By continuing to browse this site, you agree to the use of cookies to identify your session.
Privacy Policy?
Agree and close
Current Projects
Uses and perceptions of spaces on Campus (2015–2020)
Public Lecture
05/06/2023

Uses and perceptions of spaces on Campus
(2015–2020)

Case study of the University of Buenos Aires from a gender and affective perspective

Linked to
Helen V. Pritchard
Public talk by Griselda Flesler.
Moderated by Helen V. Pritchard.

Monday, 12 June 2023
3pm at the Critical Media Lab

The talk is open for anyone to join, no registration needed.

In collaboration with the Intersectional Lab.

In this lecture I will focus on the impact that the University campus design has on students and teachers according to their gender identity. We have observed that the different places generate a wide arc of emotions that go from comfort and pleasure to discomfort and fear, and that these emotions are marked in terms of gender.

Feminist geography argues that spaces are not gender neutral. Some authors have focused on pointing out hegemonic masculinity as the parameter with which public spaces have been designed, and others have discussed its heteronormativity. We are interested in studying emotions related to University campus places and spaces from the theoretical framework of the affective turn and emotional geographies.

The case study is the campus of the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), the most massive in Argentina and one of the largest in Latin America. Our analysis is based on the results of a survey carried out among UBA’s students and professors in November 2020, (more than 2000 answers) about the emotions that different university spaces produced in them.

At the end of the lecture we will propose a series of strategies and recommendations – elaborated from the survey’s findings – with the purpose of providing tools to university management to materialize fairness through design and to generate greater well-being in the experiences of their academic communities.

Griselda Flesler (she/her) is a tenured professor at the Chair of Design and Gender Studies at the Faculty of Architecture, Design and Urbanism, and principal researcher at the American Art Institute and Master in Design Theory (UBA), also she is PhD candidate in Social Sciences at the University of Buenos Aires in Argentina. Her research focuses on symbolic violence of the university space and the queer uses of the institutional and public space. Flesler also served as Head of Gender Office at FADU-UBA (2017–2022), developing and applying the “Protocol of institutional intervention in the case of complaints of gender violence, sexual harassment and gender discrimination” and she inaugurated the first non gender bathroom at the the University of Buenos Aires.