Queer Studies and Education

Queer Studies and Education: An International Reader explores how the category queer, as a critical stance or set of perspectives, contributes to opportunities individually and collectively for advancing queer social justice within the context and concerns of schooling and education. The collection takes up this general goal by presenting a cross-section of international perspectives on queer studies in education to demonstrate commonalities, differences, uncertainties, or pluralities across a diverse range of national contexts and topics, drawing a heightened awareness of heterodominance and heteropatriarchy, and to conceptualize non-normative and non-essentialist imaginings for more inclusive educational environments. Collectively, the chapters critically engage with heteronormativity and normativity more generally as a political spectrum, over a broad range of formal and informal sites of education, and against a backdrop of critiques of liberalism and neoliberalism as the frameworks through which "achievable" social change and belonging are fostered, particularly within educational settings. Taken together, the chapters assembled in Queer Studies and Education invite researchers, scholars, educators, activists, and other cultural workers to examine the multiplicity of contemporary (international) work in queer studies and education with readers' interpretations of queer's deployment across the chapters forming the compass for which to arrive at fresh insights and forms of queer critical praxis.

Nelson M. Rodriguez is Associate Professor of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at The College of New Jersey, where he serves as Coordinator of the Sexuality and Queer Studies Program. His scholarship spans the fields of queer and gender studies, Foucault studies, critical pedagogy and cultural studies, and education. His recent publications include Michel Foucault and Sexualities and Genders in Education: Friendship as Ascesis (with David Lee Carlson, 2019); Queer Pedagogies: Theory, Praxis, Politics (with Cris Mayo, 2019); Critical Concepts in Queer Studies and Education: An International Guide for the Twenty- First Century (with Wayne J. Martino, Jennifer C. Ingrey, and Edward Brockenbrough, 2016); Educators Queering Academia: Critical Memoirs (with sj Miller, 2016); Queer Masculinities: A Critical Reader in Education (with John C. Landreau, 2012); and Queering Straight Teachers: Discourse and Identity in Education (with William F. Pinar, 2007). Robert C. Mizzi is the Canada Research Chair in Queer, Community, and Diversity Education and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba, Canada. He has over 200 publications and presentations, including articles published in the Journal of Homosexuality and the Journal of Studies in International Education. He has also published five books, with the most recent being the Handbook of Adult and Continuing Education in 2020. He is President Emeritus of the Canadian Association of Adult Education and is Editor Emeritus of the Canadian Journal for the Study of Adult Education. Robert has been inducted into the International Adult and Continuing Education Hall of Fame and the Royal Society of Canada (College of New Scholars). Louisa Allen is a Professor in the Faculty of Education and Social Work at the University of Auckland. Her scholarship spans the areas of gender, sexualities, sexuality, reproduction, and education. This work is informed by queer theory, feminist new materialism, feminist philosophy and sensory studies. To explore these areas, she employs innovative research methodologies such as visual and more recently sensory methods, including soundwalks and smellwalks. With her colleague Professor Mary Lou Rasmussen, she is currently Editor-in-Chief of the first Encyclopedia of Sexuality Education. Her most recent project is a Marsden Grant with Professor Katrina Roen, which explores experiences of shame and silence for intersex young people. In 2021, she published a sole-authored book, Breathing Life Into Sexuality Education, which disrupts existing ideas about the nature and purpose of this curriculum. It employs scholarship from disparate disciplinary fields, including feminist philosophy, education, sound studies, geography, and anthropology to imagine the possibilities of a sensuous sexuality education pedagogy. Rob Cover is Professor of Digital Communication at RMIT University, Australia. He is Chief Investigator on an Australian Research Council Discovery project investigating the pedagogies of gender and sexual di­versity in Australian screen media and on an ARC Linkage studying the well-being aspects of gender- and sexually diverse migration. The author of seven books and over 100 journal articles and chapters, his recent books include Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? (2016); Digital Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Self (2016); Flirting in the Era of #MeToo (with A. Bartlett and K. Clarke, 2019); Emergent Identities: New Sexualities, Gender and Relationships in a Digital Era (2019); and Fake News in Digital Cultures (with J. Thompson and A. Haw, 2022).