Queer youth futures now! Education as a transformative praxis for queer youth globally

• In Event: Highlighted Session: Examining the power of protest against sexual, racial and political violence

Proposal

We are living in a moment of existential precarity in the lives of queer youth. Decades of academic research and human rights movements have shown the direct, structural, and cultural violence queer youth face in its intersectional forms. However, policymakers around the world are introducing new laws and policies that target the human rights of LGBTI+ students (ILGA World, 2023). This state-sponsored violence includes the United States where the American Civil Liberties Union is currently tracking 228 educational related anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in state legislatures so far this year [January-June 2023] (ACLU, 2023). This mobilized backlash includes preventing trans students from participating in school activities, forcing teachers to out their students, and censoring discussion of LGBTI+ people in the curriculum and library books. In Florida, where the conference will be held, the “Don’t Say Gay” law now makes it illegal to teach about LGBTI+ topics in primary and secondary school classrooms (CS/CS/HB 1557, 2022).

Scholars have written extensively on the disproportionate rates of bullying and harassment (Kosciw et al., 2020), homelessness (Ormiston, 2022), mental health and well-being (Russell & Fish, 2016), and conversion therapy (Mallory et al., 2019). Research has also addressed the role LGBTQI-inclusive school supports have on students’ academic and psychosocial outcomes in the curriculum (Schey, 2021), library books (Wexelbaum, 2018), teacher training (Freeman, Lewinger, & Thomas, 2021), and school policies (Kull, 2016). While this literature is paramount in offering understandings of queer youths’ experiences within queerphobic systems, it seldomly centers queer youths’ agency, actions, and participation in the co-creation and reconceptualization of knowledge, research, spaces, and selves. Furthermore, research on queer youth in the field of Comparative and International Education needs to confront the gravity of the present moment and attend to how activism through education and research can facilitate queer futurity.

This presentation will contend with the aforementioned bodies of literature that address violence and discrimination and the need for inclusion but extends the argument to center the actions documented in educational research that queer youth activists are doing to embody the queer futurity they aim to create. This lens of queer futurity is an invitation to examine the emerging ways queer youth strive to dream and enact better futures while also holding the gravity of the present moment (Jones, 2013). It allows space for queerness itself to be an interactive, lifelong education - a process of becoming (Helmsing, 2022). Inspired through the theoretical features that Muñoz (2009) offers on queer utopias, this paper stems from a literature review examining what research studying the lives of queer youth identify as important forms of activism in education spaces—including but not limited to schools—to support their wellbeing. This review pays particular focus to the aspirational elements including organizing through queer joy, belonging, and pleasure. It also centers the reality that this framing is not new - activists and academics that have been historically undercited in the academy have been tirelessly advocating through and creating new possibilities for decades.

Author

• Cody Freeman, University of Minnesota - Twin Cities