Queer Failures and Other Possibilities: Reorienting Learning and Research Through the Pandemic

• In Event: AERA Roundtable Session 1
  In Roundtable Session: Queer Critiques of Institutions and the Status Quo

Abstract

Against normative measures of success, many of us are failing. Might the pandemic offer a chance to re-orient our work and expectations of ourselves and students? This paper questions success by exploring the possibilities of failure and the spaces it affords for race, class, sexual, and gender exploration and re-orientation. Drawing on student experiences, data document both a year of high school life and ethnographic research under quarantine and its effects on young people’s experiences of race, class, sexuality, and gender. Seeing queer possibilities and success even among those spaces and circumstances frequently framed as loss or failure, the authors propose re-orienting towards and around failed research, teaching, and learning to support LGBTQ+ students including racialized queer youth.

Authors

• David A Pereira, University of Toronto

• Jen Gilbert, York University

• Jessica Fields, University of Toronto Scarborough