Join Us Online
Date/Time
Wednesday, December 4, 2024
7:00 PM EST – 8:30 PM EST
Library Salon #36
Location:
Online
Event Title:
Library Salon #36
Celebrating the Launch of Occasional Paper Series Issue #52 : “The Adventures of Trans Educators: A Comic Book Issue.”
Description:
We welcome you to join us online to celebrate the launch of Occasional Paper Series Issue #52, “The Adventures of Trans Educators: A Comic Book Issue.” This issue uses the medium of a comic book to celebrate the presence of trans educators in young people’s lives, share their experiences in PK-12 classrooms, and to work toward a field of education that is far more welcoming to trans people of all ages. The evening will begin with remarks from OPS Editor Gail Boldt and issue editors Harper B. Keenan, Lee Iskander, and Rachel Williams, followed by an exciting panel featuring 3 of the 7 collaborative teams that contributed comics to the issue. At a time when many trans communities are facing unprecedented challenges, please join us in celebrating the many contributions trans educators make to the field of education.
About The Guest Editors
Harper B. Keenan is the inaugural Robert Quartermain Professor of Gender & Sexuality in Education at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Keenan’s scholarship examines how adults and children relate to each other within the structures of schooling and other educational contexts, and what their interactions reveal about the possibilities and challenges of public education. He is also the founder of the Trans Educators Network, a mutual aid organization for support and connection among trans people working in K-12 schools. Before becoming an academic, Dr. Keenan was an elementary school teacher in New York City.
Lee Iskander (they/them) is an artist and scholar working at the intersection of trans studies, curriculum studies, and teacher education. Lee’s research examines how discourses of gender and sexuality shape identities in educational spaces and has been published in the Journal of LGBT Youth, Teaching Education, and Teachers College Record. Lee’s interest in gender and sexuality in schools arose from their experience as a youth activist. They are currently a doctoral candidate in the Department of Curriculum & Pedagogy at the University of British Columbia.
Rachel Marie-Crane Williams is a native of North Carolina, earned a BFA in Painting and Drawing from East Carolina University and an MFA in Studio Art and a PhD in Art Education from Florida State University. She spent 22 years as a professor and, later, department chair in Gender, Women’s, and Sexuality Studies at The University of Iowa. She is lucky and happy to be the dean of liberal arts at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts, a position she has held since 2022. She is the creator of two graphic historiographies, Elegy for Mary Turner: An Illustrated Account of a Lynching (Verso Press) and Run Home If You Don’t Want to Be Killed: The Detroit Uprising of 1943 (UNC Press and the Duke Center for Documentary Studies). Her writing has also appeared most recently in Southern Cultures, Mississippi Quarterly: The Journal of Southern Cultures, Meridians, Feminist Studies, and Visual Arts Research. Her work as an artist is grounded in narrative painting, printmaking, and illustration. The natural world, field research, scholarship, ephemera, and drawing heavily influences her imagery. She works in oil, aqueous media, and digitally.
Cost: Free