by Lindsay Cavanaugh

Abstract

This conceptual paper sketches out how I arrived at dream-mapping, an arts-based (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018) and participatory-informed (Fine & Torre, 2019; Kemmis et al., 2014) methodology. I reflect on how my own affective feelings of stuckness — as a PhD student, as a teacher, and as a white, queer, mad, chronically-ill femme doing “gender and sexual diversity/inclusion” work – has led me to develop a methodology that animates queer, fem(me)inine, and crip failure (Erickson, 2007; Halberstam, 2011; Hoskin & Taylor, 2019; Kafer, 2003) softly (Schwartz, 2020) as a speculative research tool (Coleman, 2021) for reimagining K-12 schools.

Introduction 

Dream-mapping is an arts-based (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018) and participatory-informed method/ology (Fine & Torre, 2019; Kemmis et al, 2014) that I have been developing as part of my PhD studies. Dream-mapping is an artistic research process that invites a small group of participants (ideally no more than 10 people — youth, educators, or both) to imagine what K-12 schooling systems could look like if their structures were animated by anti oppressive logics (i.e. queer, trans, femme, anticolonial, antiracist, crip ways of being/knowing). This process involves inviting co-dreamers (youth and/or educator participants) to individually create a series of dream-maps (pieces of art) over time (ideally 5-8 months). Specifically, the art-making process asks co-dreamers to creatively speculate about how schools could be structured differently by using historically devalued artistic mediums or digital tools of their choice (such as embroidery, beading, confessional poetry, crafting, collaging, TikToks, and memes). Co-dreamers are then invited to collaboratively analyze their own art and that of other participants using an adapted descriptive review (Himley, 2002). The dream-mapping descriptive review process involves co-dreamers coming together, sharing their art with the group one by one, and each co-dreamer sharing what the dream-maps evokes for them. Researchers interested in employing dream-mapping as a method/ology can utilize different tools (e.g. intro and exit interviews, fieldnotes, stimulated recall discussions etc.) to supplement the dream-maps, according to what they are trying to answer in their research questions. Dream-mapping therefore has a flexible design.

As a queer and trans research orientation, dream-mapping can be adapted for many projects, so long as the underlying research questions are concerned with how schooling structures could be re-imagined with antioppressive ways of knowing/being in mind. For example, one researcher could focus in on trying to make sense of how Black trans youth and educators think schools could be transformed with their ways of knowing/being in mind. Another researcher could focus on what 2S/Indigiqueer, Indigenous queer and trans ways of knowing/being are and how those logics could help reimagine different components of schooling (physical/psychological architecture, curriculum, pedagogy etc.). Personally, my PhD project focuses on how a group of femme/femme-of-centre older youth and educators think K-12 schools could be soft/er: centre care, relationality, and vulnerability (Schwartz, 2020).

This methodology is in the process of being implemented for my PhD study. Consequently, this paper is conceptual in nature, speaking to how and why I arrived at this emerging research orientation through animating concepts of queer, fem(me)inine, and crip failure (Erickson, 2007; Halberstam, 2011; Kafer, 2003; Hoskin & Taylor, 2019).

Method/ologies as Composing Practices

Doing research is not the same as composing a story, but as researchers, we are creating a type of narrative. Coleman (2021) speaks about how “unhappy endings have installed themselves within the queer imagination as a normative feature of realist genres” (p. 514). When researchers decide on how to approach queer and trans research, we are composing ways of knowing, being, and valuing, along with a set of either stated or unstated beliefs about our research participants or co-researchers. It is, therefore, worth asking: Do our methodologies contribute to dominant (realist) normative tropes of queer and trans suffering (Coleman, 2021), or do they enable us to imagine something alternative to “queer death” (Coleman, 2021)?

Death by a Thousand Cuts: “Unhappy Queer Endings” in Schools

It seems that much of the queer and trans educational research out there composes narratives of literal and metaphorical “queer death” (Coleman, 2021). I see “queer death” in the documentation of homophobia and transphobia in national surveys that reiterate the prevalence of suicidality, languishing mental health for (2S)LGBTQ(IA+) youth, homonegativity, and transphobia (in the Canadian context, where I am writing from: e.g. Peter et al., 2021; Taylor & Peter, 2011; Taylor et. al, 2015; Taylor et al., 2016; Veale et al., 2015; and in the US context, where this journal is published: e.g. Kowsciw et al., 2020; Kosciw et al., 2018; The Trevor Project, 2021).

I also see death in the educational stories that are used to engage an apathetic public. This past summer, I was working on a Canadian 2S/LGTBQIA+ curriculum writing project and we created a timeline featuring significant events for queer and trans educational activism. While  working on that project, I learned about the death of librarian-teacher Kenneth Zeller in 1985 in Toronto, who was killed in a park for being gay and I learned about the death of teenager Jamie Hubley in 2011, who died by suicide after homophobic bullying. Beyond these literal deaths, I learned about the silencing (metaphorical death) of queer and trans existence through the censorship of BC teacher James Chamberlain who was told he could not read children’s stories featuring gay couples in his classroom or the firing of Alberta teacher Jan Buterman because he was trans.

Preparing for my PhD project and conducting literature reviews to find a “gap” in the field of gender and sexuality diversity/inclusion education, I have likewise observed different types of “queer deaths” (Coleman, 2021): how some educational research either does not explicitly name multiple layers of marginalization — such as race, Indigeneity, class, dis/ability — or when it does, it highlights queer and trans vulnerability. Two of the clearest examples I found relate to race and disability.

One type of metaphorical “queer death” researchers are (re)composing relates to the invisibility and hypervisibility of BIPOC queer and trans people that misses the complex experiences of Black, Indigenous, and racialized (2S)LGBTQ(AI+) folks. BIPOC students, teachers, and families of color are often positioned in contradictory ways within K-12 schools and queer and trans educational data. They might simply be overlooked – not considered, named, or added on after the fact. In comparison to being invisibilized, BIPOC queer and trans people can simultaneously be hypervisiblized – constructed as either a victim (a figure without agency/power) or as a perpetrator (a figure with lots of agency/power) in discourses. Brockenbrough (2015) explains that because queer students of color, particularly Black students, find themselves at the nexus of multiple crisis-oriented discourses (youth of color, immigrant youth, poor youth etc.), they are often marked perpetually as “at risk,” which often downplays their agency. In contrast to this narrative of victimhood, Connell (2016) has observed that people of color are frequently vilified in racialized discourses of homophobia. In her study on lesbian and gay teachers, Connell (2016) found that BIPOC students and families were assumed to be more discriminatory than white people. Meyer, Tilland-Stafford, and Airton (2016) found a similar finding. In their study asking teachers how they could better support trans and gender creative students, they observed that their mostly white teacher participants “depict[ed] homo- and transphobia as characteristic of particular racialized and immigrant groups, primarily those coming from predominantly Muslim countries in Africa and South Asia” (p. 6).

Another type of metaphorical “queer death” relates to the overlooking and silencing of disability within queer and trans educational research. Take for example that in Peter, Campbell & Taylor’s (2021) second and latest Canadian national survey on homophobia, biphobia and transphobia, there were no acknowledgements of queer and trans (of color) students who are disabled, chronically ill, and/or neurodiverse. There was also no place for students to indicate on their survey tool if they were disabled. One 2SLGBTQ participant wrote:

You really should be asking about disability on this form. Almost every disabled person I know has been harassed including myself and for the school board to not include that is further reducing our visibility. I was heavily physically abused in elementary school because I’m disabled and harassed by teachers in high school. I can’t stress enough how important is to include us on forms like this. (p. 58)

Smilges (2022) explains that silence about disability has often figured into queer activism starting with early homophile activists who initially rejected the pathologizing conservative discourses that homosexuality was a mental illness and disability to avoid being further dehumanized. In doing so, Smigles (2022) argues that queer activists began distancing themselves from disability and madness – two ways of being in the world, which, similarly to queerness, are seen as undesirable. Smigles (2022) calls for queer studies to reconcile with their ableism and trace the ways that silence hides the messy overlapping experiences of marginalization, which are avoided in neoliberal efforts to acquire civil rights.

Literal and metaphorical “queer deaths” are, therefore, littered throughout the field of queer and trans studies in education. There are the literal deaths of 2S/LGBTQIA+ people, the removal of queerness and transness in schools, and the paradoxical (in)visibility of BIPOC and disabled queer and trans people. The overwhelming presence of “queer deaths” begs the following questions: What ethical commitments do we, as researchers, have to tell “unhappy queer endings”? Do we have ethical commitments to imagine alternatives to “unhappy queer endings” through our research? And if so, how can we do that?

Dreaming as a Speculative Tool for “Educated Hope”

In this paper, I suggest that we do have an ethical commitment to imagine alternatives to “unhappy queer endings” (Coleman, 2021) in our research. Dreaming, which I use to mean speculating about alternative worlds (a type of “educated hope,” Muñoz, 2009), has frequently been at the heart of various social justice movements, propelling various marginalized communities to imagine alternative material conditions. Different Indigenous (e.g. Kinew, 1998; Kovach, 2015; Raven, 1996), Black abolitionist (e.g. Kelley, 2002; Love, 2019), queer Chicana and Latinx (Anzaldúa, 1987; Muñoz, 2009), and queer disabled/crip thinkers (e.g. Kafer, 2013; Piepnza-Samarasinha, 2018; Rice et al., 2017) have all talked about speculating as a type of wisdom. For example, Anishinaable Elder Tobasonakwut Kinew, calls embracing one’s dreams ando pawachige n, which means seek your dream, live your dream, understand your dream, and move forward with your dream” (1998, p. 34). Young (2016) writes that “[w]orking toward and imagining a future of possibility is a moral practice of hope-work” (p. 161). Anzaldúa (1987) likewise explains that dreams provide an entry-way to another mode of consciousness.

I have often turned to dreaming as a way to imagine different worlds but have been met by disappointment. This is probably because dreaming and failure often go hand-in-hand. Muñoz (2009) understood this predicament well, which is why I align my understanding of dreaming most with his concept of “educated hope.” According to Muñoz (2009), practicing “educated hope” is a type of revolutionary consciousness. It involves a group dwelling in a critically hopeful space of not yet. Drawing on Bloch’s understanding of concrete utopias, Muñoz (2009) advocates for relational, collaborative speculation, noting that “educated hope” is marked by both positive affect (possible excitement and joy) and negative affect (possible disappointment and grief). Specifically, he points out that realized utopian enclaves are littered with affective failures — when the speculative naming of hopes do not translate into the material world.

Moving from Shame to Failing on Purpose: Queer, Fem(me)inine Crip Failures

Despite the very real possibility of disappointment and shame (the affective sense of failure that we cannot realize our “educated hope”), I still believe speculation for alternative anticolonial, antiracist, crip/mad/sick, queer, trans, femme-inist worlds is worthwhile.  Failure often has a negative connotation. We, as humans, do not want to feel like we are failing. But what if we embraced failure?

According to Halberstam (2011), Hoskin & Taylor (2019), and Kafer (2013), failure is a particularly queer, fem(me)inine, and crip mode of being. As an individual, who is white, cisgender, queer/lesbian, femme, chronically ill/sick, and mentally-ill/mad, I have felt failure, but often not in a positive reclaimed way. I have felt failure (shame) in terms of my own embodiments. I have felt failure in terms of where I am regarding life milestones (ones I do not want but have been socialized to desire). I have felt failure around being a good enough queer, femme, feminist, chronically-ill person, mentally-ill person, and white person trying to act in solidarity. As a PhD student, I have felt failure in terms of not knowing what research approach to take when approaching my doctoral studies. As an educator, I have felt failure in leaving the K-12 school system — of feeling like I did not know how to “hack it” as a queer, chronically-ill teacher working in schools. I list these feelings of failure to outline how I come to queer and trans educational scholarship as someone quite familiar with shame, worry, and uncertainty. I should note that I am a recovering perfectionist and straddle the waves of my hyper and hypo active nervous system (what a western psychiatric medical model would call my generalized anxiety disorder and depression). For these reasons, even though I wish I could say embracing failure is easy for me, it is and always has been fraught. Learning about failure from queer, femme, and crip thinkers has given me space to hold the complexity of feelings I have towards failure. Learning about softness from Schwartz (2020) has also given me permission to share vulnerably about failure to hopefully facilitate more spaces for others to share openly about their own feelings of stuckness.

Halberstam (2011) made failure hip when he theorized that failure is a queer art and ethic. He wrote that because queers often do not fit within normative scripts, they find ways to embrace alternative temporalities and embodiments. Moeggenberg (2018) has explained that Muñoz’s concept of disidentification is one practice of failure. According to Muñoz (1999), disidentification are countercultural practices that queers of color create when they remix and recycle components of existing discourses that were not originally culturally coded with them in mind. Muñoz (1999) describes disidentification as one survival strategy that can create counter publics, or what Halbsertam (2011) would call “queer time” and “queer space.”

Disidentification is also an enactment of fem(me)inine and crip failure. For Hoskin & Taylor (2019), lesbian, bisexual, and non-binary assigned-female-at-birth femmes might look cis and/or straight to others; however, they fail at patriarchal femininity because they do not follow (cis)heteronormative roles. Moreover, femmes who were assigned-male-at-birth and are gay/bisexual men or trans women embody femininity in defiance of their expected masculinity. Within a patriarchal world, they are failing to embody patriarchal masculinity. By identifying against patriarchal femininity, and composing alternative femininities, femmes enact a type of disidentification that produces femme time and space.

Disabled folks can similarly produce crip time and space through embracing failure as a type of disidentification. Kafer (2013) outlines how disabled and chronically ill people are often marked by “failure” because they do not embody time/space according to compulsory ablesanism. By rejecting a “curative imaginary,” crips can produce alternative temporalities and embodiments that honour their existence (Kafer, 2013).

Fem(me)inizing and cripping queer time/space can offer insights towards more intersectional approaches toward queer and trans futurities. For Halbsertam (2005/2011), queer time/space involves resisting mastery, embracing silliness, and caring less about remembering everything right. One additional layer that could be added to queer time/space is softness. According to Schwartz (2020), softness is a type femme intelligence that embraces vulnerability, interdependence, earnestness, and emotionality – ways of being/knowing which have been pathologized as excessive within a white colonial masculinst ableist society.  While the language of softness is not used by Piepnza-Samarasinha (2018), she speaks about crip emotional intelligence in some similar ways. Piepnza-Samarasinha (2018) describes crip emotional intelligence as the ways sick and disabled people are uniquely capable of adapting, moving slowly with intention, and reading pain and struggle in others. Piepnza-Samarasinha’s (2018) vision of crip emotional intelligence therefore has some overlaps with softness in that they both see interconnectedness (awareness of oneself in relation to others) as key.

Dream-mapping as Queer, Fem(me)inine, Crip Failures

Learning about queer, fem(me)inine, crip failure enabled me to conceptualize dream-mapping as a method/ology. In this section, I describe how dream-mapping animates queer, fem(me)inine, crip failure in its methodological design.

As mentioned earlier in this paper, dream-mapping draws on arts-based (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018) and participatory (Fine & Torre, 2019; Kemmis et al., 2014) research traditions. Arts-based (sometimes used interchangeably with arts-informed) research refers to researchers using artistic mediums to explore their research questions (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018). It is often selected as a research design to engage participants in a creative knowledge-making process, to have artistic data that might support different forms of knowledge mobilization, and to challenge positivist assumptions about objectivity (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018). Participatory research refers to a co-researching process, wherein those who are often called participants in other research designs, are instead called co-researchers and asked to develop research questions and co-analyze data (Fine & Torre, 2019; Kemmis et al., 2014). I use the term “participatory-informed” when referring to dream-mapping because I draw on certain participatory (action) research traditions, but expand what participation could look like through a crip, mad, anticapitalist lens.

Methodologically, dream-mapping enacts queer, fem(me)inine, crip failure in two main ways. Firstly, dream-mapping intentionally embraces failure by inviting co-dreamers (participants) to map out educational futurities using devalued artistic mediums; the process reclaims what has been considered “bad,” or “low brow” art. Secondly, dream-mapping intentionally “fails” by refusing a singular definition of participation, which can be subtly implied within participatory research models. By complicating ideas of participation through an anticapitalist crip/mad lens, dream-mapping uses the phrasing “participatory-informed” to signal its influence, yet respectful departure from a traditional enactment of participatory (action) research. Throughout the article, I try to embrace the femme intelligence of softness by sharing vulnerably and earnestly.

Let’s Make “Bad” Art on Purpose

When I was growing up, my mother used to sew, knit, and crochet. I remember being mesmerized by her different designs. I asked my Dad once: “Is Mom an artist?” He scoffed and said: “No, that’s girly stuff.” What gets considered art (and good art) reflects privileged perspectives. Many mediums, like embroidery, textiles, and confessional poetry have been devalued by those in power who determine what art or creative expressions are worthwhile to a mainstream (white, male, cishet, able-bodied) audience. While arts-based research does not necessarily invite people to make art using traditionally valued mediums (Cahnmann-Taylor & Siegesmund, 2018), in broader society there is a hierarchy of what gets to be considered good, successful art and what is considered “bad” and insignificant.

As an embrace of queer and fem(me)inine failure — and disidentification with art that reproduces white, colonial, masculinist, ableist logics — dream-mapping invites co-dreamers (participants) to create a series of artworks (dream-maps) using historically devalued mediums. For example, within my PhD project that focuses on femme youth and educators, I am inviting participants to create art using feminized artistic mediums (e.g. embroidery, collaging, confessional poetry, beading etc.). The dream-mapping art-making process invites non-mastery, silliness, and play (queer failure). It seeks to interrupt narratives of shame, including the stories that some participants might have regarding particular artistic forms (femme failure). Returning to the story of my father devaluing mediums my mother used, I purposely avoided doing activities coded as “girly” for many years, internalizing that to do so would forgo the respect of men in my life. The process of giving space for different people to engage with mediums they might carry shame is an attempt to embrace fem(me)inine failure.

Let’s Participate in the Ways We Want

Inviting people to make so-called “bad” art is not the only way dream-mapping embraces failure. Through disidentifying with participation as something that is always visible, tangible, or consistent, dream-mapping embraces a type of anti-capitalistic “crip” (disabled, mad, sick) failure by intentionally not doing participatory (action) research “right”.

The Limits of Participatory Research

When I first started my PhD, I felt convinced I would do some sort of participatory (action) research. This is because I remember learning about how PAR and PR could be a more liberatory approach to research than other qualitative methodologies. I was also really excited about the possibility of collaborating with community members and trying to disrupt binaries and hierarchies within research. Critical participatory action research or youth participatory action research seemed like a great fit. The problem is I had attempted to do critical participatory action research (CPAR) during my MA, but things went a bit sideways. Without having Tuck & Yang’s refusal framework (2014), I did not realize that both myself and the participants in the study were making our own refusals. As a graduate student, I felt the constraints of wanting to finish my degree within a certain time period as I needed to work. As a result of those factors, I hadn’t invited my co-researchers to create a research question with me (because I felt it would take many more months to have them co-design the project with me). Moreover, while I co-analyzed some of the data with the participants, many of them did not want to analyze data or be engaged in the more behind-the-scenes aspects of the project; they were articulating the limits of their own capacity, which sometimes related to balancing work, having low energy, and not having an interest  in certain research components. I was therefore the principal person constructing the research design and driving the analysis process, but it still felt like those involved in the project were “participating” in ways that were meaningful to them.

When I came to my current institution and tried to publish a paper based on my MA, I was confronted again by the ways I did not do participatory (action) research “right”. Reviewers told me that my project did not seem to be participatory in nature. I realized that I had not really succeeded in enacting “participation” in the “participatory” sense of the word. That being said, I knew my MA project was meaningful for many of the participants because of the relationships some of them had formed with each other. This led me to start thinking more about what participation/participatory really means and/or could mean if it was more fluid and expansive. More specifically, it led me to start thinking about intentionally failing at “participatory” as a way to expand the scope of who gets to define meaningful participation.

As someone with generalized anxiety disorder (that was not diagnosed with until I was an adult), participation has always been fraught for me. For example, until my final year of undergraduate studies, I would often forfeit participation grades to avoid speaking. As someone who worked hard to manage my anxiety so I could become a skilled, thoughtful facilitator, I operate off the assumption that I cannot always tell how engaged a person is by how they take up space within a certain environment. I learned how to mask my anxieties and perform in ways I was expected to. It would have meant a lot if people gave me space to express myself in alternative ways that made me feel like I was not inherently “wrong.” Some people cannot speak, cannot hear, cannot exist in particular spaces due to disability, chronic illness, and mental illness compounded with other identity markers that leave them marginalized within those environments. I do not believe participation looks the same for each person, so how does this translate into implied expectations around participation with participatory (action) research models?

Generally, asking people to co-design an entire study requires a lot of time, labor, and education for those involved. It means building long-term sustainable relationships. It means training people involved to know about different methodologies and methods so they can make informed choices about how to design a research project. It means asking people to give up a lot of their time and energy to participate in such a project. As a researcher, it also means ensuring that co-researchers are appropriately compensated for their time/labor. I started wondering: Is that level of participation and those expectations of participation always fair, accessible, and/or realistic? Does asking people to participate in those ways always benefit them? What people might be excluded from such standards of participation? What if people cannot always participate in such a way due to their work responsibilities, family lives, disability, and/or mental illness etc.? What if people cannot secure funding to provide honorariums to co-researchers? What if potential researchers need to complete research within shorter timelines (such as graduate students or junior scholars who need to publish more to access tenure-track jobs)? In sum, I think prescribing participation (whether explicitly or implicitly) flattens what participation could be.

Call for Expanding Notions of Participation

Through a crip, mad and anticapitalist lens, I surmise that participation takes into consideration multiple ways of being in time/space (e.g. of being in one’s body, of communicating, of relating) and the constraints that people might experience as a result of capitalism (needing to work to survive). I try to animate this understanding of participation within dream-mapping, trying not to gate-keep what participation means or looks like for people (or to pretend to know what participation would be meaningful/liberatory for people). Opening up participation in this way is not an attempt to avoid rigorous participatory research, but to be compassionately and critically curious about how participation is being defined.

Dream-mapping, therefore, fails methodologically in its invocation of “participatory” — it’s refusal to pinpoint participation in one way, which hopefully allows for multiple forms of participation. Co-dreamers are invited to participate in many ways through the dream-mapping process: they are invited to make knowledge creatively through their dream-maps; they are invited to choose what devalued artistic mediums they want to use; they are invited to co-analyze the art through a descriptive review process; and they are invited to share their thoughts about the process through supplementary data collection tools (e.g. interviews, stimulated recalls etc.). Co-dreamers can also refuse to participate in particular ways. For example, someone could make an argument for using a more historically valued artistic medium and given space to explore why they want to use that. Another person could state that they do not want to talk about their dream-map with the group, or have their dream-map analyzed. Overall, there are different ways co-dreamers can participate.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have begun sketching out dream-mapping as a speculative tool for queer and trans educational researchers. I talk about how I arrived at dream-mapping as a methodology by reflecting on my own affective feelings of “failure” as a human, a PhD student, and a teacher alongside reading about how Halberstam (2011), Hoskin & Taylor (2019) and Kafer (2013) talk about queer, fem(me)inine, and crip failure. Dream-mapping animates these three types of failure — an embrace of non-mastery and silliness (queer failure – Halberstam, 2011); a rejection of shame and reconfiguring of femininity as radical (fem[me]inine failure – Hoskin & Taylor, 2019); and an interruption of compulsory ablesanism (crip failure – Kafer, 2013) — by inviting participants (co-dreamers) to create “bad” art and participate in ways that honour an anticapitalist “crip time.” Overall, this paper offers an initial outline of an emerging methodology and seeks to spark dialogue about how speculative research within queer and trans studies in education can imagine alternatives to literal and metaphorical “queer death” (Coleman, 2021). In doing so, I am articulating that dreaming, speculating about alternative worlds, is a worthwhile pursuit. Or as Muñoz (2009) has already beautifully stated: “some will say that all we have are the pleasures of this moment, but we must never settle for that minimal transport; we must dream and enact new and better pleasures, other ways of being in the world, and ultimately new worlds” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 1).

Notes on Contributor

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