 Now I would like to move to introducing our wonderful keynote and when I was preparing for this admittedly a bit later than I wanted last night, but I just wanted to make sure you have this proper introduction of our keynote and after writing a little bit of a script which actually Lisa did for me who has been helping to organize this, I just realized how important it is to actually give proper introduction to Lucy because everything in her buyer and her story is so intentional and every word is so intentional that I will definitely be reading this to you now before we actually welcome Lucy on stage. So Lucy is internationally a renowned engagement expert. She currently holds quite a lot of wonderful positions including Executive Director of Collective Voices Consulting, a research affiliate at the University of Sydney, media spokesperson for equity equality Tasmania and she recently concluded her work at the lived experience program coordinator at the Tasmanian Council for Social Service. Lucy specializes in designing engagements which center equity, diversity and inclusion. She brings a cross sector perspective having worked and engaged across higher education community, not-for-profit corporate and government sectors. She has an outstanding reputation in research, teaching, facilitation and advocacy which drives social, cultural, organizational and legislative reform for more inclusive society. As a proud queer disabled woman she integrates her first hand navigation of systems of privilege and oppression into her engagements making them authenticate, inclusive and accessible. In higher education Lucy specializes on student staff partnership and student equity. Lucy's teaching and research seeks to reconceptualize relationships between students and staff in higher education based on respect, reciprocity, dialogue and mutual learning. Lucy adopts social justice and feminist lenses to shine light on the role of power in her work aiming to create her more spaces in higher education. Her keynote today titled quiet students or silenced voices as intersectional and trauma-informed approach to including diverse students in higher education governance and decision-making. It is a particularly meaningful in the theme and topic for us to unpack today and I'm very excited to have someone like Lucy to actually do this for us today. So without any further ado please give it away to Lucy and welcome her. Hi folks I was told just to clicky clicky this button until my slides come up. Too many clicky clickies. All right. Hi I'm Lucy. First thank you to Uncle Wayne for that beautiful acknowledgement of country. I'm here from Nipaluna Hobart which is in Littoruita Tasmania the lands of the Palo Aparcana and I'd like to pay my respects to the Jagara Jagara Ugarapul peoples. I had a yarn with Uncle Wayne this morning to get that that pronunciation right. I brought two outfits to wear to this keynote because I was feeling anxious about doing something that seems political in a higher education context where so often we're implicitly taught to be apolitical but the older I get the more I realize that there is no such thing as apolitical there is just upholding the status quo and staying silent and so on a day where we're talking about voice I wanted to use my voice and my platform and my privilege to actively provide allyship I suppose and use my white privilege to encourage people to really think hard about how you vote tomorrow. So this is going to be fun isn't it education then beyond all other divides of human origin is a great equalizer of conditions of men the balance wheel of the social machinery this is a very old quote and we can tell that by the balance of men but it I guess higher learning is something that this strives to do we like to think that this is something that everyone can access but I think actually increasingly we need to be a lot more intentional about that because historically this hasn't been the case for so many groups in society and as far back as we go we will always see attainment gaps and you can add your cohorts down the bottom and it paints a picture of the inequality of access to education that we face in Australia and around the world. I led a national centre for student equity and higher education grant last year where we surveyed ten two and a half thousand students across ten universities in Australia in metropolitan and regional areas we targeted and attained contributions from at least 70 percent students who identified as belonging to a group that experiences marginalization in Australia and 45 percent with intersectional identities so those who belong to more than one group who experiences marginalization and we along with a lot a lot of other things did comparisons between the experiences during COVID of people from a single minority intersectional cohorts and non-minority students. So students from minoritised backgrounds during COVID when compared to non-minoritised students oh that's much better thank you. They experienced worse in learning experiences financial situations and well-being they had a lower sense of belonging already but this got worse during COVID and they also felt less supported by their universities and were less aware of the available supports at their universities. Where should I be pointing this? These effects were amplified for those with intersectional identities and across nearly all of these domains that difference was statistically significant so I think you know higher education being the equaliser of all men or people is a fallacy at the moment and I think that student voices Australasia is something that can contribute deeply to addressing these these gaps but that needs to be acknowledged that learning does not happen in a vacuum. Higher education institutions replicate and sometimes amplify societal systems of oppression and this is something that I think we don't acknowledge or talk about enough in higher education up here thank you. So what power asymmetries exist in higher education there's students and staff and there is an inherent power asymmetry in the ways that students and staff navigate everything in higher education. Can I see a hands up who's a student in the room and a staff member? Any who both? A few, yep. So yeah there's students and staff and that is institutionally imbued power but then there's all these other metrics and so taking an intersectional lens on you know power asymmetries in higher education is really critical in acknowledging that it's not just the institutional power asymmetries but everything from outside higher education comes into and is sometimes amplified. So my thesis today is that we cannot equalize power we're too far down that rabbit hole. I have an argument with my mum about whether we've got a shirt that says I'll be a post feminist in the post patriarchy and she finds it increasingly depressing that I think there won't ever be a post patriarchy but we can we can address and disrupt power when we choose to work in radically different ways. So there's an increasing body of research that says that student staff partnership contributes to the success of students from marginalised backgrounds and I've spent a lot of time thinking about why this is I've spent a lot of time working as a student in student staff partnership and then working with students from marginalised backgrounds when I moved on to become a staff and the research says that these are some of the main partnership outcomes that are really distinct from the other kind of pedagogical learning outcomes that we might seek in traditional classrooms and this to me is the reason why pedagogical partnership or student voice and student staff partnership anything that adopts that kind of participatory and democratic approach to education really provides that additional social capital building and the efficacy and confidence and I think that this is true or at least for me it's been true not just as a student but as a staff member as well when I work with students in ways that try to redistribute power from ways that are you know hierarchical to shared these are things that I developed I didn't start feeling like I belonged in higher education until I had set up a space where I could work equitably and that took me years as a lecturer to do so how do we optimise partnership in governance and decision-making to intentionally create create space for marginalised students and for inclusion of a diverse range of perspectives and I talk about partnership because that's what I always talk about but I am including student voice in this as one of the ways that we can partner with students just as a little caveat apply a power lens to everything I did a job interview a couple of weeks ago and I feel like I must have talked about power like I don't know I said the word a hundred times in half an hour and I really felt like I was begging on about it but I don't think it was a client engagement job I don't think you can do engagement without talking about power and if you're doing engagement without talking about power you're not doing well enough so the kind of backdrop of what a power analysis looks like in governance and decision-making is these are deeply hierarchical situations governance is to govern and to govern is to govern over somebody else and Sean said something about rooms full of dinosaurs historically that is what governance looks like in higher education and probably too much currently as well they're steeped in tradition for me tradition is just a way of saying old school and inequitable I suppose it is often used as the argument against change why would we do something differently well the new is fear something to be feared and um kind of well it's the fucking argument about it's about there's the argument about the voice if you don't know vote no right that is the fear of the unknown and it was actually the argument used by people who didn't want women to get the vote back in the suffragette movement we're reliving that all over again so if someone says to you it's always been this way yell at them um so there's strict rules about how people participate in governance there is a lot of jargon around it there is a lot of like access things that you kind of need to know I tried to get into I do some governance work and it took me a long time to figure out how to say the words so that I sounded like I knew what the fuck I was talking about right um and then there's this notion of meritocracy and Sean talked about this as well in terms of like the notion of defining who gets to hold that power and the notion of meritocracy if you haven't heard about it before it's a feminist theory and it's talks about the politics of merit and what gets seen as meritorious in spaces and the biggest power move in this space is that who defines what is meritorious are those who are already succeeding so they're building a system for them and people like them and in Australia that is cishet white men often older so they build the systems they succeed in it and unless we change the systems those are the people who are inherently going to succeed for as long as we allow that kind of meritocracy based system to to belong there's a notion of volunteerism we are living in the middle of a cost of living crisis more people now are living in poverty than in a long time in Australia and that includes students not just low sES students by increasingly higher proportions of our populations are facing financial hardship and if you are asking them to give up their time for free you are selecting the students who can afford to give up their time for free that is I mean it's inherently classist but it is also really problematic in terms of putting up barriers to students in to engage in decision making bureaucracy and jargon blah blah red tape we know red tape can get rid of like all our red tape at the beginning of COVID just got absolutely slashed and it's like cool so all the things around equity and healthcare and education that and flexible work that we've been arguing for for decades only happens when the old white man in parliament are threatened by it right and that's when the red tape gets slashed so we know that it's possible they did it in universities too they flipped classrooms immediately so anyone who says that the bureaucracy is slow moving it's bullshit you just got to push harder and they need to listen more relies on representation I've been talking to some people before this Kate Welsh from Flinders University and she said that one of the things that they face is that the compassion fatigue and the exhaustion that comes from being the only indigenous the only disabled the only queer student on a panel there to speak for everybody else if we take disability as an example the inherent diversity just within one group means that it's completely impossible for one student to speak on behalf of other students I remember one of my first public speaking engagements in a staff room like this as an undergraduate and I was talking about student engagement I got up with my notes and held them up here and read them quietly and one of the staff members in the room put up their hand and said oh um how do you think that you know Aboriginal cohorts in mathematics classes in regional Australia would experience those things I don't know do I look like that like but that's not my experience and I shouldn't be asked to speak for it because students are not all the same and if we take it that students are not all the same then we have to take it that all of the groups that we target with diversity metrics are inherently diverse inside and it is on the organisation to provide access for them not on those with inherent diversity to try and overcome the barriers that we've constructed and it's stacked in staff numbers how like just being like being the minority in any room especially if you're already got a lot of intersectional minority identities is it's really scary even the most confident person would feel intimidated by that so you know I know that people are saying oh we'll have two students it's not enough have half students and if you want if you want to go for representation you better have like one staff and then that the rest of students because that's the campus proportions right they are the majority on campus but often they are the silent majority and we need to start flipping and unpacking why that is and then all these barriers are exacerbated for students from marginalised backgrounds so how do we unpack and address power in this context who's heard of intersectionality before I've talked about it a lot just now yeah a good amount of people in the room which is fantastic so intersectionality is a lens for seeing how various forms of inequality operate together and exacerbate each other we tend to talk about race inequality as separate from inequality based on gender class sexuality or immigrant status what's often missing is how some people are subject to many or all of these and the experience is not just the sum of its past so it's a theory that takes into account the various identities or groups that people belong to examine that examines that within a matrix of power to look at where kind of oppression interlocks and intersects and the intersecting nature of that oppression is cumulative over a person's lifetime hi come in sit down oh hello yeah yeah go for it that's fine walk across you've already missed all the good bits sorry so this is a very busy diagram and you don't have to read all the words that are on it but what I'd like you to understand is this is a representation of the types of power analysis that intersectionality affords so it takes into account the environment this is international national the environment of kind of wars going on and the legal system and colonization all those sorts of things then it looks at the systems of oppression so within those external environments how does power manifest to cause systems of oppression based on identity so your identity is um in the pink and it's kind of indigeneity it's social status it's lived experience it's refugee status and then that changes in different contexts right so if you take me as an example I live in Australia I'm white I get a huge amount of privilege from a white supremacist society I will always get privilege in that context so I don't experience racism but I am disabled and I am queer so in situations I experience ableism and I experience homophobia my partner is trans they experience transphobia it's different and that notion of being queer and disabled and a woman is my identity and that stays same but the context that I move around in changes the way that my identity gives me privilege and gives me power so when I'm in my queer community I don't experience homophobia and transphobia but when I go to work I do um so this is really complex um and what I want you to take away is that while students might share a societal and organisational environment each will experience systems of oppression based on their various identities and these will vary across contexts and I encourage you to move away from like oh it's complex it's too hard and actually sit and revel in the complexity and the nuance and the difference and the discomfort that comes with that because that discomfort and that complexity is where learning happens and understanding is not enough knowing this is not enough you need to action into intersectionality so get ready for a big long list I'm going to talk faster I've had not enough sleep and too much caffeine start at the top that's you guys that's the leaders this is your responsibility you need to know this shit and you need to live and breathe it because if you don't nobody else will invest lots of time and resources this cannot be a siloed thing that happens in HR or people and culture or whatever they're calling it this day it shouldn't even be siloed into like a student equity department this should be stuff that everybody across the university knows and that takes lots of time and lots of resources using intersectional lens in policies procedures trainings and resources this should be the place that you start whenever you sit down to write or do anything add incentives lots of carrots that's great but leaders you need to have sticks people know need to know that if they don't do this there will be repercussions and those repercussions need to be severe enough for people to take it seriously collect intersectional data we love data we're like have data pouring out of our asses in universities and we actually collect a lot of this data but we don't action it and when we do look at it we often don't look at it through the intersectional lens of the data that I was talking about before we look at how are the poor people doing how are the disabled people doing how are the quit we don't we don't actually collect queer data but you know we have we have you know kind of siloed data things what happens when you look at that student who is queer and indigenous what happens when you look at the student who is disabled and low socioeconomic how do they different differ from other peers and what does that tell us about what we need to be doing reflect diversity safely please do not I know like representation matters and having leaders who you know present the minority groups is fantastic don't ask them to be in that position if you're not going to support them to deal with the system systematic oppression that this university will place upon them throughout their leadership journey so that needs to be safe distribute leadership break down that power hierarchy and this is really where you guys are sitting as well this is shared decision making this is letting student letting students take the lead encouraging them enabling them prioritized diverse lived experiences who has heard the term lived experience in this room most of you awesome it wasn't around when I left academia like four years ago at least it wasn't something that was used that often so I'm really excited to hear that this is everybody's responsibility this starts with you know your privilege and know how to act as an ally one size fits one always approach engagement for a place of curiosity if you feel yourself being defensive or judgmental examine that and see if you can approach it from a place of understanding why rather than coming up with a response for no value constructive conflict and tension and for constructive conflict to happen there has to be cycle safety and keep doing the work always do people want to take photos of that before I flip yeah and intersectional oppression results in cumulative trauma so the cumulative experiences that minor marginalised people feel in Australia results in trauma microaggressions result in trauma it's you like PTSD often results from this kind of ongoing exposure to oppression resulting in trauma and that means we have to take a trauma informed approach to student engagement so what is trauma trauma can be caused by a single distressing event or it can be the result of a prolonged series of experiences including oppression discrimination and prejudice it changes the way that our nervous systems perceive safety we our nervous system becomes dysregulated and we perceive things that are mostly unthreatening as unsafe means we function in survival mode not in a state of resilience of being able to shift up and down between our different nervous system states and that means that protection becomes more important than connection and for people who have been exposed to systems of oppression connection is dangerous so why does this matter for student engagement we often cope we always co-regulate our nervous system is constantly scanning the room looking at people's facial expressions their body languages the language that they use and we co-regulate with each other's nervous systems this means that when we think about student engagement particularly with students from diversal marginalised backgrounds how we show up deeply impacts whether other people feel safe and if you are acting in a way that does not align with the words that are coming out of your mouth that student will know so it is not enough to say the right things you have to be safe you have to be a safe person for that person and this means being really self-aware all of this work starts with you and the capacity for reflection critical reflection and self-awareness and of knowing how our nervous system states guide our behaviours and what that means in terms of fostering safe environments for other people so what does an intersectional and trauma-reformed approach to student engagement look like I know this was the title and I've taken half an hour to get here but we're finally here so honour diverse knowledges do you know when I type knowledges into Microsoft word it auto-corrects it's not a word in the English dictionary apparently it's grammatically incorrect that's bullshit it's white supremacy so knowledges plural and not just knowledge imbued by training but the lived experience of a lifetime of experience of oppression that takes longer to develop than the nine years I spent to get my qualifications and I use it more acknowledge trauma start from a place of explicitly everybody experiences trauma and maybe this is a little more accessible now because we've just been through a global pandemic where millions of people died we have a collective experience of trauma now we understand what that means um analyze power you can use the intersectionality framework I've shared today you can use other frameworks there's lots of great queer and feminist theorists to provide lots of different lenses for this I encourage you to read widely find a lens that works for you um and again understand your own privileges biases and experiences of marginalization and take those with you in critical awareness every relationship you're in so centre safety how are people made to feel physically socially culturally emotionally and economically safe can students speak out contribute ideas and raise concerns without the risk of negative negative consequences what does that look like build trust this is trust is complicated but it also is so simple one of the core aspects of whether you're deemed to be trustworthy by other people is whether you're willing willing to share vulnerability now people who are oppressed share their vulnerability every day our lives are vulnerable we are vulnerable to the systems of oppression but in relationships showing up and willing to share parts of yourself that maybe you don't often share maybe they're about your identity maybe they're about the challenges you faced in your life but sharing that vulnerability trusting somebody else that they won't discriminate against you as a result in that act of benevolence is one of the quickest ways to build trust violating people's vulnerability when it's offered is the quickest way to break down trust enable voice and choice and that's not just voices the seated at at the table it's choice and empowerment at every stage of that engagement process how do you want to be engaged where do you want to be engaged if you don't feel comfortable coming to us how can we come to you do you want it to be online do you want it to be in your homes do you want it to be in your community do you want it to be at the student centre it's location it's medium it's the medium it's the language we use it's everything everything you can give students choices and that will facilitate that kind of enablement that I think this you know group really focuses on collaborate but particularly do this really early often and this is hard because with our institutional power staff have more capacity to start initiatives so we always start from you know the front foot of power when we invite students in being able to give an invitation is an act of power in itself but if you're not able to have a student-driven initiative and you do need to start something keep it really simple don't do the details keep it locked down and really really like wait until you've got those students in the room and do that as early as possible and see the all success is dependent on each other this shouldn't be something that if you ask yourself could I do without do this without students and succeed if the answer is yeah probably start again go back to the drawing board facilitate empowerment um parlor frary talks about um empowerment is not something that can ever be given because to give empowerment is an act of power in itself and so we need to be able to think about how we enable students to self-empower what does that look like how can we support and make available the tools and then follow their leadership um and then again keep doing the work so what's the primary key to success in intersectional and trauma responsive student engagement anyone want to have a crack it's really simple four words keep doing the work so but where to start this feels really complex and i've just bombarded you with a lot of things quite quickly because of the caffeine but um here is where you start doing the work so one thing before you start analysing this and playing the game in your head just listen to me all eyes on me um the the problem with privilege is that it is kind in australia and globally and western cultures privilege is linked with morality so to call someone out on being a racist comes across as calling them a bad person we intrinsically link your privilege with guilt and shame and so it's really hard to start conversations about you owning your own privilege or me owning my own privilege when our immediate defense is that person's calling me a bad person and i will meet that with resentment i will meet it with defensiveness men tend to get defensive white women tend to cry and there is a wonderful book called um why i'm no longer talking to white people about race by ranny italy lodge out of the uk and i was sitting there reading this having my like anti-racist revolution and crying about like guilt and shame about my own white privilege and then i turn the page and the next chapter is white women's tears did i see him um that's fine to have those emotional reactions but don't put the responsibility back on to marginalised communities to assuage those um so what i really like to invite you to do is to examine your own privilege and not see it as a bad thing everybody holds privilege and everybody experiences marginalisation even white men will get old at some point and then they will experience ageism so this nobody is immune to experiencing marginalisation and equally nobody is immune to experiencing privilege it's not a bad thing it's just a fact so take this tool have a little reflection on it and um yeah think about how you show up in spaces and how you use your privilege to create spaces for others to lead thank you okay we've got plenty of time for questions which is great because i hate talking at people and i prefer to have a conversation so please don't leave me standing up here or awkward to a silent room feeling very good about myself i've either like totally overwhelmed and alienated you or i've answered every single one of your questions there's so much in this yeah up about just for the folks online worse um i just want to say that was really really good you just ticked so many boxes for the work that i do so thank you very much um and i that identifying and acknowledging the power dynamics between um a staff member be professional or academic but i think it's even more powerful when you're in an academic or or in a senior role um it it's really difficult when you're working with students to sort of try and um to try and establish and sort of of de-empower the situation and it takes time and it's it's really relational work and in the project that i'm working on which is um in recognition of prior learning um i've had the luxury and the privilege of taking the time and working with students and it's just been so you know i mean that's where the approach that that we've taken i feel has really ticked a lot of those boxes so yeah no but i i just loved it loved it all thank you there you go i broke the ice thank you up the front here could it um so we're from new zealand and we're from the national disabled students association and do we just also want to say thank you so much for this presentation i wrote so many notes but um one of the main things that really sat with me was your uh volunteerism and talking a lot about that and coming from a place where we're constantly um engaging with universities or government or other organizations with lack of compensation all the time how would you um create that uh open conversation to get compensation and i guess get awarded with compensation or like how has conversations in the past been successful for you start saying no if every student on campus says no we're not going to help you until i pay you pay us for our time you get paid for your time like it is a solidarity thing right like um in iceland so they have they have no gender pay gap in iceland then they have for quite a long time the way that they did that was that women just stopped working women just went on strike they were like see run your country without us and it lasted like two days and then everyone was like oh shit we really need them right like saying no is an act of power and it doesn't have to shut down the conversation so it's got to be no and um and the argument that i always make is that if your organization is benefiting from my time and wisdom why wouldn't you pay me and then how much do you pay the consultants who come in to give you time and wisdom what's their hourly rate i bet it won't be 30 bucks an hour so make the comparisons make people uncomfortable i feel like students are often put marginalized people generally are often put in positions of like we've been given the scraps for so long that it's the expectation of take what you can get and be grateful right and we see we see this with the referendum right um and so i think for as long as we accept that people in power will get away with that being the norm so you actually you actually have immense power you have a lot more power because if you go to the media and you talk about how inaccessible and ableist those organizations are they're fucked you own that you know your power you don't have to do that but you are in a position of being able to bug and you do not have to accept the terms that they give you you can negotiate so stand in that power and get paid what you're worth one of one of the interesting points and it's it's been raised about volunteerism is this concept of Aboriginal people appearing for acknowledgements and welcome to countries right so there's an expectation uh that in we shouldn't have to pay those people that conversation we shouldn't have to acknowledge the fact that people can acknowledge country or acknowledge the power of all those sorts of things what it's done is create helped create the issue that Jim and both of you are outlined this morning which is often about welcome to country is just simply a repetition of a meaningless phrase acknowledgement is the same nothing more sickening for me than to sit there with others go through that process it's very significant that Aboriginal people will not communicate with people they'll shut down that conversation so that word of silence the second thing that happens is that often you'll get the yes conversation you're coming to give us a welcome to country on Friday morning at nine o'clock yes okay are you not coming to give us a welcome to country on Friday morning at nine o'clock yes right so the yes conversation which is the post-center and all the stuff we did with the all that medical stuff in the past it's very important to acknowledge the power of of that word where we need to get a genuine understanding of people so the two things that I would see is identify who can do that okay and then the last thing that you need is a non a non meaningful non empathetic non understanding explanation where somebody who is right that's the nominated person you know arty gwen's going to get up there uncle Wayne's going to get up there and go yes you know this is a great university this is a great opportunity whatever if i'm truthful and honest which i am about the situation and in my role and i've got to thank the university for this and i'm not trying to be smart at the moment i only answered to the vice chancellor right so that's it it's a very unique situation for so often i receive millions of complaints about what happens about a lack of balance and for my two or three days a week i'm offered seven days a week of working with community so we all need to understand that those services that are provided by community in a genuine and positive way aren't free to be given with empathy and power they need to be done with the right people at the right time with the right sense of understanding and remuneration as well and we see that in New Zealand we see it in other countries so i've seen it in Canada this year and worked with first nations in Alaska and it's a very different sort of dynamic when you work with people that are like that so yeah thank you thanks uncle um the other one is just ask some of you sit are you being paid to sit here and have this conversation the answer is always yes if they're a staff member and it's a weekday actually if they're a staff member and it's any day in academia um they're being paid to do the work but you know i think it's good to highlight that injustice regularly and you don't have to do it aggressively but you can do it assertively and make people uncomfortable and if they say there's not the money rubbish there is always the money up the front here we actually have uh peter oh thank yes i'll let you keep track on that and then with questions from online as well is someone got to all right so um first of all i'd like to say thank you um i'm part of the student senate here at uni sq and this is our big um line of thought is how do we engage our students but going back to your t-shirt first um it's such an important yes for everyone in the country to understand but i also think about um student voice and i think about the voice to parliament and they are so important as each other is um because in each case what we're doing is asking someone um to speak out um the voice to parliament is this advisory group in which we'll be able to give direction and an advice and in that is exactly what we're trying to do with inside the university is give an uh the student senate's or whatever organization um or whatever name your organization wants to commit to is going to be the advisory group which will give the students voice to the um uh to the to the hierarchy um but one thing that i've been thinking of as i sit through the last four five months of student senate is how do we engage this voice because it's still very hard to get what you've done today is made that job so much easier so thank you you're welcome thank you do we want to go to the online questions and then one up the front we have one online and Ali will ask that okay question from online thank you thank you Lucy that was wonderful um i have a question that's come through online from Kate Walsh from Flinders University hi Kate your friend and mine um so Kate asks uh the idea of privilege being linked to morality is so powerful uh i see it all the time even when students speak up about their experiences sometimes negative and it's met with resistance and excuses from staff and people in power for why something is the way it is this often results in those speaking up shrinking back down again how can we counter this as both allies in the room and as people who receive the feedback me thanks Kate um how can we counter people meeting privilege with like the morality defensiveness is that so that shrinking back for the students who have asked that question or given that is a trauma response that is fight or flight it is withdrawing from the conversation and that is because the person who has been defensive shut them down told them no judged them made them lose their voice has created a psychologically unsafe workplace so the the countering of the shrinking back and the silencing is not on the individual to be resilient right like it's exhausting um it is not on that student to harden up and ask the question again or speak truth to power or you know it's not it is the responsibility of the people who have the power to set culture and for them not to create psychologically unsafe cultures there's new legislation in place that says that organizations have a legal responsibility at the same level of workplace health and safety to ensure psychologically safe psychological safety in the workplace i think this is it's incredible it opens the doors to exactly this conversation so preventing this gym that's your job all the people in power Sean that's your job you when you become aware of people acting like that that's the stick and that has to come from the top so offer the education help people understand their power how to act as allies how to be a psychologically safe person and then if they don't use those tools whack them with a stick and they get like three choices and then you're out it is so that is how psychological safety happens um and that's the responsibility of the people in power and until the people in power can own their own privilege it just won't happen so this is the work these are the conversations that need to happen over and over and over again and we keep doing the work for that shrinking to not happen question down here my question kind of relates back to what was just discussed but your point on constructive conflict really stuck like our lovely co-presidents here we work in a higher education space and quite often we're bringing forward a disabled student experience and it's often quite negative I I guess my question is mostly how would we set up that space for constructive conflict because so often we'll come forward and politely but firmly go this has been our experience and it's negative and it needs to change and so fast we're labeled as dramatic emotional combative non-compliant and so the conversation ends there's there's no there's no there's no court at all there's no conversation anymore how how would you advise we would work in that space because at that point collaboration ends yes so it's a psychological safety issue again and there's four stages of psychological safety and the last one is challenging so when people in workplaces feel truly safe they are safe to challenge to ask questions to give negative feedback without fear of negative consequences I don't think I have a simple answer for that at least I haven't found I haven't found it um so I guess can you say the question for me again caffeine's wearing off sorry I I can't feel the caffeine in my body anymore the in short it is constructive conflict is powerful needs to take place how do we set that up so that first of all staff are able to enter that space and those who hold power and how do we protect those who are speaking from being labeled in such a way that they've with no longer works I think there's two approaches uncle wayne talks about the you know the yes I often talk about the no so these like accountability and diversity equity inclusion are becoming more necessary and we're at an interesting tension between people higher ups knowing they need to do it and not having the skills to so for as long as there is that gap we will be in that place of tension and that often leads to dysfunctional con conflict if the people with power don't have the skills to show up in ways that are safe for the people that they're listening to so part of it is um advocating for change for those people who make decisions so um perhaps changing your messaging and going from we can't actually have a conversation about what's not working until we can have a conversation full stop and we can't have a conversation until you are able to hear and like digest our feedback in a way that is safe and respectful and so there's a piece of advocacy done around like trauma informed leadership I have a great colleague who teaches that if anybody with money in the room would like to have training done for your organization it is hands down the number one most like useful skill set that I think leaders can have and I think it's their responsibility to know how to do that and know how to show up so I think that's probably a key piece that is missing between that point of having constructive conflict safely and the skill set that currently exists in higher education the other is and I do a lot of this so as a diversity equity inclusions consultant I spend a lot of time in rooms with people talking about their own privilege it's not always an easy job but the way that I have found possible to start and get a crap like get a toe in the door is starting the conversation around that notion of like the difference between morality and privilege and starting that as a conversation point I once heard an amazing auntie talk at some really big university there was like 500 people in the room and they had done a piece of work around like decolonizing the curriculum in higher education as a national piece of work and um they they were like I don't know 20 recommendations or something and someone in the room said if you had to choose one recommendation that was most important what would you choose do the work do all of them like but she like took a deep breath and then said I'm about to get angry angry black women tend to be silenced do not shut down and hear my anger as a way to ignore what I'm about to say and then she went on and I can nailed him it was great but like you can be upfront about how you're feeling um that is an act of vulnerability that's something that's hard to do when you're already in a vulnerable marginalised position within the spaces of power but if you feel like you have the resilience to take that on it can be quite a disarming technique to sit down and say I'm actually really anxious being here today I have a history of talking about how ableism harms me and my community and people getting defensive and shutting me down I would really appreciate it if your reaction could be mindful of that history of trauma that I hold and to not get defensive when I give you negative feedback it is vulnerability but it's also a gift helping people to engage with you in ways that they can hear you is a gift to them if they don't know how to take that that's on them but you have done everything you can to start that conversation from a place where you are enabling them to listen any other questions or are we at time thank you so much for listening thank you so much Lucy this was this was incredible and what a way to also end your keynote with this wonderful answer and thank you for the question that you know also brought this up