 Welcome everyone. Once again, let's talk about social inclusion. And today we ask, what is an inclusive city and how do we create one? And so I've invited Karin Duplan that we invited Karin Duplan to help us explain to answer the question and to explore the concept of inclusive city for gender and sexual minorities. This will be the focus of our conversation today. And we will explore targeted publics of inclusive policies concerning gender and sexualities and also to understand how participation reshapes urban citizenship and what are the implications for social justice. Karin, welcome to our episode. Thank you. Karin, why did you decide to conduct research inclusion in cities of sexual and gender minorities? So I decided to explore the use of inclusive terminology in public policy because inclusion seems self-evident. Who can say he or she is against inclusion or if we turn the other way around, who can say he or she is favor of exclusion or discrimination. So I decided to investigate the terminology of inclusion in public policy because while inclusion seems to be taken for granted, discrimination persists and this tension is even more salient in a context where inclusion is increasingly highlighted in critical discourses. So everyone, every institution wants to be inclusive but the society in which we live and the cities in which we live remain spaces of exclusion and discrimination. So we can ask ourselves what lies behind the term inclusion and the terminology of inclusive city in public policy. What was left out there in the research specifically that prompted you to go ahead with this research? So I was quite frustrated by the resources I found in the literature on the use of the inclusive city in gender-related public policies. I found institutional documents from various bodies and also a lot of academic papers that were applying the need to include women's need in public policy, mostly. And then for me, there was kind of challenges in this literature and I identified three of them. And the first was about to trace some elements of genealogy of the term of inclusion in relation to gender. The second was to identify at what level of governance this term was used or was not used. And the third one, which was for me the main one was to adopt the definition of gender that would go beyond a egalitarian framework for women and would include as well people who do not come from this heteronormativity. Okay, well, promising. So let us know the most important highlights of your study. So this paper is more theoretical paper and analyze more specifically two areas of public policy. So women's equality and LGBTQ plus equality. And the drunk analysis of these two fields highlights similarities in the paradoxical integration of women and LGBTQ plus equality agendas in public policies. So I identified three main shared patterns. First is that there is a focus on tools and procedures that runs the risk of being disconnected from an overall strategy of equality and also from the diversity of lead experiences. And this leads to forms of technocratization that prevent transformative change. For example, this is the case when the accessibility of public space is advanced by means of statistical indicators rather than through a critical analysis of the power dynamics that prevent women and gender and sexual minorities of full participation to the public realm. So that's the first pattern and I identified a second pattern which is linked to the genesis of inclusion policies. So both in gender as women and LGBTQ plus equality policies, both agendas remain economically driven. The project of inclusion is primarily a project of integration into the market and therefore social inclusion serves to promote what should an emancipatory lifestyle be like based on consumption lifestyle. So this issue is also linked to the definition of the public targeted by inclusion policies, namely a citizen who participate in the markets through conception practices and this limits the public of most inclusion policies to middle class subjects who are also most often white able subjects. And finally, the third shared pattern I identified is that there remains an explanatory binary thinking within most public policies that contributes to present Europe on one part as an ideal model of tolerance and openness to gender and sexual diversity. And these equality policies portray then an ideal model of citizenship who is economically independent and socially emancipated in opposition to the figure of a non-western other portrayed as illiberal and backwards and in need of educations in terms of gender equality towards progress and modernity. So as a wrap up on the outcomes, the inclusive city appears more as a desirable ideal for cities than as an operational model of governance and it has become a kind of normative framework for which urban development based on conception lifestyles. And this links a bit that I liked in the beginning when you said that we like to say that we're all inclusive but we still find a lot of exclusion spaces in cities. So being these more of a theoretical paper and you've highlighted as the three main conclusions, what can you tell us about consequences for public policies? Well, I think that if we draw on this idea of the inclusive city as an ideal and normative framework for urban development, it's worth asking whether it has not become more of a buzzwords that eludes power relations. To illustrate this, we can highlight how the inclusive city model refrained itself from changing the heteronormative structures that produce inequalities and also underline how heteronormativity and capitalism remain closely linked one to each other. So for the inclusive city to overcome the drifts of neoliberal governance and reach its democratic potential, there is a need to work with a reorientation of planning. This means not only recognizing LGBT people's subjects but rather pricing them as central to the making of a more inclusive city. And this could be done, for instance, by working more closely with grassroots movements and through participative action research methodologies. And academically, what are some venues for future research? So as this is more a theoretical insights on the issues of inclusion and the inclusive city, I would say that now there is a need to confront this with empirical data and to do this and maybe drawing on more like, would say, insurgent perspectives. I would call for a focus on participatory action research with grassroots organization with the aim of leading to the opening of more queer creative features. So this is what I will be following in my first coming research project. We will be starting next spring on urban specialties and senses of belonging of queer exiles with participatory action research methodologies. Perfect. Karine, this has been a very straight to the point episode, but if someone just came in this conversation and didn't listen to what you said before, if you could sum up this conversation in one, two sentences, the punchline, what would it be? So I would say that it's important to remember that inclusion and exclusion go always one with each other. So it's important to remember that inclusion is more like an ideal which is complicated to reach. So it has always to be reassessed permanently. And also maybe if I, you know, need to add something more, it's important to remember that inclusion and the inclusive city, it's not only about statistics, but about challenging and thinking to disabilize the power relations that produce inequalities and then to advance the empowerment of those who are still marginalized. Karine, it was a pleasure. Thank you. Thanks to you. To those who are watching us on YouTube, you can find all the resources, all the materials of this conversation. Of course, specifically the article that served as base for the conversation on the Let's Talk About Social Inclusion website. Alternatively, you can listen to this episode whenever you get your podcast. You can subscribe to our newsletter and follow us on Twitter at Kojitatiu LTA.