Station 1

• In Event: The Art of Queer and Trans Educational Research Methodology: A Workshop on Community-Engaged Scholarship

Abstract

In this first station all participants will be invited to engage in a multimodal exploration of the following questions:
What becomes possible with regard to queer/trans liberation when we center Black trans and queer youth and their communities?
How might our scholarly explorations of queerness and transness in education shift if we took our cues from Black queer and youth and their communities?
What new methodologies are needed to explore the agency of Black queer and trans youth and their communities?
This station will draw on data from a 4-year ethnographic study on the agency of Black trans and queer youth in New York City’s Ballroom Culture. This ethnographic study explored how the youth participants understood their own agency in school and out-of-school Ballroom spaces. Though the study was primarily done by one of the presenting scholars, this station will be hosted in collaboration with Black queer and trans youth from the Ballroom Scene who formed part of the original research project. The focus of this station will be to learn from the youth participants as they reflect on their experiences as part of this research project and share their recommendations on how to best engage them and their communities in future scholarship. In addition to learning from the youth’s experience on how to work with Black trans and queer youth and their communities, this station will provide opportunities for participants to work through conceptualizing research on queerness/transness in education that does not center whiteness or damage-centered narratives of Black trans and queer communities.
Theoretical Framework: Queer of color critique

Ferguson (2004) first articulated queer of color critique (QOCC) as an interdisciplinary approach to scholarship that centers LGBTQ+ people of color, emphasizing their relationship and resistance to power. In its analysis, QOCC critique maintains that often our approaches to studying race, class, gender, and sexuality are single-identity approaches that present one social identity marker as the most significant and having developed independently from other aspects of our identity. This single identity approach relies on the myth of the “normal person” informed by notions of normalcy, whiteness, and cis-heteronormativity (Ferguson, 2004). And these single-identity approaches frequently leave out and reinscribe inequitable experiences for our most marginalized such as those who are at once racially and sexually minoritized while prioritizing those within the group who are more privileged. Though QOC critique emerges from outside the field of education, scholars like Brockenbrough (2015) have taken up this analysis to charge education researchers to explore the benefits of engaging the ways of knowing and being from within queer and trans communities of color with an emphasis on how these communities practice agency to resist oppression (Love, 2017).
Brockenbrough, E. (2015). Queer of color agency in educational contexts: Analytic frameworks from a queer of color critique. Educational Studies, 51(1), 28-44.

Ferguson, R. A. (2004). Aberrations in black: Toward a queer of color critique.Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

Love, B.L. (2017). A ratchet lens: Black queer youth, agency, hip hop, and the Black ratchet imagination. Educational Researcher, 46(9), 539-547.

Author

• Shamari Reid, New York University
  Presenting Author