Wendy Cumming-Potvin

The Bloomsbury Handbook of LGBTQIA+ Inclusion in Educational Contexts brings together international contributions in scholarship and coverage, mapping the discipline through theoretical explorations, personal narratives and empirical studies. The handbook focuses on themes that examines Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer issues including: inclusion in action, engaging teaching spaces, social justice standpoints, student/teacher agency, preservice teacher education, criticality in educative spaces and children and agency. The book provides a crucial lens into educational contexts that fuel or hinder human flourishing, the power of learning spaces and institutional educative standpoints and teaching approaches. Cultural, social and economic injustices that perpetuate cycles of disadvantage and oppressive narratives are explored using different theoretical frameworks that underpin equitable and inclusive educative landscapes.

Mainstream media has a long tradition of depicting sexual violence through stereotypes and misrepresentation. However, digital technology has recently highlighted alternate narratives that feature the stories of survivors of sexual violence. Although some scholars have welcomed digital narratives as facilitating activism that combats sexual violence through social media, for others, the online world is peppered with sexual abuse, sexism, and negative consequences for feminist activists. Underpinned by intersectional feminist theory, this chapter adopts the premise that sexual violence is an alarming narrative in many countries, including Australia. For migrant, refugee, bisexual, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, or transgender and gender diverse people, the risks of being attacked through sexual violence, online and offline, are exacerbated. Examining a highly mediatized case, the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins in Australia’s Parliament House, this chapter unpacks the politics of complaint towards postdigital feminist inquiry. The discourse is guided by reflections about: Who is allowed to complain, how does a complaint generate a digital narrative or transform into a messy, postdigital narrative? The chapter concludes by looking to the future of sharing narratives of sexual violence in contexts where politics, law, and social activism collide with the power of technology corporations.

Mainstream media has a long tradition of depicting sexual violence through stereotypes and misrepresentation. However, digital technology has recently highlighted alternate narratives that feature the stories of survivors of sexual violence. Although some scholars have welcomed digital narratives as facilitating activism that combats sexual violence through social media, for others, the online world is peppered with sexual abuse, sexism, and negative consequences for feminist activists. Underpinned by intersectional feminist theory, this chapter adopts the premise that sexual violence is an alarming narrative in many countries, including Australia. For migrant, refugee, bisexual, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander women, or transgender and gender diverse people, the risks of being attacked through sexual violence, online and offline, are exacerbated. Examining a highly mediatized case, the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins in Australia’s Parliament House, this chapter unpacks the politics of complaint towards postdigital feminist inquiry. The discourse is guided by reflections about: Who is allowed to complain, how does a complaint generate a digital narrative or transform into a messy, postdigital narrative? The chapter concludes by looking to the future of sharing narratives of sexual violence in contexts where politics, law, and social activism collide with the power of technology corporations.

In this paper, our purpose is to investigate policy informing texts and discourses referencing transgender equality and gender diversity in the Western Australian education system. Drawing on scholarship from transgender, queer and policy studies, we highlight the interplay of progressive and conservative forces affecting the Western Australian education system’s commitment to supporting transgender and gender non-binary students. Based on a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) project, the paper constructs a Western Australian case study, which threads together the critical examination of policy informing texts, qualitative interview data and media discourses surrounding public narratives, such as the Safe School Coalition Australia’s attempt to implement a school program, which builds awareness about gender and sexual diversity. Emerging through the material, discursive and spatial elements of locales and networks, our case study has the potential to deepen knowledge regarding the heuristic capacity of employing policyscape as an analytic category. In this vein, we draw attention to the possibilities and challenges for re-conceptualizing gender and providing trans-affirmative school spaces that promote equality.

In this paper, we investigate primary school teachers’ reflections on addressing the topic of same-sex families and relationships in their classrooms. Informed by queer theoretical and Foucauldian analytic approaches, we examine teachers’ potential use of texts, such as picture storybooks, which introduce representations of same-sex relationships and desire. By employing a case-study approach, our aim is to provide insights into the pedagogical decisions and the heteronormative conditions under which three teachers in the Australian context attempt to deal with the topic of same-sex families/relationships. Attention is drawn to the regulatory surveillance of the parental gaze and the silencing and marginalization of sexual identity issues in order to illuminate the ways in which the micro politics of teaching about queer families and relationships are inextricably linked to broader macro processes governing the institutionalizing influences of heteronormativity, heterosexism and homonegativity. Implications for teacher education are outlined.

Recently, neoconservative media reporting, as well as Commonwealth initiatives, such as the Draft Australian Curriculum for English (Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (2010). Australian curriculum. Retrieved September 29, 2010, from http://www.acara.edu.au/curriculum.html), has resurrected pedagogical battles surrounding the teaching and learning of literacy. Influenced by the increasing popularity of national standardized testing, public debate about literacy for Australian classrooms has focussed on comparing academic results across schools to alleviate a ‘crisis’ in student achievement. Despite a complex new millennium characterized by multiliteracies (The New London Group, Multiliteracies: Literacy learning and the design of social futures, 2000), neoconservative perspectives have encouraged a reductionist approach to literacy teacher education that emphasizes teaching reading through phonics. As a teacher educator concerned by pressures to normalize the teaching and learning of literacy, I draw on qualitative research to reflect on pedagogy for engaging with literacy in ways that promote critical enquiry and social justice (see Giroux, The terror of neoliberalism: Authoritarianism and the eclipse of Democracy, 2004).