Queer Joy and Failure in Gender and Sexuality Research and Practice

Introduction: What does Failure offer to Queer Joy Studies? (Casey Burkholder, Melissa Keehn, and Megan Hill) Chapter 1: Centering Failure in Participatory Visual Research Facilitation: Exploring Romances, Ruptures, and other Ethical Messes (Casey Burkholder, Melissa Keehn, and Megan Hill) Chapter 2: Everything is not Fine: Policy and Pedagogy Failures in Sexuality Education (Melissa Keehn, Casey Burkholder, and Megan Hill) Chapter 3: Engaging Collage and Queer Archives to Reflect White Queer and Femme Complicity (Casey Burkholder, Melissa Keehn, and Megan Hill) Chapter 4: Unpacking the Islamophobic & Queerphobic Logics of the Sexuality Education Classroom (Hafsah Mohammad, Casey Burkholder, and Melissa Keehn) Chapter 5: There’s a lot of DIY Joy”: Elevating Queer Joy through Participatory Visual Research with 2SLGBTQIA+ Folks in Atlantic Canada (Casey Burkholder, Melissa Keehn, Katie MacEntee, Megan Hill, Arlo Beaumont, and Symone Hunt) Chapter 6: Sanctuary: How we Live: Centering Failure in Queer Art Exhibitions and Failure in Gender and Sexuality Research and Practice (Casey Burkholder, Megan Hill, Melissa Keehn, and Katie MacEntee) Chapter 7: “What is Aids? Jesus Christ?!”: Failures and Repair in Sexuality Teacher Education (Melissa Keehn, Casey Burkholder, and Megan Hill) Chapter 8: Conclusion: Learning from queer joy as failure: Rejecting settler moves to innocence and homonationalism inside and outside of schools (Melissa Keehn, Casey Burkholder, and Megan Hill)

Biography

Casey Burkholder (she/her) is a bi femme Tier II Canada Research Chair in Social Justice in Youth and Child Studies and an Associate Professor at Concordia University. Previously, Casey worked as an Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick (2017-2024). In choosing a research path at the intersection of resistance&activism, gender, sexuality, DIY media-making, art production, queer joy, and participatory archiving, Casey engages in research for social change through participatory visual approaches to local issues with 2SLGBTQ+ youth, adults, elders and teachers. She is the co-founder of the Fredericton Feminist Film Collective, and is the PI of Pride/Swell+ and SexualityNB.

Melissa Keehn (she/her) is a femme lesbian and assistant professor at the University in New Brunswick. Before changing careers, she was an art and social studies teacher at a rural high school in New Brunswick. Her current research focuses on the relationships between gender, sexuality, and social change, particularly as they unfold within school contexts. A key strand of her work engages with sex education, exploring how curriculum, pedagogy, and teacher practice can either reinforce or disrupt dominant norms around sex, gender, and sexuality.

Megan Hill (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Education at Concordia University. Her doctoral research is about intergenerational knowledge exchange between elders and children within the 2SLGBTQIA+ community. She recently completed her master’s at Trent University, where she wrote a SSHRC-supported thesis titled Queer Crip Generativity. Megan is an active member of the JOY Lab and a research assistant on Pride/Swell+. In her spare time, Megan sometimes works at a queer youth summer camp developing accessible and joyful programming.