You Too Are Part of This Research

• In Event: Thursday Roundtable Session 10:50 am
  In Roundtable Session: Describing the Immeasurable: The Transformative Potential of Descriptive Review for Teaching, Learning, and Research (Table 29)

Abstract

Objectives
Welcome. I choose to do research within my own communities, that is in service to my own communities, not as a way of making us legible to others, but as a way of naming our own strengths and needs and creating tools for us. My research is not just for and about queer and trans people, but also invested in intergenerational community. Committed to the agency of children, my work engages children as researchers and knowledge producers, paying attention to external power structures and hierarchies, but also ways agism functions within queer and trans spaces and families.
Creating images, and engaging in an adapted process of Carini’s (2011) descriptive review, offered multiple ways to address power imbalances. It takes some power away from the researcher, as you are not evaluating, but paying attention to. It offers a way to address the power imbalances between an adult and a child researcher team, encouraging child researchers to share insights, and removing a requirement for literacy. Finally, it offers a way to invite readers into the possibilities imagined by children, to appreciate children’s insights and complexities, and to be present with their work.
Theoretical framework
Malatino (2020) writes about “relationships structured by mutual indebtedness or reciprocal duty – where we know and thus owe the other” (loc. 609). Such deep relationality and ethics of care shaped my research. This was overlaid with queer and trans theory; a belief in the agency of trans people and recognition that we deserve to engage in research for our own purposes, not as metaphors for others; and a commitment to the agency and brilliance of children.
Methods and data sources
This project was a partnership between me, an adult queer and trans researcher, and my elementary nonbinary child. Participants were recruited within my networks, and included 17 children and 12 adults from 11 households. During interviews, all participants were invited to draw what an ideal educational space would look like. Descriptive review was used as both a means of analyzing these drawings, and a way to draw readers into community and relation with the created work.
Results
Careful attention to the desires and wishes of children allowed adult access to their expertise on education. Emerging from this came children’s recommendations to make schools safer, more celebratory, less institutional and more collaborative. Children wanted an end to imposed gender binaries, and saw solutions to bring in more gender possibilities. Importantly, they wanted this not just for themselves, but also for others they saw excluded from power structures. Children of diverse identities addressed racism, ableism, colonialism, poverty, and land-based-learning in their visions for education.
Scholarly significance
Steele and Nicholson (2020) describe how most Trans and Gender Expansive (TGE) children experience “testimonial injustice,” deprived of access to words and stories about themselves and simultaneously disbelieved when they describe themselves. This project is a refusal (Martino & Omercajic, 2022) to engage in testimonial injustice, and instead co-create possibilities as queer and trans adults and children, in community and relation with each other.

Author

• j wallace skelton, University of Regina