CONTEXT:
Since 2020, there has been a resurgence of anti-Trans and anti-Queer policies related to elementary, secondary, and post-secondary schools in North America. This regression has disheartened queer and trans educational scholars, many of whom are managing their own Queer Battle Fatigue (QBF). On the one hand, scholars are trying to heed the call to move towards desire-centred research. On the other hand, they are living through damaging times.
RATIONALE:
Turning towards the wisdom of Black, Indigenous, Chicana, feminist, Disabled leaders, this project developed a methodology called dream-mapping as a soothing balm for this moment. While dreaming cannot fix the present, it can plant seeds for futures to come. Alongside developing a speculative methodology, this arts-based research theorized with Femmes* about a community knowledge called softness. Femmes are 2S/LGBTQIA+ people who embody and/or recuperate femininity in queer ways. There is a strong need for speculative and critical femininity perspectives in educational research. Both speculative research and critical femininity studies have been sidelined due to racialized, femmephobic biases. Focusing on F/femme dreams excavates community knowledge that otherwise might not be documented.
CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK:
According to critical femininity scholars, softness is a femme community intelligence that revalues emotionality, vulnerability, and interdependence. This dissertation builds on this framing of softness, connecting it to black feminist, indigenous matriarchal, and crip of colour perspectives alongside femme theory.
STUDY DESCRIPTION:
Drawing on the idea of softness, we — nine Femme*, Disabled, 2S/LGBTQIA+ advocates between the ages of 20-40 — created and analyzed speculative art about softening education. Most co-dreamers created and analyzed three pieces of art about soft/ening educational timespace, pedagogy, and curriculum. We had the opportunity to participate in seven workshops with Femme* facilitators to reflect on softness and femme-inist artistic mediums.
Our broad research question was:
What happens when a small group of Femme* educational advocates, dream-map about how schools could be softer?
Our probing questions were:
- How do co-dreamers conceptualize softness as ways of being, knowing, and valuing (if at all)?
- How do co-dreamers conceptualize softness in relation to education (if at all)?
- What affect – emotions, sensations, and thoughts – are generated through the process of dream-mapping (if at all)?
MAIN FINDINGS:
- We conceptualized softness as normative and disidentified affective embodiments. The first kind, normative softness, refers to the affective norms that British settler-colonial societies impose on White feminized bodies, deny to BIPOC bodies in particular ways, and infantilize in some (Disabled) bodyminds. The second kind, disidentified softness, refers to a remixing process that BIPOC, Queer, Trans, Disabled, Femme communities engage in. Disidentifying with softness means rejecting colonial notions of emotionality, vulnerability, leisure/rest, and care/protection, and re-imagining them through one’s relational and aesthetic choices.
- We imagined disidentified soft education as foregrounding relationships with the land, embracing embodiment, prioritizing slowness/rest, and deconstructing shame in compassionate ways.
- We described dream-mapping as a methodology that has the potential to produce wayward joy — a mixture of hope, disappointment, shame, and possibility.
CONTRIBUTIONS:
- For educators, this dissertation traces how normative softness and hardness can manifest as a hidden curriculum. It poses some strategies for remixing softness and hardness as transgressive relational ethics and curricula.
- For researchers, this dissertation offers dream-mapping as one tool for speculative, joy-focused, and desire-centred research.
RELATED PUBLICATIONS:
Peer Reviewed Articles
What Can Femme Teach Us About Pedagogy? (2025) with the Journal of Femininities
Wayward Joy in Queer Femme-inist Research (2025) with the Journal of Queer & Trans Studies in Education
Embracing Queer, Fem(me)inine & Crip Failure: Arriving at Dream-Mapping as a Speculative Tool for Queer & Trans Educational Research (2023) with Theory, Research, and Action in Urban Education
Peer Reviewed Book Chapter
Glitter & Death in the Anthropocene: Dream-Mapping In Apocalyptic Times (Forthcoming Chapter/Zine) *authored with co-researchers
ACCESSIBLE KNOWLEDGE SHARING:
Stay tuned for zines!