"School Shouldn't Be Something You Have to Survive": Queer Women's Experiences with Microaggressions at a Canadian University

Coping among Black college women: A transformative study of gendered racism

Black women in the United States are placed at higher risk for mental health challenges, including distress and depression, due to structural inequities. Black college women enrolled in predominantly White institutions may be particularly exposed to stressors related to gendered racism, but there is limited knowledge about this population's coping strategies. A cross-sectional survey and focus group were utilized to understand and disrupt participants' experiences of gendered racism. In phase one, a survey assessing coping strategies and mental health outcomes was conducted with 168 Black women enrolled at a predominantly White institution in the southeastern United States. Logistic regression results indicated that several coping strategies including behavioral disengagement, self-blame, self-distraction, denial, and positive reframing were significantly associated with depression and psychological distress, all p < 0.05. Phase two included a single focus group with a subset of the sample from phase one. The focus group findings supplemented the survey results, suggesting education (more accurately consciousness-raising) as a foundational theme that seemed to create space for humor and social support as coping subthemes and created a transformative space where participants spoke openly about gendered racism. Findings from this study highlight the societal underpinnings that shape Black college women's experiences of gendered racism. College settings should endeavor to provide formal and informal support for Black women to minimize the harms related to gendered racism.

Violence Against LGBTIQ+ People at Universities: The Need to Uncover a Silent Reality

Violence against LGBT community can manifest in different forms and exists in all spheres of society, including education. The main purpose of this article is to deepen the understanding of the state of the art about violence grounded in sexual orientation or gender identity in higher education in order to identify gaps for further research. The topic of this state-of-the-art literature review is the presence and magnitude of these forms of violence in the Spanish higher education system. For this reason, the inclusion criteria were empirical studies about the prevalence of violence against LGBTIQ+ individuals in the Spanish educational system. After analyzing the 25 articles that met the inclusion criteria, the main findings point that despite the existence of numerous international studies of the presence of violence against LGBTIQ+ people at colleges, little is known about this reality in Spain. The Spanish university system continues to remain hermetic, and violence against LGBTIQ+ people is silenced and hidden. Practice, policy and research implications of the findings are discussed in this article, highlighting the need of further research in this field. In this context, the research project Uni4Freedom, addresses this social and educational problem to contribute to the creation of safer universities for the LGBTIQ+ community and people who support them.