Deep-rooted dynamics of "hympathy" (Manne, 2019) maintain androcentric structures and make persons at the bottom of the university power hierarchy very vulnerable. In recent years, students in Latin America have confronted the male dominance in academia with creative bottom-up protests and interventions, such as the "Clothesline" (El Tendedero), inspired by the work of the Mexican artist Mónica Mayer. We will bring this intervention to the conference to initiate a practice of collective reflection on SHV and use the chance to invite participants to share testimonies anonymously with us: https://bit.ly/3jtW8Wk