Tanja Wälty is a research associate in the research project "Sexualized Harassment, Discrimination, and Violence in the Context of Higher Education" at the Margherita von Brentano Center for Gender Studies at Freie Universität Berlin. She wrote her doctoral dissertation as part of the International Research Training Group "Between Spaces" of the Institute for Latin American Studies at Freie Universität on the topic of bodies and body politics in the female punk movement of Mexico City. Her main research topics are sexualized violence, body and body politics, feminisms, social movements, and punk

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.

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