Project Overview 

What We Aim to Achieve:

• Generate Knowledge: Produce actionable gender equality knowledge through highly participatory methods.
• Create Space to Act: Build dedicated environments for social innovation and gender-based inclusion inside the institution itself.
• Design Educational Models: Develop frameworks that successfully integrate gender perspectives into higher education.
• Interactive Learning: Host an interactive online academy tailored specifically for university communities.

The Three Pillars of Action 

1. Beyond Gender Academy

Power, diversity and belonging in higher education.

Four modules, one transformation. This academy course, available in English, Spanish and Greek, thoroughly examines the intersections of gender, diversity, and inclusion within higher education and broader society. Through critical analysis and hands-on activities, participants gain practical frameworks to embed gender perspectives directly into research, teaching, and community life.

More info and registration here: https://2811global.com/beyond-gender-academy/

2. Mapping Equality 

How do university spaces shape who feels welcome, safe, and able to participate?

Mapping Equality is a participatory, qualitative, and intersectional research process combining spatial observation, emotional mapping, and collective reflection. Conceived as both a diagnostic tool and a pedagogical experience, it explores everyday campus environments by utilizing students as co-researchers rather than passive subjects.

The Research Process

1. Participatory Design: Students co-create the research tool during the Beyond Gender Academy to ground it in real, lived experience.
2. Equality Walk: Based on the concept of Jane’s Walks (Jacobs, 1961), it is a guided campus tour featuring emotional mapping to document comfort, discomfort, and avoidance in specific spaces.
3. Collective Reflection: Students discuss spatial patterns with expert mentors, generating qualitative evidence on safety, belonging, and visibility.

5 Dimensions of Equality Analysed 

• Visibility & Representation
• Safety & Accessibility
• Communication & Symbolism
• Care & Wellbeing
• Participation & Belonging

This process seeks epistemic justice by validating students’ experiential knowledge, whose findings serve as an empirical basis for the co-design of concrete actions in the subsequent Living Labs phase.

3. Living Labs: How do communities co-create change from within?

The Living Labs are participatory spaces for social innovation embedded within each partner university. They represent the project’s transition from diagnosis to action: taking the findings from the Beyond Gender Academy and Mapping Equality to co-design, prototype, and test real solutions to gender inequality challenges in everyday university life.

Three Phases of Action

• Phase 1: Design & Map: Student driving groups co-design the lab structure, define protocols, and map the local ecosystem of challenges, stakeholders, and potential allies. Transparency, horizontality, and social inclusion guide every decision.
• Phase 2: Explore & Co-create: The driving group engages the community through interviews, focus groups, and co-creation sessions. Collective ideation sessions utilize social design thinking tools like the Impact Matrix to prioritize and pilot the most viable, promising solutions both inside and outside the university.
• Phase 3: Test & Sustain: Pilot results are shared directly with the community to collect feedback and measure impact. Each lab produces an Action Plan and a Sustainability Plan to ensure the lab, its projects, and its culture of change remain active and effective far beyond the project’s lifespan.