Queering Academia Through Student-Led Research and Learning Communities

• In Event: Remedy and Repair Through the Queering of Research, Pedagogy, and Methodologies

Abstract

As PhD students, we felt a transdisciplinary silence around queer scholarship and discourse in our institution. While there were critical conversations around educational equity rooted in race, ethnicity, and immigration, we found no institutional offerings that surfaced queerness, despite a purported departmental interest in intersectionality. In response, we created our own queer community research space, called Q-RAC, with the goal of living out the kind of queer relationships and research we want in education.

Queer theory, borne of lesbian, gay, and transgender studies (Ferguson, 2018) is critically extended by intersectional approaches such as queer of color critique (QOCC) that highlight the entrenched nature of white supremacy within queer scholarship (Brockenbrough, 2015). A

QOCC approach stresses the importance of deconstructing white normativities within queer knowledge production. Just as we must be carefully attuned to how heteronormativity is reified and reproduced in learning institutions, we must be equally attuned to how white normativities are reproduced, and how they depend on each other (Bruyneel, 2023). We use QOCC here to analyze how our production of a queer research space induces anti-oppressive knowledge production that delinks white supremacy from queerness.

In this paper, we take a queer autoethnographic approach to our experiences and observations of the creation and development of Q-RAC. As Jones and Adams (2016) note, both queer theory and autoethnography are conceptually compatible in their resistance to orthodox ways of knowing and writing. Queer autoethnography resists normative storytelling techniques by striving not for completeness or finishedness, but rather for a messier, more dynamic, honest account of experiences (Cavanaugh, Alexander, & Gaztambide-Fernández, 2023). A reflexive analysis of our decisions and interactions that led to the creation of Q-RAC offers unique insight and an important analytical window into what kind of conditions and motivations help undergird efforts to queer academic learning spaces, and in turn bring about meaningful change.

Our analysis of ethnographic notes reveals how creating queer spaces can help queer other learning spaces. Q-RAC helped queer academic camaraderie by challenging normative notions about separating ourselves from our research. In highlighting queer relationality as an intentional, sustained practice of Q-RAC, we show that attention to affective dispositions proved, as shown in the discursive analysis of members’ own reflections on our sessions, to be an invaluable site for anti-oppressive moments of learning.

As this panel’s authors show, students need more spaces that see them for who they are and that are committed to horizontal working dynamics that do not replicate oppressive logics. As our analysis reveals, neither is the development of such spaces uncontested or perfect. Rather, it is the re-iteration of our values and political commitments to one another and to a queer ontological view of the world that must be centered in any learning space that seeks to queer its pedagogy.
Such lessons are not meant for carbon copy blueprints for other learning spaces, but they may provide unique and important understandings upon which others may build out queer dreams and futures in their own lives.

Authors

• Jackson Gzehoviak, University of California - Los Angeles

• Micaela Bronstein, University of California - Los Angeles