Dr Ina Linge from the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies, speaks to Catherine Hurcombe about her experience of public engagement, relating 20th century sexuality studies to modern audiences.
CH: To start off with, would you like to introduce yourself?
IL: My name is Dr Ina Linge. I’m Associate Professor of German, gender and sexuality studies in the Department of Languages, Cultures and Visual Studies. My research at the University focuses on the production of sexual knowledge in the early 20th century in the German speaking world and its contemporary relevance.
CH: With your research engaging with a particular geography and period of history, what drove you to bring public engagement into it?
IL: I got into it during my PhD, working with researchers at the Humboldt University, engaging with the history of Jewish collectors of objects of sexuality. So it was through that work, curating a small exhibition for the general public, that’s how I started. It’s a mixture of traditional routes into public engagement, and opportunity. Also networking, inspiration and previous scholarship.
CH: When you’re engaging with publics, how do community perspectives influence your work, particularly hearing people’s lived experience of gender and sexuality?
IL: In the period I look at, there were LGBTQ+ communities that were more visible than in other periods in German history. These communities fought for their rights and experimented with a new language to describe themselves, their identities and relationships. LGBTQ+ audiences today often recognise the parallels to topics and discussions that are happening today. There is almost this community memory, and understanding yourself as part of that longer history. I don’t think it’s always that difficult to explain the relevance; audiences really get that.
For one of the projects that I worked on, the podcast Adventures in Time and Gender, we presented our research to trans and non-binary young people from Gendered Intelligence. One of the things that we brought to them was during this period there were all these different concepts about gender and sexuality, lots of different categories. And we thought this massive categorization is just a way of controlling and making it more scientific, and medicalising communities. Whereas the young people thought actually was really liberating and really exciting to have words to describe yourself and ways to connect. So that was really eye opening for us. It was sort of something that we didn’t bring.
Something I also find challenging is that working with universities can be really alienating for certain community groups, or other partners who are not academics, because the university holds power in a way other people don’t have access to. It’s really important to figure out how each partner deals with that. Something that I’m trying to do is have exploratory conversations with partners about what they see in a collaboration; what they want to get out of it. I have put some of that together in a blog post on our Queer Natures website as a sort of cheat sheet.
Another challenge is even getting that public engagement funded. When you work with minoritized groups, or want to do in-depth work, you can’t engage with a million people.
CH: Last question, what would your advice be for anyone looking to get involved in public engagement for the first time? Particularly people who are looking at specific periods of history or social contexts, and bringing that to modern audiences.
IL: It’s always good to start small and not try and do everything. It’s something that you have to build up slowly, so get to know your partners, and figure out what their needs are, and use that as an experimental first stage.
It’s good to have a rough idea of what you want to get out of it, but to be flexible enough that you might get something completely different out of it. And that would actually make your project more interesting!