Queer and Trans Youth Spatial Practices and Experiences Thriving Amid Place-Based Boundaries

• In Event: Roundtable Session 35
  In Roundtable Session: Toward Necessarily Complex Research of Queer and Trans Youth Resistance and Survival

Abstract

This paper explores queer and trans young people’s navigation through their everyday lives to explore how youth make meaning of their experiences moving through space and how they come to understand the places they inhabit. Rather than focus on queer and trans youth’s experience of/in a single place, this paper explores the various places youth occupy and pass through to addresses a gap in research on queer and trans youth in education to shine light on these youths’ own senses of world making and knowledge production about space and place amidst the networks of power around them as they move through the social world.
In making the place/space distinction, this paper follows scholars in philosophy and geography who theoretically delineate the two concepts (Agnew, 2014; Harvey, 1993; Malpas, 1999) and also education scholars who argue for critical understandings of place (O’Donoghue, 2007; Ruitenberg, 2005; Weems, 2010). While echoing concerns that the decentralizing of place moves the focus away from certain lived spatial experiences, especially those of Indigenous people and communities of color (Tuck & McKenzie, 2015), this paper remains weary that non-critical approaches to place ignore place’s discursive constructions. Navigating through these bodies of work is led by a desire to investigate how youth are making sense of their movement through space, while attending to networks of power and oppression, and also paying close attention to youth’s perceptions and understandings of, acquiescing to and challenging of, and attempts to survive and thrive amidst place-based boundaries.
This paper explores the initial findings of an ongoing transnational ethnographic research project on queer and trans youth in New York City, New York and Vancouver, British Columbia. Through a series of interviews and observations, this research centers on youth’s own perceptions and ways of knowing and thinking about place and space. Each participant (about 5 from each city) engaged in 2-3 interviews and a series of participant observations (about 4-5). The interviews explore youth’s experiences moving through space and their experiences encountering place-based borders and boundaries. The observations focus on youth spatial practices, specifically how they move betwixt and between multiple locations during their everyday lives and how those journeys are filtered through their overlapping racial, gendered, and sexual identities. The interview transcripts and fieldnotes from observations comprise the data for this project.
The focus on space and place offers additional tools for scholars and educators to understand how youth’s movements through the social world in ways that better appreciate the complexity of youth lives and their spatial practices. This paper suggests that moving with them through space and across place-based boundaries offers research a different view of queer and trans youth’s lives. The central concern of this project is expanding ideas about what and who queer and trans youth “are” by focusing on how they commonly come to be known as such. Overall, this project aims to think against practices and ways of thinking that too often place queer and trans youth without an awareness of how and why such placement is happening.

Author

• Sam Stiegler, The University of British Columbia