The UK is expanding its diversity efforts with the anticipated 2021 opening of Queer Britain, the first LGBTQ+ museum, which is getting help from Molly Merryman, Ph. D., associate professor and director of 鶹ý’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality.
Dr. Merryman, who recently was appointed as Queer Britain's research director and who will be leading the creation of Queer Britain's oral history work, has been working with Queer Britain to coordinate and create a functioning network of queer scholars.
"We're looking at getting a network of queer scholars from all around the UK together,” Dr. Merryman told DIVA magazine, “and also looking at different technologies so that people can, in the not-too-distant future, submit their own histories to the project. We're really trying to create an accessible interface with Virtually Queer.”
Kent State’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality has been collaborating with Queen Britain on this project through Dr. Merryman.
“We've set up a collaborative agreement between 鶹ý and Queer Britain and we're figuring that in 2020, we're going to bring a class of our students from the US to the UK to collect more interviews,” Dr. Merryman told DIVA. “In short, we're just really looking at the different ways we can make this bigger and better.”
The integration between Queer Britain and 鶹ý has been made easier with integration of technology and social media platforms.
“We also want to set up an app so that people can sit down and go through guided questions in their own time at home. We want Virtually Queer to be truly comprehensive – like, thousands of interviews – and there's no way I, even with a team of me, could do that,” Dr. Merryman said in the article. “Now we have technology, Skype, other things, there are ways that this can happen that don't require people to be sitting face-to-face with us. It also makes the project a lot more accessible, and hopefully diverse.”
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