‘We truly learned to engage with each other’s perspectives’
How do ideas from psychology, law and history together contribute to understanding tensions between privacy and inclusion in the workplace? Prof Jojanneke van der Toorn (social psychology) and Dr Martine Veldhuizen (literary history), both members of the Utrecht Young Academy, share their experiences with their interdisciplinary research project Privacy and Inclusion.
The idea for the collaboration results from an interdisciplinary networking evening organized by the Utrecht Young Academy in 2018. Together with Dr Stefan Kulk (law) and Dr Florien Cramwinkel (interdisciplinary social sciences), Jojanneke and Martine posed the question of how inclusion of LGBTI+ people on the work floor can be achieved and how ideas about privacy may hinder this. With the help of a Seed Money Grant from Utrecht University’s Gender and Diversity Hub, they set up a consortium with multinationals, universities of applied sciences, public and societal organisations and platforms like the Workplace Pride Foundation.
Linking Disciplines
‘By bringing together people from different disciplines, we created the idea for this collaboration without any preconceptions about our approach’, Martine explains. ‘Since we did not know what to expect beforehand, we were able to keep an open perspective. At the networking evening, we came together by theme through short speed dates, after which we approached the topic from our own interpretation through exercises like associative writing.’
‘Since we did not know what to expect beforehand, we were able to keep an open perspective.’
‘We each contribute with our own expertise’, Jojanneke adds. ‘For example, Stefan was already researching privacy and data protection, and I study sexual prejudice and diversity management in my own research. Martine’s approach from the humanities is important for determining the variables in the psychological part of the research. For instance, the question of whether people want to share sensitive data with their employer to begin with stems from Martine’s preliminary research on taboos and the role of trust. Investigating the history of privacy as a concept can reveal the context of the persistent and universal human need for privacy.’
Connecting to the workplace
Through the consortium, questions posed by companies regarding privacy and inclusion can be identified. Jojanneke: ‘In order to map inequality, businesses need information about the sexual orientation of their employees. There exist different ideas on how this relates to the employees’ privacy. Through focus groups with the companies in the consortium, we found that there exist many different presumptions about enquiring about the sexuality of employees. Some diversity officers already had assumptions about what the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) states about this, while the assumptions of data officers or LGBT network groups were very different. Through the consortium, we are now working together with a Legal Designer from the University of Applied Sciences Leiden to translate insights from the GDPR into workplace parlance, such that policy does not need to be based on assumptions.’
Creating a consortium is also in line with the interdisciplinary character of the project. Martine: ‘Working with concrete issues from the private sector is quite new for me as a literary and cultural historian, but it is incredibly insightful. There is a similar need for interdisciplinary collaborations in legal studies, for example by looking at what organisations want to know about the law. Moreover, while there exists clear legislation about privacy, there simultaneously is a lot of room for interpretation. That makes psychological and historical insights very useful.’
Interdisciplinary interaction
‘While we all investigate the same theme, it can be challenging to identify the shared question.’
The interdisciplinary project not only brings together psychology, law and history, but it also promotes an interaction between these disciplines. Martine: ‘During this project we truly learned to engage with each other's perspectives. While we all investigate the same theme, it can be challenging to identify the shared question. In the end, we managed to conceptually meet each other in definitions and concepts from the field of anthropology.
Jojanneke: ‘The collaboration has also allowed us to build a friendship that sparks creativity. The Utrecht Young Academy played an important part in this, since it allowed us to meet academics from other disciplines in a research context and to start collaborating. That truly shows the unique added value of such a collective and for that I am very thankful to the university!’