SU22 - Our questions to Postgraduate officer candidates
Questions to Education officer candidate, Jamie-Lukas Campbell
What’s your number one priority?
Jamie-Lukas: Strengthening the dialogue across our postgraduate community. That means amplifying communication between students and staff and encouraging stronger cross-disciplinary collaboration.
Postgraduate experiences are extremely diverse. How can you represent all of them at the same time?
Jamie-Lukas: The postgraduate experience varies across our campus, but we share a common interest in improving our facilities and personal development opportunities. Representing our robust community means demanding accessible and inclusive functioning spaces, career preparation, and a supportive and engaging learning experience. Existing technology across campus needs improvement to realize bold initiatives like lecture recording, more attractive and accessible presentations, and support some of our peers’ research goals. A world-class institution demands world-class facilities. These logistical challenges impact our education, limiting our often brief PG experience at Queen’s.
What active steps will you take to change Postgraduate funding?
Jamie-Lukas: I will promote schemes and work with you to demand school-based ad-hoc support funds. Master’s programs don’t include hidden fees, such as registration and travel costs for some field trips. Then, far too often, the University releases funds for short-term projects or initiatives without timely advertising them timely and clearly to PG students. I’ll actively promote funding that’s made available and continually request that schools release and promote existing financial support besides the Hardship Fund. Far too many students are not aware of the support released each year to ease the financial burden, and as Postgrad Officer, I will be a partner in these efforts.
How have your personal experiences shaped your manifesto?
Jamie-Lukas: My ethos shapes my manifesto: be inclusive, thoughtful, and champion diversity in every meaning of the word. I launched my career when I became an outspoken voice for equitable education funding in a small suburb, where Policymakers had ignored Black and brown voices. That advocacy and subsequent experience shaped my experience and my commitment to fairness. I will be proud to represent you in our demand for a more holistic student experience and join you in building an inclusive environment where our postgraduate community feels they have a balanced advocate in their corner.
If you could have dinner with three famous people, dead or alive, who would they be?
Jamie-Lukas: I’d dine with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Bayard Rustin, outspoken leaders of the Civil Rights Movement, and Perry Watkins, a late former US service member who was one of the first openly queer people to be dismissed from the service because he was gay. He’d spoken about the impact of intersectionality in policymaking, and my research closely follows his contribution to the world. I’m passionate about research that explores the effects of identity and societal intersectionality on power and society’s collective memory and interpretation of that memory.