Geographies of Queer Joy

Lauren Levenston, Geography

Last quarter I conducted an independent research project, interviewing queer UW students on how our urban and educational environments impact their experiences of queer joy, belonging, and safety in University District, Seattle. After these interviews, I cumulated my interviewees' experiences into a storymap, showing how these experiences of queer joy are geographically distributed in U District. The storymap includes images, definitions of queer joy, poems, brief stories, and experiences with student organizations.

In addition to the storymap, I wrote up a final paper that details the methods and findings of my research. The findings go more in depth about the experiences described by my interviewees, such as difficulties as a queer woman in engineering, finding belonging in student organizations that are not queer affinity groups, aroace exclusion from mainstream queer culture, intersectional nuances of safety for queer people in public urban spaces, and various definitions of queer joy.