Facilitating gender-affirming participatory visual research in embodied and online spaces

Abstract

How might participatory visual research with 2SLGBTQ+ be facilitated in gender affirming ways across physical and digital spaces? What do these practices look like, and how might facilitators adapt their practices in response to cisnormative language and binary physical spaces? This article describes the opportunities and challenges to facilitating two projects with 2SLGBTQ+ youth. The first project, Where Are Our Histories (2018–2020) – was a face-to-face participatory visual research project addressing the erasure of 2SLGBTQ+ people, experiences, and histories from the New Brunswick Social Studies curricula and classrooms and co-creating media to interrupt these erasures with youth. We consider the ways that participatory visual research can be facilitated with 2SLGBTQ+ youth in embodied spaces that are gender-affirming and resist tokenism and structural violence by employing DIY (do it yourself) strategies. We describe the ways in which facilitating Where Are Our Histories has shaped the co-facilitation strategies employed in a distance-based participatory visual research project, Pride/Swell, with 50 2SLGBTQ+ youth amidst Covid-19. We describe how both projects required engaged attention to facilitating the public-facing visual outputs (zines, collages, cellphilms) in public spaces. We offer strategies for facilitating and negotiating cisnormative, transphobic, and homophobic discourses in person and online.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We wish to acknowledge the experiences, time, art, and consideration of all of the participants in the Where Are Our Histories and Pride/Swell projects.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

This is to acknowledge that no financial interest or benefit that has arisen from the direct applications of my research.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation [2019-005]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada [2019-153005,430-2018-00264].

Notes on contributors

Casey Burkholder

Casey Burkholder (she/her) is an Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick’s Faculty of Education. Her research programme centres on exploring participatory visual research approaches with youth to explore their ways of knowing and experiencing school and social structures. Casey seeks to work with youth activists to agitate for social change through participatory visual research approaches, including DIY art production and participatory archiving.

Amelia Thorpe (she/her) is a doctoral candidate at the University of New Brunswick and Executive Director of ConneQT NB. Her research is centred on grassroots development within gender and sexual minority communities and queering concepts of identity, space, and education. Amelia has extensive experience as an educator and activist and has worked with numerous not-for-profit and advocacy groups both locally and nationally.