Exploring the Queer Potentiality of Messiness in Education

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session Thursday 7:45 am
  In Roundtable Session: Transforming Queer and Trans Research: Youth, Bridge Building, Cultivating Spaces

Abstract

In this conceptual paper, the author argues that messiness holds potential for queerly disrupting normative educational discourses, including conceptualizations of teacher professionalism rooted in coloniality, Whiteness, and neoliberalism that emphasize neatness and efficiency. Leveraging Manalansan’s (2014) theorization of queer as mess, the paper begins by examining how normative discourses of neatness function in teacher-facing media. Then, weaving together ideas from queer scholars with vignettes from everyday teaching life, the paper offers three ways messiness can disrupt these normative discourses. The author concludes by asserting that examining messiness allows educators and researchers to grapple with how definitions of teaching are tied up with discourses of hygiene, health, and efficiency inextricably linked to whiteness, ableism, and capitalism, and to imagine otherwise futures.

Author

• Zander Nowell, University of Colorado - Boulder