AAMG 2021 Annual Conference Code of Conduct

The Association of Academic Museums and Galleries (AAMG) is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form.

This Code of Conduct applies to all AAMG spaces, including our website, the groups.io listserv, our conference platforms, and our mailing and membership lists, both online and off. Anyone who violates this Code of Conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of AAMG.

Some AAMG physical and virtual spaces may have additional rules in place, which will be made available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules.

Harassment includes:

  • Offensive comments related to gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, mental illness, neuro(a)typicality, physical appearance, body size, age, race, or religion.
  • Unwelcome comments regarding a person’s lifestyle choices and practices, including those related to food, health, parenting, drugs, and employment.
  • Deliberate misgendering or use of ‘dead’ or rejected names.
  • Gratuitous or off-topic sexual images or behaviour in spaces where they’re not appropriate.
  • Physical contact and simulated physical contact (eg, textual descriptions like “*hug*” or “*backrub*”) without consent or after a request to stop.
  • Threats of violence.
  • Incitement of violence towards any individual, including encouraging a person to commit suicide or to engage in self-harm.
  • Deliberate intimidation.
  • Stalking unwelcomed following.
  • Harassing photography or recording, including logging online activity for harassment purposes.
  • Sustained disruption of discussion.
  • Unwelcome sexual attention.
  • Pattern of inappropriate social contact, such as requesting/assuming inappropriate levels of intimacy with others.
  • Continued one-on-one communication after requests to cease.
  • Deliberate “outing” of any aspect of a person’s identity without their consent except as necessary to protect vulnerable people from intentional abuse.
  • Publication of non-harassing private communication.

AAMG prioritizes marginalized people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort. The AAMG Conference Committee reserves the right not to act on complaints regarding:

  • ‘Reverse’ -isms, including ‘reverse racism,’ ‘reverse sexism,’ and ‘cisphobia’
  • Reasonable communication of boundaries, such as “leave me alone,” “go away,” or “I’m not discussing this with you.”
  • Communicating in a ‘tone’ you don’t find congenial
  • Criticizing racist, sexist, cissexist, or otherwise oppressive behavior or assumptions

Reporting

If you are being harassed by a member of AAMG, notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the AAMG Conference Committee at aacademicmg[at]gmail[dot]com. If the person who is harassing you is on the team, they will recuse themselves from handling your incident. We will respond as promptly as we can.

We reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be deleted without response.

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of AAMG members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent.

Consequences

Participants asked to stop any harassing behavior are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behavior, the AAMG Conference Committee may take any action they deem appropriate, up to and including expulsion from all AAMG spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other AAMG members or the general public.

This policy is licensed under the Creative Commons Zero license . It is public domain, no credit and no open licensing of your version is required.

This anti-harassment policy is based on the example policy from the Geek Feminism wiki, created by the Geek Feminism community: http://geekfeminism.wikia.com/wiki/Community_anti-harassment:

The policy is based on the conference anti-harassment policy, and is the work of Annalee Flower Horne with assistance from Valerie Aurora, Alex Skud Bayley, Tim Chevalier, and Mary Gardiner.