Disrupting the Mythology of Bias-Based Bullying: Queer Kids and Social Violence

Session Type: Symposium

Abstract

Authors in this symposium critique and confront mainstream bullying discourse, which is the dominant paradigm for repairing LGBTQ youth experiences of victimization and school exclusion. Through research on how bullying shapes policy and practice in the UK, Australia, and USA, the authors demonstrate that this discourse fails to encompass the diversity and complexity of queer youth school experiences, or account for the how and why bias-based aggression occurs. Authors illustrate the dangers of reductive approaches to creating safer schools, particularly in current contexts of rising bias-based bullying and threats to queer inclusive K-12 policies and practices. Writers offer strategies and opportunities to engage with queer youth in ways that are humanizing and have more realistic potential for counteracting discriminatory policies.

Sub Unit

• Division G - Social Context of Education / Division G - Section 4: Policies, Mattering, and Praxis

Chair

• Elizabethe C. Payne, Queering Education Research Institute (QuERI)

Papers

• Pipelines Paved by Bullies: Black Queer Youth and Zero-ish Tolerance Policies - Boni Wozolek, Pennsylvania State University - Abington

• Disrupting the conservative parent discourse: Parents’ considerations of school-based bullying of gender/sexuality diverse students - Jacqueline Ullman, Western Sydney University; Tania Ferfolja, University of Western Sydney

• Bullying and LGBTQ Students: A Call to Redefine the Problem - Elizabethe C. Payne, Queering Education Research Institute (QuERI); Melissa J. Smith, Fairleigh Dickinson University

• Queer Cwtch: A phEmaterialist approach to addressing gender and sexual diversity and equity in schools - EJ Renold, Cardiff University; Jessica Lenore Ringrose, UCL Institute of Education

Discussant

• Jen Gilbert, University of Toronto - OISE