I’m the Associate Dean for Education and Student Experience at Oxford Brookes Business School, and one of the main reasons this role is important to me is that I can bring my own experiences of having a non-normative gender and sexual identity into who I am at work and the decsions I help make across the University.
I came into education to make a difference, because going to University made a difference to me. As someone who also had a non-traditional educational background and a late diagnosis of ADHD, learning (and navigating its environment) was never very easy. It is this positionality that influences the way in which I ‘see’ learning and enables me, alongside many of my other colleagues at Brookes, to make sure that ‘otherness’ has a voice and influences our policies and practice - for both students and staff.
Whilst I have not hidden my LGBTQ+ identity with colleagues since starting at Brookes in 2005, it is only more recently that I have begun to publicly share my sexuality and gender identity with larger audiences, from talking about my PhD research (queer(y)ing LGBTQ+ advertisements) to opening EDI staff development events with a personal account of my own experiences as a gay, non-binary person. For me, this shift positively reflects where Brookes is in its institutional development and the increased responsibility I feel (in a good way!) to continue to step out and step up.
For those of you that have read a number of our LGBTQ+ staff profiles, I hope you have started to gain a sense of what the environment feels like for many of us at Brookes. My advice, if you are already with us, is to get connected! The LGBTQ+ Staff Forum is a great, informal safe space…and Brookes Union has a range of support available for students and opportunities to get more actively involved.
“One of the main reasons this role is important to me is that I can bring my own experiences of having a non-normative gender and sexual identity into who I am at work and the decsions I help make across the University.”
Dr Lindsay Williams
Associate Dean for Education and Student Experience
- lwilliams@brookes.ac.uk
- Room: CLC1.31, Headington Campus
