Queer, trans, and non-binary youth navigate school spaces punctuated by erasures, silences, and oppression, and resist these experiences through solidarity-building, activism, and art practice. In this article, we seek to centre experiences of school and society as important spheres of inquiry through participatory visual research with queer, trans, and non-binary young people (ages 12 to 17) and pre-service teachers and community educators (ages 22 to 40) in Fredericton, New Brunswick, Canada. Using an intersectional lens, we consider how intersecting power structures—gender, race, class, and disability—produce unequal impacts in relation to school and social experiences in New Brunswick. Centring youth agency, we position youth as knowledge producers through participatory visual methods of inquiry, including the making of zines (DIY print productions). With youth and pre-service teachers, through inquiry into existing and desired school and social experiences, we seek to make visual the practice of intergenerational solidarity building through zine production.
Keywords: participatory visual research, queer, trans and non-binary youth, pre-service teachers, zines
Posthuman research methodologies center nonhuman actors and spaces. In this paper, we argue that technological mediation is a key component in a move toward the exploration of posthuman subjectivity in research and the restructuring of dominant understandings of gender and sexualized difference. Drawing on a cellphilm (cellphone + film production) based project with queer, trans, and non-binary youth in New Brunswick, Canada, we seek to center queer stories and experiences to speak back to their erasures in school spaces and landscapes. We argue that in researching with queer, trans, and non-binary youth in the Anthropocene, cellphilm method offers us the opportunity to think critically and creatively about environments, inclusions, and queering environmental futures (Lebel, 2019) within schooling structures.
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