Hello there! My name is Lindsay Cavanaugh (she/her). I have a Ph.D in Curriculum & Pedagogy from the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education and currently work as a Course Instructor at Toronto Metropolitan University, where I teach courses related to critical sexuality and disability studies. I also consult as a curriculum writer, 2S/LGBTQIA+ subject matter expert, and program evaluator. For more information about my services, check out my consulting site here. Prior to working in academia and consulting, I worked as a K-12 certified teacher in BC and Ontario.

My research focuses on queer and trans futurities in education, critical femininities (especially femme theory), and disability art methods. My doctoral work documented 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 knowing, being and valuing, softness is racialized, classed, and connected to madness and disability, making it a rich concept for intersectional analysis. I have further unpacked softness through my time as a research fellow with the Hunt Simes Institute for Sexuality Studies (University of Sydney) and with the Global Centre for Disability Studies (University of Toronto Scarborough).

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 graduate students who strive to facilitate greater opportunities for greater care in academia. Members of the OISE Care Collective are currently editing a special issue called All Worn Out in the Academy that features graduate students, junior scholars, and independent researchers with Feral Feminisms.

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 for my piece “she / a bird” 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.