Thinking Queerly with Educational Futurities

• In Event: Counter-Storytelling for Queer & Trans Epistemic Justice

Abstract

Objectives or purposes: This paper explores the implications and potentials of using queer and trans methodologies in educational research with educators whose identities exist at the intersections of queerness and/or transness and disability. In all cases, queer, trans, and disabled identities are construed broadly. In order to begin to conceptualize how queer research methods might be put to work toward building just educational futures where queer and disabled people have space to thrive, I consider the efficacy of personal (re)narration as a vehicle for speculative imaginings, and consider the viability of working within a disability justice framework as an aspect of queer research.
Perspective(s) or theoretical framework: This paper engages a cripistemological framework, where the embodied simultaneity of queerness and disability offer a distinct lens through which to conceptualize the production of knowledge. This work also negotiates with the possibilities and limitations of disability justice as a theoretical framework in queer education research, especially with respect to displacing damage-centred narratives.
Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry: To begin to navigate the methodological possibilities of thinking with cripistemology and disability justice as queer research practice, personal narration and reflection on the role of pain in queer, trans, and disabled research are considered and placed in conversation with emerging scholarship around queer narrative repair (Coleman; Shrodes; Iskander et al.). Further, the idea of disability as oracle (Wong) is read in the context of queer space and time (Friedman), and positioned as a potential entry point for speculative design in queer and disabled education research.
Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials: The author’s memories and embodied experiences of both queerness and disability are considered together with scholarship in queer education research, disability and disability justice, and speculative methodologies.
Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view: This paper recognizes that dreaming different futures can be an expression of disability justice, and a way to connect to queer and trans epistemologies across time and space. It acknowledges that imagining from a place of pain does not inherently reinforce damage-centred narratives about what is possible for queer and disabled people at school, and demonstrates that engaging the stories we tell about our own embodied experiences as disabled queer educators might offer a generative starting point for speculative imagining.
Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work: Queer and disabled interrogations of educational experiences, including through personal (re)narration, might be oriented speculatively in order to begin imagining more just educational futurities that allow us to thrive. In a world where climate change, extractive capitalism, state violence, pandemic disease, and White supremacy create the conditions for increased disability, and a world where queer and trans youth are increasingly having their rights threatened, envisioning alternate educational possibilities becomes more urgent than ever. Queer, disabled, and speculative methodologies can be put to work in service of this.

Author

• Madeleine Long Long, University of Toronto - OISE