Auckland Institute of Technology (AUT) launched its innovative e-portal this week bringing together rainbow-specific research, books, reports, dissertations and articles, with the hope of it eventually being a global repository of knowledge.
Named Ia, it will initially hold more than 100 works with open access and a commitment to research never shut away in journals that people can’t afford, Professor Wellby Ings says.
“It came from need. Back in the day, we used to go into libraries trying to find stuff about ourselves and about our people. And oftentimes it was very biased, and we live in a world today that has so much misinformation floating around. And we thought in the past in universities, people would write theses and we’d write journal articles and they either sat on the back shelf of a library, and no one saw them, or they were locked away behind subscription-only journals.
“But this is information about our people, for our people. And we thought, well, nobody else in the world is doing this. But this is Aotearoa, and we don’t really wait for permission.”
The Rainbow Initiative spokesperson says the idea came about after a number of young people reached out to the organisation asking for help finding information to complete school assignments and themselves finding resources difficult to access or spread across multiple research hubs at different universities and institutions. That led to this groundbreaking portal.
Nothing that joined disciplines before
“What we found is that we spent a long time assuming there were some other precedents somewhere in the world. All I could find was occasionally in a university, there would be a little hub. It might sit in a discipline somewhere where there’d been a little collection, but nothing expansive. Nothing that joined all the disciplines, from business to engineering, to mathematics, to languages, to psychotherapy, nothing that connected it all together.”
Ings says collating research into Ia has revealed significant gaps in rainbow research and the difficulties faced by rainbow communities around the globe.
“There is not enough research, right? And so it helps us in arguing the necessity to grow research and to grow our people, grow our takatāpui researchers, who have an embodied understanding of the thing that they’re researching. So it’s not research about us, it’s by us, for us.
“Sixty-six countries in the world put you in prison for being gay. Twelve of them kill you. It brings up another really interesting thing. Everyone we checked:, ‘Are you okay with your research being here?’ And just about everyone says yes but some people don’t. And the reason they don’t is that they come from other countries and once their name is on a portal like this at Immigration or somebody clicks their name they know straight away their association with research like this. So the world is not as safe as it is here.”
