Problems can be addressed in an institutionalized manner, and people can be held accountable for working through problems in a constructive manner. That is to say, beyond acknowledging the problems of access that an institution currently faces and validating the hard work that people are putting into trying to create more inclusive and equitable learning environments, one can actually work to dismantle the very real, structural, and institutional barriers to access that exist. This means to go beyond naming the problems of an institution, and to challenge deeply rooted institutional norms that serve to further marginalize already marginalized groups of people. True service to humanity, in essence, is to put the most vulnerable at the center of one’s work, and not to make one’s work the most comfortable.

An outline of paternalistic saviorism has been sketched which silently infantilizes university students in order to conceal university failure. The paternalistic university appears to be caring for its students in order to protect them from themselves within a discriminatory hostile environment. Instead of enabling students to be liberated from structures of oppression by the university, the queer students are enabled by the university in order to be rescued by a savior from themselves. Their problems are individualized in order to hide the fact that the hostile environment of the university is producing these problems in the first place. In this way, the agency of the students is taken away from them.

To shed light on how safety has in the past been used to monitor and control, it is important to draw a line between protection and policing within institutional support structures. The lives of queer people in the past were policed and regulated within the framework of so-called ‘support’ of safety. Thus, universities as centers of progressive education could support their queer students, but at the same time also delimit their scope of action and exclude them by putting up further barriers of care. The same pattern of failure that has in the past been concealed by administrative gestures of solidarity, should not be covered up by similar gestures at our university today.

Institutional failure creates an institutional Catch-22. Initially reluctant concessions to change are seen as an end in themselves, revealing the initial failure in the provision that was not included from the start. Such concessions to change are then strictly controlled in order to prevent a loss of power. The forced exposure of institutional failure is ultimately the only way to reveal the hypocrisy of institutions that expose their weaknesses but demand real accountability for their mistakes.

For centuries, queerness has been portrayed in such a way as to be pathological, giving false scientific legitimacy to deep-rooted prejudice. A prime example of this is queerness being constructed as an illness, where there is a misconception that there is something medically wrong with an individual and that this deviance can be linked to moral failing and to pre-existing negative stereotypes towards queerness. This stigmatization has had serious consequences, legitimizing the passing of discriminatory laws, enabling the practice of so-called ‘conversion therapies’ and queerness’ persecution from mainstream society. Looking at the past is key to realizing how clinical language has been used in order to condemn individuals who do not conform to ‘normal’ ways of life.

Why this matters to me: This is a really powerful historical assessment of repression on university campuses. Most people’s perception of university campuses today is that they are progressive spaces and “safe spaces” for students but this historical account really reveals the sites of university campuses as sites of marginalization and repression rather than not. This piece will allow for an assessment of the extent to which historical sites of trauma have yet to be unpacked on university campuses and how that campus climate shapes the perspectives of current and past faculty and administrators as well as current students in order to provide a really powerful lens through which to view current marginalization on university campuses.

Using ‘how is queer?’ as a lens through which to view research transforms the entire process of research from categorizing human beings into boxes and labeling them to examining the systems, the binaries and the language that create the oppression in the first place (heterosexual/homosexual, male/female etc). This way of viewing research leads to the use of critical, post-structuralist methodologies.

"Flushing out" is a very telling phrase in this context. It is a very brutal phrase which reveals the very brutal logic of an institution's need to purify, to get rid of the queer contaminant. That the university is using the language of sanitation to talk about how they are going to find this queer student, and then flush him out, is a very telling commentary on the university's active role in violence in order to purify the campus of the “other” in order to maintain the illusion of a pure, heteronormative space. The shame is always on the suspected not the suspector. This institution is filled with such deep-seated shame and desperation to cleanse itself of difference.

Describing representation is not neutral; it is participation. By providing a list of ways in which queer people are represented in literature, the researcher acts as a kind of curator of established narratives in studies of representation. In this way, the researcher decides which stories of representation will be studied in any given study of representation. The act of describing, in itself, reinforces the hierarchies of study (who will be represented how) and of visibility (whose representation will be more visible than others), and the description of the representation of queer people reinforces the perception that the existence of some people is simply not worth documenting. Or at least that what I think!

What we have instead of equitable ‘queer visibility’ in the university is the selective exposure of some queers to the rest of university life, while others are regulated by the university as to how their queerness can be 'acknowledged.' In this sense, queerness exists within the institution, as dictated by the power structures that govern it. A focus on hierarchy within the space is all that is revealed, and that power determines who can be queer in that space in the first place. In short, real change within the university requires real structural change, not simply showcasing a select few on the stage of inclusion.

"92% accuracy off the back of 300 hours of te reo Māori / community consent / NOT scaling mindlessly vs. 200 million Indonesian speakers are digitally invisible, and 40% non-English in what is termed a ‘multilingual’ model = total failure. We aren’t in a battle with technology here, we’re fighting the economics of indifference. The numbers don’t lie."

200 million is the number of Bahasa Indonesia speakers world-wide as stated in the article above. This number makes Bahasa Indonesia a “low-resource” language. The reason for AI bias, or so one would think, is the accident of data scarcity for these languages. However, 200 million people are digitally being erased from the global intelligence system. Not because they do not exist, but because there is no economic incentive to index their voices. The wealth of content that currently is being indexed in order to be able to search for it and to process it in some way or other represents the wealth of the few, not the wealth of humanity.

"Most people's fear of the AI-induced automation economy is that of technology running amok and eliminating human jobs. However, that's not really what's here. The biggest threat posed by the AGI economy is that it has zero financial incentive to preserve the world's languages. The world's most expensive machinery to date has been created to automatically scale human labor as efficiently as possible. And the commercial bias of said machinery to render to scale, will by commercial necessity default to English. Escaping from AGI is impossible. The real battle is therefore to somehow escape the machinery's default indifference to small languages.

So, if the hypothesis is correct, these individuals and groups are not merely preserving artifacts and old texts. Rather, they are proving that a language does not need to have native speakers in large numbers in order to be kept alive from generation to generation. The language can be kept alive by people of modern times, adapting it to the many forms of modern communication to bring awareness of its existence. The ultimate test of all of this will be to see whether or not the language’s increased presence on the web leads to increased use between generations in people’s homes.

Hegemony is not as powerful as it seems. It must be constantly reinforced. When there is extreme cognitive diversity, it becomes very hard for any given worldview to be considered the only way of seeing things. To suppress dissent, authoritarian regimes silence opposing views because they reveal that the dominant narrative is but one of many stories. Every time we cite a marginalized scholar, ask a difficult question, or choose a method that centres the voices of people whom the dominant way of thinking has excluded, we are waging the war of position. I wonder if we are misunderstanding the cumulative effect of these acts of epistemic rebellion against the current state of knowledge.

This framing of “a civilization’s worth” of knowledge is quite philosophical. A civilization of whom? Whose knowledge will be considered? Who gets to decide what is worth ingesting in this model of human knowledge? It is not until later in the text that we find out that the majority of the sources used to create this model are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic). So, this model of human knowledge does not even begin to represent all of “civilization’s” knowledge. Rather, it is a model of the knowledge of a small subset of the world’s population that has had the most influence on the development of AI in recent decades. Can we even call the knowledge that this model ingests “civilizational”? If not, then what would it take to create a truly civilizational AI?