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Current legislative, policy and cultural efforts to censor and illegalize classroom discussions and curricular representations of LGBTQ+ people reflect longstanding challenges in English education. In an effort to explore what curricular inclusion can (not) accomplish – especially what and how current struggles over inclusion, censorship, illegalization and ultimately representation in English education might (not) contribute to queer and trans liberation – the purpose of this article is to feature the experiences of queer and trans youth as knowers in classroom lessons with LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum.

Drawing from a yearlong literacy ethnography at a Midwestern high school in which the author explored youth and adults reading, writing and talking about sexual and gender diversity, in this article the author focuses on one literacy learning context at the high school, a co-taught sophomore humanities that combined English language arts and social studies.

Engaging theories of epistemic (in) justice, the findings of this article highlight the experiences of queer and trans youth – especially two queer youth of Color, Camden and Imani – as knowers in the context of an LGBTQ+-inclusive classroom curriculum. The author describes epistemic harms with respect to distortions of credibility and homonormative assimilationist requirements and reflects on alternative possibilities that youth gestured toward through their small resistances.

By centering the experiences of LGBTQ+ youth, this article contributes to research about LGBTQ+-inclusive curriculum in English teaching. Previous research, when empirical rather than conceptual, has tended to focus on the perspectives of teachers.

This study aims to illustrate how white supremacy culture can be produced within nonprofit organizations with a mandate to serve marginalized communities and provide practical suggestions for preventing oppression.

The site of inquiry was a nonprofit organization in south central Texas that provides social support to queer and trans youth. Through critical ethnography, the researchers evaluated the organization's processes and structure (including hierarchy, decision-making, fundraising and interactions between leaders, partners and affected groups) to explore how the organization perpetuated attributes of white supremacy culture.

Data reveal that the organization alienates the youth, volunteers and employees through defensiveness, fear of open conflict, paternalism, perfectionism and power-hoarding.

A dearth of research focuses on how white supremacy culture manifests in organizations serving marginalized communities. This paper addresses this gap by focusing on a nonprofit organization in central Texas that supports queer and trans youth. The authors offer recommendations for addressing white supremacy culture in organizations and suggest future research opportunities.

This study explores the health-seeking process for queer and/or trans people, and factors involved in their healthcare negotiations and decisions to seek care. The data included 20 semi-structured interviews of people who identify as queer and/or trans in the southeastern United States. Qualitative analysis was conducted using constructivist grounded theory to inductively analyze accounts of healthcare events, behaviors, and experiences of queer and/or trans people. Participants’ ages ranged from 18 to 57, with a majority identifying as trans/gender nonconforming (65%) and those remaining identifying as queer, cisgender individuals (35%). Both queer and trans identities can overlap, therefore, I use the term “queer and/or trans.” Categories generated through the coding process were as follows: (1) mental health concerns, (2) negotiating gendered and heteronormative assumptions, and (3) significance of participants creating a bed of knowledge. My analysis asserts that these data indicate that queer and/or trans participants manage not just healthcare decisions, but the hopelessness attached to seeking this type of help.

This chapter draws on 10 years of ethnographic fieldwork collected in gay bars from three American cities to explore the strategies LGBTQ subcultures deploy to recreate meaningful places within the vestiges of local queer nightlife. As gentrification and social acceptance accelerate the closures of LGBTQ-specific bars and nightclubs worldwide, venues that once served a specific LGBTQ subculture (i.e., leather bars) expand their offerings to incorporate displaced LGBTQ subcultures. Attending to how LGBTQ subcultures might appropriate designated spaces within a gay venue to support community (nightlife complexes), how management and LGBT subcultures temporally circumscribe subcultural practices and traditions to create fleeting, but recurring places (episodic places), and how patrons might disrupt an existing production of place by imposing practices associated with a discrepant LGBTQ subculture(place ruptures), this chapter challenges the notion of “the gay bar” as a singular place catering to a specific subculture. Instead, gay bars increasingly constitute a collection of places within the same space, which may shift depending on its use by patrons occupying the space at any given moment. Beyond the investigation of gay bars, this chapter contributes to the growing sociological literature exploring the multifaceted, unstable, and ephemeral nature of place and place-making in the postmodern city.

This article aims to share findings from a youth-informed study with interracial anti-racist youth activist groups in two urban high schools.

The study used mostly critical ethnographic methods.

The findings showed that the agency of youth activists amplified their literacies of love and resistance, organizing, critical teaching, and knowledge. More research is needed in English education related to youth organizing activities across contexts as youth organizing work is largely unknown or underused by educators and schools.

Overall, this research supports humanizing collectives that amplify the literacies of youth and position youth-centered education for liberation.

This paper aims to center the experiences of three cohorts (n = 40) of Black high school students who participated in a critical race technology course that exposed anti-blackness as the organizing logic and default setting of digital and artificially intelligent technology. This paper centers the voices, experiences and technological innovations of the students, and in doing so, introduces a new type of digital literacy: critical race algorithmic literacy.

Data for this study include student interviews (called “talk backs”), journal reflections and final technology presentations.

Broadly, the data suggests that critical race algorithmic literacies prepare Black students to critically read the algorithmic word (e.g. data, code, machine learning models, etc.) so that they can not only resist and survive, but also rebuild and reimagine the algorithmic world.

While critical race media literacy draws upon critical race theory in education – a theorization of race, and a critique of white supremacy and multiculturalism in schools – critical race algorithmic literacy is rooted in critical race technology theory, which is a theorization of blackness as a technology and a critique of algorithmic anti-blackness as the organizing logic of schools and AI systems.

Possibilities for self-representation for transgender (trans) and gender non-conforming (GNC) youth must be conceptualized in relation to youths’ placement within frames of power. Powerful institutional forces in youths’ lives include schools and policing and, as is evidenced by youths’ statements, extend to mass media portrayals. Library approaches that reify the inclusion of representative texts do not adequately meet the needs of trans and GNC youth. As a profession, librarianship must reflect on ideological approaches to gendered embodiment to push against an ongoing repetition of institutional harms done to trans and GNC youth.

This chapter offers examinations of information needs, complex online worlds, and incorporation of histories made invisible by power alongside critical literacy skills as crucial aspects of providing services to all possibly or actually trans and GNC youth. It critically situates the circumstances of trans youths’ lives in relation to the effect that adult perceptions have on trans and GNC youths’ ability to access resources. It provides a framework for reflection on how young adult librarians often unconsciously limit library access by enacting gendered expectations that do not always match the possibility or actuality of youths’ experiences or self-conceptions. The chapter outlines modes of communication – through library materials, programs, community resources and partnerships – that convey deeper understandings of trans and GNC experiences to possibly or actually trans and GNC youth.

In this comparative study, we explore the ways eight queer university students from Trinidad and Tobago and New Brunswick, Canada, use cellphilm production (cellphone + film production + intention) to share their experiences, make calls for change, and forge solidarities across racial, cultural, and national contexts. Engaging in cellphilm production as a research method for social change, we ask: What are queer, trans, and non-binary students’ experiences in campus spaces? What are the commonalities and tensions that exist between their experiences? How might cellphilm production work to disrupt unsafe campus spaces and create transnational queer solidarities? Through cellphilm production, participants crafted narratives highlighting significant systemic barriers, and speaking back to micro and macro aggressions. Both participating groups expressed feelings of exclusion and institutional neglect and highlighted their university’s disregard toward accommodating physical spaces, such as washrooms, downplaying of verbal hostilities, and other microaggressions. Participants also noted that students were at the forefront of creating purposefully queer spaces. Our comparative study disrupts the erasure of the experiences of queer, trans, and non-binary university students in Trinidad and Tobago and New Brunswick and speaks back to hegemonic whiteness in the context of queer campus spaces in New Brunswick, Canada.