NOWSA 2012

CHAIRS: Mira Bouchmouny, Emma Eriksen. Speaking List Taker: Lydia

MOTION: That resolutions proposed by autonomous caucus are heard and accepted in block without discussion to respect the autonomy of the caucuses as the voices of marginalised groups.

Moved: Emma Eriksen Seconded: Amy Jenkins

MOTION PASSED

RESOLUTIONS FOR NOWSA 2013

Resolutions from ATSI Caucus

RESOLUTION: That ATSI 2012 Caucus directs NOWSA 2013 organisers to prioritise the subsidising of ATSI women attending NOWSA.

RESOLUTION: That NOWSA 2013 run a workshop or facilitated discussion (a more intimate arrangement than a speaker) exposing aboriginal cultures from the region to interested attendees. It will be run by a person of Indigenous, Maori or Torres Strait Islander heritage. Also, that a there is a discussion on the differences and similarities between our (Indigenous, Maori or Torres Strait Islander) culture and Australian culture, as a way of exposing NOWSA attendees to the differences in culture, rather than the campaigns involving Indigenous, Maori and Torres Strait Islander peoples. ATSI 2012 Caucus recommends that this is achieved by the NOWSA 2013 organising team consulting with local Indigenous departments.

Resolutions from WoC/CALD Caucus

Resolutions from Disabilities Caucus

RESOLUTION: NOWSA 2012 was satisfied with and favours the continuation of a ‘quiet-no-questions’ room and a ‘chillout zone’ (separate spaces).

RESOLUTION: That the 2012 NOWSA (dis)abilities caucus recommends an anonymous suggestion box as an alternative to formal grievance.

RESOLUTION: That the 2012 NOWSA (dis)abilities caucus trigger warnings should be specific to themes and progressive throughout the sessions. That there should always be a break between sessions, and always phrased using non-stigmatising language (e.g. ‘would everyone like to go to the bathroom’ rather than ‘if you feel uncomfortable…’).

RESOLUTION: That in order to ensure speakers are aware of the concept of triggers, a checklist of potential triggers be disseminated to speakers beforehand to encourage awareness amongst speakers themselves. This will result in a more comprehensive trigger warning covering more specific issues (i.e. rape culture, drug abuse, rather than ‘sexualisation’) These trigger warnings should also be available across all NOWSA media beforehand as well (including online and printed information). Trigger warnings apply not only to images but to verbal descriptions and text.

RESOLUTION: That there is at least two who are trained in mental health first aid (more than just a listening post) and that these Mental Health First Aid Officers be publicized to delegates from the beginning of the conference.

RESOLUTION: That there should be clear explanation as to the purpose and definition of (dis)ability caucus, including reference to those who are questioning of their status and of mental health and invisible (dis)abilities, and a clearer definition of the function of pro-caucus. Note: The use of ‘(dis)ability’ is to imply a recognition of the social construction of (dis)ability.

RESOLUTION: That information about local resources (e.g. doctors, rape crisis, counselling etc.) be disseminated on the website and in the showbags beforehand to assist those attending conference from interstate. Resolutions from Queer and SGD Caucus

RESOLUTION: That NOWSA 2013 (and future conferences) operates on the basis that this is a caucus for delegates who identify as queer, lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, intersex, a-sexual, pan-sexual, poly, sex & gender diverse, questioning, those who experience queer-related oppression (for instance children of queer parents) and other queer and alternative orientation and gender identities.

RESOLUTION: The Network of Women’s Students Australia conference is for people who identify as and/or experience oppression as women.

RESOLUTION: Within the conference of NOWSA there exists a multitude of experience and of feeling. NOWSA recognises this difference and promotes a ‘Safer Spaces’ policy that seeks to ensure that every effort is made to ensure that there is sufficient opportunity for choice in workshops. In this vein it is important that the consent of participants is sought before changes are made to workshops that may undermine this choice.

Platform:

a) That NOWSA recognises the diversity of experience within conference

b) That NOWSA recognises that not every participant would be comfortable with all speakers and workshops that are undertaken at the conference

c) That NOWSA takes these feelings into account in the event that workshops are run merged after the beginning of the sessions

d) That NOWSA recognises that proper process of active consent must be pursued before any changes are made to the content of workshops

Action:

1) NOWSA 2012 directs that where workshop presenters wish to merge their workshops or change the content significantly, they must move rooms and give a fresh trigger warning, in order to provide an appropriate opportunity for people to leave. During this process of change, a break ought to be allotted.

2) The NOWSA2013 Organising committee must make clear to workshop presenters that this is the procedure.

3) NOWSA 2012 believes that unless this is done there is an undermining of the safer spaces policy

Mover: Rebecca Doyle Seconder: Sally Cotton

MOTION PASSED

MOTION: That the Network of Women Students Australia develop a paid-for WordPress site to officially represent the Network outside of Facebook. The cost and responsibility of the site would be passed over to the hosting collective of each year, to begin with the ANU Women’s Collective. The login information must be transferred to the new organising collective immediately after the successful bid. The new collective must change the password for security reasons.

Mover: Renee Jones Seconder: Belinda O’Connor Abstention: Shyneth Paton MOTION PASSED

MOTION: That issues which affect caucuses in particular, for example the conduct and procedure of caucus and pro-caucus, be a matter left to the individual caucuses, and that these issues are not voted on by conference floor.

Mover: Trisha Jha Seconder: Jacinta Lo Nigro Abstentions: Amy Jenkins, Shyneth Paton

MOTION PASSED

MOTION: That the Network of Women Students Australia call for a National Day of Action and campaign on Reproductive Rights in Australia. The decision of a date, name, slogan and campaign colours are to be decided, by a conference session on digital media(s), which will be advertised through the current NOWSA Facebook group as well as other forms of NOWSA media.

Mover: Renee Jones Seconder: Lydia Motion

MOTION PASSED

MOTION: the future NOWSA organisers put into tangible action, dedication to, and solidarity with, Indigenous rights by:

a) Always seek engagement with local elders for Welcome to Country or whatever is deemed appropriate by the elders

b) Having a local resources list included in the booklets/readers facilitating the conference attendees to connect with local Indigenous resources and communities external to the conference pertaining to local campaigns/issues and more in this spirit. Following this engagement, a local resource list is developed to facilitate the conference attendees’

Mover: Caitlin Seconder: Shyneth

MOTION PASSES

MOTION: That NOWSA 2012 affirms that the NOWSA conference and the network itself is an independent organisation

Mover: Renee Jones Seconder: Emma Eriksen

MOTION WITHDRAWN

Definition for whom is invited to come to NOWSA conference

The Network of Women’s Students Australia conference is for people who identify as and/or experience oppression as women.

Rewriting the reader definition for Queer and SGD (sex and gender diverse)

This is a caucus for delegates who identify as queer, lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, intersex, a-sexual, pan-sexual, poly, sex & gender diverse, questioning, experiences queer related oppression (for instance children of queer parents) and other queer and alternative orientation and gender identities.

NOWSA 2012 Queer Caucus

DRAFT definition for whom is invited to come to NOWSA conference

The Network of Women’s Students Australia conference is for people who identify as women, including people who

Assigned at birth

Gender queer

Trans and intersex

Has identified as female

??socialised

Non-cis men

Regardless of gender performance ?

Has suffered women’s oppression

Rewriting the reader definition for Queer and SGD (sex and gender diverse)

This is a caucus for delegates who identify as queer, lesbian, bisexual, gay, transgender, intersex, a-sexual, pan-sexual, poly, sex & gender diverse, questioning, experiences queer related oppression (for instance children of queer parents) and other queer and alternative orientation and gender identities.

Melbourne University Radical Sex and Consent Week SS policy  

Safer spaces policy

Safer spaces are welcoming, engaging and supportive. We want this event to be a space where people support each other and can feel free to be themselves. A place where abuse and discrimination is not tolerated. Attendees are asked to be aware of their language and behaviour, and to think about whether it might be offensive to others. This is no space for violence, for touching people without their consent, for being creepy, sleazy, racist, ageist, sexist, hetero-sexist, trans-phobic, able-bodiest, classist, sizeist, whorephobic or any other behaviour or language that may perpetuate oppression.

What we need to do to create a safer space:

- Respect people’s physical and emotional boundaries.

- Always get explicit verbal consent before touching someone or crossing boundaries.

- Try to notice how much you speak in meetings, workshops, and discussions. Try to share the knowledge you have whilst also allowing others the space to do so (especially to those whose voices are heard less often) and practice active listening.

- Speak from your own experience (e.g. use “I” statement) and try to avoid generalising or universalising your experience in a way that invisibilises other people’s experiences.

- Respect people’s opinions, beliefs, differing states of being and differing points of view (this doesn’t mean you can’t critique beliefs etc. you don’t agree with, just that you should do so respectfully! E.g. criticise what has been said not the person who said it).

- Try to be conscious of and communicate your own needs while also being attentive to and respecting of other people’s.

- Be responsible for your own action. Be aware that your actions do have an effect on others despite what your intentions may be.

- Challenge inappropriate and oppressive behaviour, including your own, and if possible support people to challenge their own behaviour. This includes an awareness of your own or other peoples privileges, which may include: race, class, gender, age, sexuality, experience and ability.
(see the “feminist discussion group” discussion thread on “The UMSU Wom*n’s Department!” facebook page for links to readings on privilege!)

- Get help to assure your safety/wellbeing if you need it (see grievance blurb for more info r.e. support on offer).

- We would like all the workshops to be sober spaces. During events where alcohol will be present be aware of how the consumption of alcohol and other substances can affect your behaviour in ways that impact on others. If you so choose, drink & be merry, just make sure you do so safely & responsibly

- Any group or individual engaging in violence (including sexual violence and harassment) or offensive behaviour of the nature outlined above may be asked to leave immediately. This includes expression of pro-nonconsent views.

During the PoC and CaLD caucus session, pro-caucus members where invited into the autonmous caucus space to listent to PoC and CaLD women talk about their experiances as part of a practice in empathy and understanding. During the session they were given and opportuinty to write anonymous questions down for the PoC and CaLD caucus members to answer during the week prior to the report back.  These are the questions:

What type of actions would you want allies to do? how can we show support without being seen as imposing/trying to make it about us?

How can we help without patronising you?

What are your opinions or experiances with WOC (women of colour) collective groups at unis on campus?

As a mixed race person raised in a manner in which my father had not included a lot of his cultural experiance in our upbringing, how do you think I can endeavor to understand the way my mixed race status informs my experience/identity  while still really checking/recognising my white privilege (passing as white, having a’white’ upbringing)

The disability movement began in the UK in the 1970s. We reclaimed the term ‘disability’ from professionals in medicine and social care who viewed it as a personal affliction, entirely reconstructing its meaning in the light of the social exclusions encountered in our own lived experience (UPIAS, 1976). In a radical move, we severed the presupposed causal link whereby impairment resulted in disability, asserting instead that disability was an entirely socially caused phenomenon. Disability was reformulated to mean the social disadvantages and exclusions that people with impairment faced in all areas of life: employment, housing, education, civil rights, transportation, negotiation of the built environment, sexuality and so forth. Traditional medical and welfarist models of disability, together with their culturally pervasive ‘personal tragedy’ counterpart, were thrown aside in favour of a social definition of disability. Mike Oliver coined the phrase ‘the social model of disability’ to capture this new paradigm, and it became a touchstone in Disability Studies and the disabled people’s movement in the UK. The social model of disability unleashed a powerful drive for social and political change. Disability was exposed as a form of social oppression and exclusion that should not be tolerated, analogous to already recognised oppressions associated with gender, race, class and sexuality. Once this understanding of disability is adopted, the manifestations of ablism can be readily observed: a wheelchair user or a person with visual impairment cannot access public transport systems, or is not able to obtain a quality education that would enable them to compete for well-paid jobs in the labour market, or is represented as a person of lesser value in films and other media. The disabling ‘social barriers’ in the lives of people with impairments can be identified and challenged because socially created barriers can be dismantled. As people with disabilities the social model has enabled a vision of ourselves free from constraints of disability (oppression) and provided a direction for our commitment to social change. It has played a central role in promoting disabled people’s individual self worth, collective identity and political organisation. I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the social model has saved lives (Crow, 1996: 207).
The unrelenting system of exclusion and otherness of disability in Australia is internalised by each of us, and indeed constructs us as subjects. In our private moments and in our cherished notions of ourselves, we are shaped and marked by the power relations of disability (Goggin & Newell, 2005, p.200). On a personal political note disability politics enables a political analysis of the dominant discourses to be undertaken leading to forms of resistance and unruly activism to be enjoyed-such as pashing women in woollies-resisting simultaneously the a-sexualisation people with disabilities are subject to as well as homophobia

The current situation for women living with disabilities in Australia

The content outlining the disadvantage experienced by women with disabilities in Australia is taken from a paper titled ‘Women With Disabilities Australia: Policy Paper: ‘Assessing the situation of women with disabilities in Australia: A human rights approach’(July 2011) written with extensive research and documentation by Women With Disabilities Australia- the peak organisation for women with all types of disabilities in Australia (wwda.org.au). Both men and women with disabilities face discrimination and a-sexualisation however; women with disabilities face particular disadvantages in the areas of education, work and employment, family and reproductive rights, health, violence and abuse. These are just some of the facts:

-Women with disabilities experience violence, particularly family violence and violence in institutions, more often than disabled men;
-Gender-based violence, including domestic/family violence, sexual assault/rape is a cause of disability in women;
-Women and girls with disabilities are often at greater risk than disabled men, both within and outside the home, of violence, injury or abuse, neglect or negligent treatment, altreatment or exploitation;
-Women with disabilities are more vulnerable as victims of crimes from both strangers and people who are known to them, yet crimes against disabled women are often never reported to law enforcement agencies;
-While disabled people are much more likely to live in poverty, women with disabilities are likely to be poorer than men with disabilities;
-Women with disabilities are more likely to be sole parents, to be living on their own, or in their parental family than disabled men;
-Women with disabilities who are parents, or who seek to become parents, face barriers in accessing adequate health care and other services for both themselves and their child/ren.

Disability feminism 101-What can we do as feminists?

In light of these depressing facts what can we do as feminists, to understand and mobilize around these issues? We can understand disability politics and disability feminism and fight the struggles from within these political perspectives. Disability feminism at its core deals with issues of the non-normative body/mind and how our experience of our disabilities are socially mediated and constructed by power. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, a disability feminist scholar and activists writes about transforming feminist theory through the inclusion of the experience of disability. She proclaims that ‘disability allows for a critique of the intersections between the politics of appearance and the medicalization of subjugated bodies/minds. Feminist disability theory’s radical critique hinges on a broad understanding of disability as a pervasive cultural system that stigmatizes certain kinds of bodily variations. At the same time, this system has the potential to incite a critical politics. The informing premise of feminist disability theory is that disability, like femaleness, is not a natural state of corporeal inferiority, inadequacy, excess, or a stroke of misfortune. Rather, disability is a culturally fabricated narrative of the body, similar to what we understand as the fictions of race and gender. The disability/ability system produces subjects by differentiating and marking bodies. Although this comparison of bodies is ideological rather than biological, it nevertheless penetrates into the formation of culture, legitimating an unequal distribution of resources, status, and power within a biased social and architectural environment. As such, disability has four aspects: first, it is a system for interpreting and disciplining bodily variations; second, it is a relationship between bodies and their environments; third, it is a set of practices that produce both the able-bodied and the disabled; fourth, it is a way of describing the inherent instability of the embodied self. The disability system excludes the kinds of bodily forms, functions, impairments, changes, or ambiguities that call into question our cultural fantasy of the body as a neutral, compliant instrument of some transcendent will. A feminist disability theory denaturalizes disability by unseating the dominant assumption that disability is something that is wrong with someone. By this I mean, of course, that it mobilizes feminism’s highly developed and complex critique of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and sexuality as exclusionary and oppressive systems rather than as the natural and appropriate order of things’.

‘One of the reasons the situation for people with disabilities has been so slow to change is precisely because they are positioned as the ‘other’ in our culture. To change such terrain requires all of us to undertake a great deal of listening, talking and communication in so many ways in order to imagine disability differently and to change something that moves often only very imperceptibly-our culture itself. To embark on this journey, and proceed with it when it becomes difficult, we cannot avoid seeking answers to some important questions: why are we so concerned with defining and enforcing normalcy? What is at stake for all of us in confronting the frailties of our bodies, minds and lives? How can we as feminists resist normative constructions of bodies/minds and find ways to subvert and challenge them?

Extracts from above from:

Thomas, C, 2004, Disability and Impairment in Swain, J, French, S, Barns, C & Thomas, C, (eds), 2004, Disabling Barriers-Enabling Environments, (2end ed.), Sage Publications, London.

Goggin, G & Newell, C, 2005, Disability in Australia: Exposing a Social Apartheid, University of New South Wales Press, Kensigton.

Garland-Thomson, R, 2006, Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory in Davis, L, (ed) 2006, The Disabilities Studies Reader (2end ed.)

The NOWSA 2012 Conference Building

NOWSA 2012 will be held in the H.W. Arndt building which is just off Kingley Street, it is behind Childers Street and the Uni-lodge area of ANU.

If you get lost call 0423766966 and Emma will come rescue you

http://lostoncampus.com.au/9984

Hi All,

Thank you to all of those that have registered thus far. We are very excited to see you all soon at what we hope to be a glorious NOWSA.

For those that have registered, the only thing you need to do to finalise the process is transfer your $50 registration fee if you have not already. The details are: BSB 801 009, Account Number 1049951, Account Name The Women’s Office.

For those of you who haven’t registered, remember to do so by the 30th June!