GISA Spring Election 2025 Candidate Profiles: Inés Léon Giménez for Vice President of Master’s Programs

In conversation with Inés Léon Giménez, MINT Gender, Race and Diversity 1st Year.

Q. What makes you the ideal candidate for your role, and how do you believe your background will help you succeed in this position?

My advocacy, rather than being an extracurricular activity for me, is my way of life. Everyday, I ask myself the question “how can I use my role as an activist to contribute to youth empowerment and gender equality?”. As a Vice-President, I commit to apply this rationale to adequately and fairly represent Master’s students’ needs and champion solutions that are wanted by the student community.

I am ideally qualified for the role: on top of my years of experience in youth and intersectional feminist advocacy, including being a Dual Degree representative, I propose a vision for the Vice-Presidency grounded in the principles of intersectionality, participation, and collaboration. 

As for performing VP-specific tasks, my professional background, including roles at the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, will help me in my drafting activities. This experience also made me a stronger communicator and connector as I organized assemblies for young people to talk about their policy ideas – my purpose was to build bridges for young people to be empowered to speak out and connect at a global level. Coming from Reunion Island, an extremely diverse place, and being binational, I know how to navigate cultural differences and switch between different codes, which is crucial at the Institute when interacting with the student body but also with the administration. As a VP, I will mobilize all these skills to make sure that every day of my tenure is geared towards making concrete steps towards the amplification of fellow students’ voices.

Q. How do you plan to approach the role in a way that ensures the smooth running of GISA’s operations and fosters a collaborative atmosphere?

I approach the role with the responsibility to make this Vice-Presidency a collaborative space where students, Class Representatives, and Initiative members can come and bring their ideas to the table – I would rather facilitate discussions about policies rather than give my own individual opinion.

To do so, I intend to approach the role with informality: fostering exchanges among the student community, going to talk to people directly, engaging in person and online, would be my first call. Checking in with Class Representatives and with Initiatives members every now and then with in-person meetings while remaining available for online options would be an opportunity to further connect and prioritize having touch with the community, rather than over-professionalizing our tasks, missions, and personas. I also want to promote participation from all students, for which circulating Google Forms to collect opinions and recommendations would be an avenue, on top of informal discussions at the Institute.

I also believe in the power of our Initiatives’ events, bringing people closer and building trust. Joy being its own form of resistance, cultivating spaces of joy and co-existence, such as during parties for instance, is something dear to my heart – especially at the beginning of the year, in order to ensure a better integration process for the newcomers. Together with the elected President, fostering collaboration and communication between Initiatives would be key for the whole student community to benefit. 

In a more personal way, I know how intimidating this Institute, including GISA, can appear, especially for marginalized students. By being approachable, caring, and kind, I am intimately committed to actively work against power structures and limiting beliefs, for each student to be able to engage with and enjoy their journey at the Institute.

Q. What past experiences have prepared you for the challenges of this role, and how will you use these experiences to improve GISA’s  efficiency?

Informed by my experience at the Beijing+30 Youth Steering Committee (UN Women), I believe one of the key challenges for this role is managing expectations through inclusive communication: keeping our ideas grounded and down-to-earth, in the framework of the mandate, while aiming higher and better through amplifying the voices of all students. I will do so by adopting context-sensitive and person-specific strategies in order to accommodate every students’ needs, with a peculiar attention for marginalized students.

From a personal perspective, I see myself as a resilient and optimistic person: when facing a challenge, while accepting to sit in difficult emotions, I always try to turn my day around and spotting the tiny beauties that our world is made of – cheesy, I know, but I believe this curious outlook on the world and life gives me the internal and external capacities to face any situation.

Q. If elected, what would be your primary goal and how would you ensure its successful implementation during your tenure?

If elected, my primary goal would be to plan a strategic plan to have the most intersectional feminist version of the GISA Vice-Presidency that you have ever seen: 

At a student’s experience level, as a result of the Master’s Forum and informal discussions, enforcing inclusive policies such as mandatory 5-minute breaks are crucial to making the Institute a better place. Supporting the Working Group on the reform of the misconduct reporting system would also constitute a core element of my advocacy. Last but not least, correctly labelling food at the cafeteria and providing vegan and gluten free options are also important points I would like to amplify voices for.

Continuing my predecessors’ work, I would like to further carry out the crucial efforts to decolonize the curriculum through intersectionality. Goals that motivated my candidacy are advocating for a larger offer of diversity- and intersectionality-centric classes and workshops, as well as a thorough incorporation of such topics throughout each course – including more critical and non-hegemonic scholarship is key to moving beyond the single ‘Postcolonial and Feminist Interventions’ class in a semester. Involving key actors such as the ASA and MENA Initiative and the Decolonial Working Group, but also Black Conversations, QISA, and the Feminist Collective, will be instrumental to be successful.

Q. How do you plan to make GISA more accessible and transparent for students, particularly when it comes to administrative processes and decision-making?

This is actually a key principle of my platform! Coming from a family rooted in working-class values and habitus, I have experienced firsthand the need to use easier language and to avoid jargon and acronyms, among other communication practices that are exclusionary. While actively avoiding email and online communications fatigue, I would love to promote an easier access to GISA and transparency by providing some updates about what we are doing, so that students can also hold us accountable – by harnessing existing tools such as the GISA newsletter, but also through Instagram and in-person discussions.
Another critical point is to provide adequate support for incoming 1st year Master’s students: collaborating closely with the student services to send out checklists and know-how toolkits per email about how to register at OCPM, how to receive insurance, how to file taxes, is on my agenda. Such resources shall also remain available permanently online, so that students can access them at all times in an easy way and can stay after the 2025-2026 GISA term. I alongside the rest of the GISA Executive Committee will also make sure to remain available and actively check-in and follow-up with students that may encounter challenges.

Q.What are three core values you bring to your role?

Three core values that I bring to my role are:

• Inclusivity and Intersectional Feminism: This is no secret, if elected Vice-President, the vision that I have for this position is fully embedded in intersectional feminist and inclusivity. I believe we are stronger when gathered and organized in the community, and I intend to tackle issues with this holistic framing in mind.
• Radical Empathy: Being a VP doesn’t mean imposing ideas and ‘leading’ in a way that feels individualistic under a neoliberal system. What I want to bring to the table is empathy as core to each decision to be made as a VP, assuming best intentions, and practicing understanding and care. I believe emotions such as joy and love for the community to be essential drivers for effective change.    
• Collaborative Participation: I envision the role of the VP to be a role of connector, bringing together different actors and perspectives in order to, collectively, tackle issues that are deemed important by the student body. As an amplifier of all student voices, including marginalized voices, I want to collect as much information that I can to make sure to propose the best avenues for collaboration. Through inclusive communication, I will make sure to engage the community to participate and to make their voices heard.

Q. Lastly, a few creative ways or plans of action (chance to do something different )

If I want to build on my predecessors’ work, my perspective, informed by a vision and methodology that I personally believe in, also has a creative dimension. On top of my framing that includes strong takes on intersectionality, participation, and co-construction, I intend to include more movement and expressions of freedom at the Institute. As a dance scholar and practitioner, and a Conservatory graduate, connecting with the student body with dance-offs and other similar creative ways to occupy the space that is ours to use is something I would like to explore. I would also love to export this idea to nice places we all go to when the sun is out and the weather is warm – imagine the vibes of all of us gathering and dancing at Perles du Lac! 

I also would like to frame an Orientation Week that includes check-ins for administrative and academic procedures, but also Initiatives events, and a biiiig party organized by GISA.

In the absence of a student union, I also believe that informing the student body of important events happening in the city of Geneva, related to our values of intersectionality, inclusivity, and participation, would be a way to engage as a VP with the community.