Home » Call for Submissions

Call for Submissions

Queer & Trans* Futurities in Educational Research & Practice

A Special Issue of Theory, Research, and Action in Urban Education (TRAUE) 

Deadline: June 1, 2022

In Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, queer of color performance studies scholar José Esteban Muñoz (2009) theorized queerness as an imaginative and generative refusal of cishetereonormativity’s “totalizing rendering of reality” (p. 3). Queerness, he suggested, is “a longing that propels us onward,” a commitment to “dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” (p. 3). Narrated as impossible within normative social imaginaries (Nicolazzo, 2021), queer and trans* futures are nevertheless invoked through the performative force of queer worldmaking: the queer and trans* social practices, cultural productions, and political activities that enact, through disidentification with the world as it is, expansive possibilities for queer and trans* lives (Muñoz, 1999). 

This special issue of Theory, Research, and Action in Urban Education (TRAUE) invites papers that invoke queerness and/or trans*ness as speculative resources (Coleman, 2021) in educational scholarship. We welcome scholarship that engages, in its content and/or methodologies, with imaginative leaps, utopian gestures, and queer interventions. This work may engage in education through any number of subfields, including but not limited to curriculum studies, childhood & youth studies, higher education, educational policy, teacher education, educational history, and educational psychology & learning sciences. We welcome conceptual, empirical, and methodologically innovative work, as well as scholarship that defies categorization and scholarship that is inter- or anti-disciplinary. 

We especially invite work by emerging queer and trans* scholars of color. As well, we invite work from scholars who recognize that queer and trans* identities are produced through interlocking systems of oppression and dominance (Cohen, 1997); scholars who grapple with antiblackness, nationalism, and Indigenous erasure in queer studies (Ferguson, 2004; Rowe & Tuck, 2017); and scholars who engage in reflexive praxis via embodied epistemologies (Cruz, 2013; Johnson, 2020). We are excited by recent queer and trans* scholarship in education that explores, for instance, the Black ratchet imagination (Love, 2017), conscious Black asexuality (Miles, 2019) critical trans* frameworks (Kean, 2020), drag pedagogy (Keenan & Hot Mess, 2020), intersex (in)visibility (Sperling, 2021), Jotería Studies (Duran et al., 2020), neuroqueer disidentification (Egner, 2019), poor queer studies (Brim, 2020), queer of color agency (Brockenbrough, 2013), queeruptions (McCready, 2019; Darling-Hammond, 2019), trans* epistemologies (Nicolazzo, 2021), two-spirit Indigenous self-determination (Laing, 2021), and UnDocuQueer meaning making (Cisneros, 2018). 

However, we are most excited for the emergent work we cannot yet cite, work that will enact possibilities that we, as special issue co-editors, cannot yet imagine. We welcome work that centers these queer and trans* ways of being and propels us toward futures we cannot yet envision. 

NOT FEELING OUR “ACADEMIC LANGUAGE”? NOT A PROBLEM! Please consider contributing to our Community Voices Section! For this special issue, we want to create space to highlight and share your personal and communal greatness. What does queer and trans* educational justice look like within and beyond your schools?  How do you show up for and show out in your queer and trans* communities? How do y’all show each other love in radically beautiful and uniquely creative ways? Please feel free to submit your response to these questions in mediums that make you feel good: we accept poems, journals, pictures, paintings, graphic art, narrative essays, and various other types of submissions that speak to your queer and trans* experiences and to justice and humanity in your community. Please contact us at urbanedTRAUE@gmail.com if you have any questions about the process or what we accept. Please note that Community Voices submissions will range in length and format. 

To submit to this special issue, please view our submission guidelines here and send full submissions (5,000-7,000 words, inclusive of references) OR Community Voices artifacts (length will vary) to co-editors Karen Zaino and Jordan Bell at urbanedTRAUE@gmail.com by June 1, 2022. Please note that TRAUE is an peer-reviewed journal that features work by graduate students and other emerging scholars and community members. If you have questions about the submission process, please feel free to reach out! 

References

Brim, M. (2020). Poor Queer Studies. Duke University Press.

Brockenbrough, E. (2015). Queer of color agency in educational contexts: Analytic frameworks from a queer of color critique. Educational Studies, 51(1), 28-44.

Cisneros, J. (2018). Working with the complexity and refusing to simplify: Undocuqueer meaning making at the intersection of LGBTQ and immigrant rights discourses. Journal of Homosexuality, 65(11), 1415-1434.

Cohen, C. J. (1997). Punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens: The radical potential of queer politics?. GLQ: A journal of lesbian and gay studies, 3(4), 437-465.

Coleman, J. J. (2021). Restorying With the Ancestors: Historically Rooted Speculative Composing Practices and Alternative Rhetorics of Queer Futurity. Written Communication, 38(4), 512-543.

Cruz, C. (2001). Toward an epistemology of a brown body. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 14(5), 657-669.

Darling-Hammond, K. (2019). Queeruptions and the question of QTPOC thriving in schools-An excavation. Equity & Excellence in Education, 52(4), 424-434.

Duran, A., Orozco, R. C., & Gonzalez, S. A. (2020). Imagining the future of jotería studies as a framework in the field of higher education. Association of Mexican American Educators Journal, 14(2), 67-86.

Egner, J. E. (2019). “The disability rights community was never mine”: Neuroqueer disidentification. Gender & Society, 33(1), 123-147.

Ferguson, R. A. (2004). Aberrations in black: Toward a queer of color critique. U of Minnesota Press.

Johnson, L. P. (2020). Professor in residence model for queering the edges of school: a project in humanizing methodology and love. International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, 33(6), 634-648.

Kean, E. (2020). Advancing a critical trans framework for education. Curriculum Inquiry, 1-26.

Keenan, H., & Hot Mess, L. M. (2020). Drag pedagogy: The playful practice of queer imagination in early childhood. Curriculum Inquiry, 50(5), 440-461.

Laing, M. (2021). Urban Indigenous Youth Reframing Two-spirit. Routledge.

Love, B. L. (2017). A ratchet lens: Black queer youth, agency, hip hop, and the Black ratchet imagination. Educational Researcher, 46(9), 539-547.

McCready, L. T. (2019). Queeruptions, queer of color analysis, radical action and education reform: An introduction. Equity & Excellence in Education, 52(4), 370-372.

Miles, B. (2019). Theorizing Conscious Black Asexuality through Claire Kann’s Let’s Talk about Love. Humanities, 8(4), 165.

Muñoz, J. E. (1999). Disidentifications: Queers of color and the performance of politics (Vol. 2). U of Minnesota Press.

Muñoz, J. E. (2009). Cruising utopia: The then and there of queer futurity. NYU Press.

Nicolazzo, Z. (2021). Imagining a trans* epistemology: What liberation thinks like in postsecondary education. Urban Education, 56(3), 511-536.

Rowe, A. C., & Tuck, E. (2017). Settler colonialism and cultural studies: Ongoing settlement, cultural production, and resistance. Cultural Studies↔ Critical Methodologies, 17(1), 3-13.

Sperling, J. (2021). Comprehensive sexual health education and intersex (in) visibility: an ethnographic exploration inside a California high school classroom. Sex Education, 21(5), 584-599.