Anne M. Harris

Stacy Holman Jones

Sandra L. Faulkner

Eloise D. Brook

At a time of increasingly diverse and dynamic debates on the intersections of contemporary LGBTQ rights, trans* visibility, same-sex families, and sexualities education, there is surprisingly little writing on what it means to queer notions of family and kinship networks in global context. Building on the recent wave of scholarship on queerness in families and how families intersect with schools, schooling and educational institutions more broadly, this book considers how we are taught to enact family at home, at school and through the media, and how this pedagogy has shifted and changed over time. Conceived as a collection of keywords that take up the vocabulary of queerness, queering practices, and queer families, the authors employ a nuanced intersectional approach to connect the damaging and persistent invisibility of their subject to the complex and dominant and normalizing discourses of marriage and family. Offering post-structural, post-humanist, and new materialist perspectives on kinship and the family, this book moves the conversation forward by critically interrogating and expanding upon current knowledges about gender diversity, queer kinship, and pedagogy.

Keywords

Queering Families, Schooling Publics

Larissa Hjorth

Gretchen Coombs

Kat Jungnickel

Creative Practice Ethnographies focuses on the intersection of creative practice and ethnography and offers new ways to think about the methods, practice, and promise of research in contemporary interdisciplinary contexts. How does creative practice inform new ways of doing ethnography and vice versa? What new forms of expression and engagement are made possible as a result of these creative synergies? By addressing these questions, the authors highlight the important roles that ethnography and creative practice play in socially impactful research. This book is aimed at interdisciplinary researchers, scholars, and students of art, design, sociology, anthropology, games, media, education, and cultural studies.

Creative Practice Ethnographies

Queering Autoethnography articulates for the first time the possibilities and politics of queering autoethnography, both in theoretical terms and as an intervention into narratives and cultures of apology, shame and fear. Despite the so-called mainstreaming of same-sex relationships and trans* visibility, many within gender’s ‘liminal zone’ remain invisible and unrecognized, existing somewhere outside of heteronormative relationships and institutions. At the same time, the political and scholarly potential of autoethnography is expanding, particularly in its potential to evoke empathic and affective responses at a time of public numbness, a practice crucial to making scholarly research relevant to the work of global citizenship and crafting meaningful lives. This volume considers flash points in contemporary scholarly and popular culture such as queer memorializing and mourning; unintelligibility and monstrosity; physical, digital and cultural transformations of queer lives and bodies; the power and danger wrought in the public assembly of queer people in a culture of massacre; and the promise of queer futurities in the contemporary moment. It also makes original theoretical contributions that include concepts such as massacre culture, queer terror, mundane annihilations, and activist affect. The authors write these ideas in action, joining theory and story as a contact zone for analysis, critique and change.

Queering Autoethnography

The conundrum of understanding, practising and teaching contemporary creativity is that it wants to be all things to all people. Almost all modern lists of creativity, creative thinking and how-to ‘becoming creative’ books begin with one premise: the creative individual/artist is not special, rather each of us is creative in a special way and these skills can – and must - be nurtured. Increasingly, industry and education leaders are claiming that creativity is the core skill to take us into a prosperous future, signalling the democratisation of creativity as industry. Yet centuries of association between aesthetics, mastery and creativity are hard to dismantle. These days, it is increasingly difficult to discuss creativity without reference to business, industry and innovation. Why do we love to think of creativity in this way and no longer as that rare visitation of the muse or the elite gift of the few? This book looks at the possibility that creativity is taking a turn, what that turn might be, and how it relates to industry, education and, ultimately, cultural role of creativity and aesthetics for the 21st century. In proliferating discourses of the commodification of creativity, there is one thing all the experts agree on: creativity is undefinable, possibly unteachable, largely unassessable, and becoming the most valuable commodity in 21st-century markets.

Toward a New Aesthetic Imaginary

The Creative Turn

The Queer Life of Things takes up new materialism and posthumanism as a queer intervention into the devaluing and degradation of some human, animal, and plant lives and ways of living. Through a sustained and vibrant encounter with things that matter, this book offers readers an affective and more-than-human mode of activism for the 21st century.

Anne M. Harris

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