In this piece, BILT Student Fellow Elliot Green interviews Dr B Camminga, a lecturer in SPAIS at the University of Bristol.
What is your background?
Growing up, my parents were very conservative evangelicals, so I went to a very evangelical school. Your subject choices were: you could do maths or you could do biblical studies. And that school didn’t really promote going to university because South Africa doesn’t have Christian universities, and no one in my family had gone to university, so I didn’t really think about doing this. So after school, I just started working in cafes and bars.
My best friend was in the grade below me, and she went to university. She said to me, ‘You know, you should really go to university,’ and I was like, ‘What is that?’. Next thing I know I’m putting in an application, and I get in, and I start getting scholarships to keep going. And I tell myself that it’s kind of like a job, really. My brothers a firefighter, my sisters a nurse, my other brother’s a plumber, so my family is all trades, and since I was getting paid I think of it like work.
During this time I came out as queer and this influenced the kind of work and research I wanted to do. Research is always best when you have some sort of investment in it, and lots of people find their route through finding themselves. During my PHD I finally came out as trans, and by that point, I was already working with the trans community in South Africa. I ended up becoming a sociologist of gender.
Do you have a particularly memorable teaching experience?
Well I like to think that I’m obviously queer and trans and I also like to vocalise that in my classes. When I was a student, it was so important to see someone like myself, and now students will always come and say that they take far more of an interest in the class and they produce better work because of this. Sometimes they’ll even come and find me a few years down the line and want to be my master’s students or PhD students. And those are the best journeys because I already know they have a great foundation, they have an interest, and they’re going to write interesting stuff.
How do you create a sense of community while teaching?
I do really try to, particularly in the two environments I teach in. Most of my teaching has taken place in South Africa and being out is important for students to see and feel that your door’s always open. A lot of us don’t make it. Being an undergrad and being different is hard, and there’s so many other pressures in the world on us. A lot of us [queer and trans people] don’t make it to the other side of a degree. So you see fewer queer and trans people in higher education, particularly trans people, and that means it’s so important to create that community, to show that it is possible for us to make it, so that more of us do. Sometimes you need someone to tell you that it’s okay. Otherwise, you can feel like you’re just failing and failing. And what we do is say ‘it’s okay, I hear you, don’t worry about it’. And then, I would suggest baby steps, one thing at a time.
In terms of community, Bristol is great because there are so many wonderful groups and societies. People who are different will always find each other, and that’s important. In terms of the queer community, I’ve been blown away. Bristol has so many things going on, down to minute things like… queer chess? Or queer pottery? There are so many things. And if a student is struggling to feel like they belong in class, or at university, my advice would be to get out there, find your niche, weird kids aren’t gonna find each other if you’re in your rooms.
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