My name is Lindsay Cavanaugh (she/her). I'm a PhD candidate in Curriculum & Pedagogy at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (OISE), a certified teacher in Ontario and BC, and a published poet.

I'm a queer, cis, fourth-generation white femme, who lives on Turtle Island, in so-called Canada. I research queer and trans educational futurities through a femme-inist, anticolonial, critical disability lens. Currently, I am documenting the desires of a group of Indigenous, Racialized, white, dis/abled femme* 2S/LGBTQIA+ educators and older youth advocates about how the time/space, pedagogy, and curriculum of schools could be soft through an arts-based and participatory-informed method called dream-mapping. Softness has been identified as a relational femme(inist) intelligence by Andi Schwartz (2020) and is characterized by emotionality, vulnerability, interdependence, and earnestness. As a way of knowingbeingfeeling, softness is racialized, classed, and connected to madness and disability, making it a rich concept for intersectional analysis.

Softness informs my teaching and community work, including my leadership in establishing the OISE Care Collective (formerly the Ph.D. Caring & Sharing Collective), a network of OISE grad students who strive to facilitate greater opportunities for lateral care in academia.

Beyond research, I love to tease apart queer femme sick and mad subjectivities in my poetry. My writing has appeared in Contemporary Verse 2 (CV2), Room, and Grain. I am the 2022 winner of The Short Grain Contest and my poem “a body is never enough but still we try” was shortlisted for the 2022 Malahat Review’s Open Seasons Award. You can read more about my creative writing here.