ICLS Hybrid Symposium | iHY-2_LGTBQ-JUSTICE | Queer and Trans Theories as Praxis: Analyzing Power and Designing for Learning Toward Justice

This structured poster symposium, co-chaired by an intergenerational group of scholars, brings together scholars whose work engages queer and trans theories as praxis. Amid intensifying political attacks, we foreground the historical persistence of queer and trans knowledge-making and centering futures in which learning is reimagined toward justice and livability. The contributions examine diverse contexts—including early childhood classrooms, community design spaces, nationalist and parental rights discourses, arts-based learning, and computational simulations—to show how queer and trans perspectives unsettle dominant definitions of learning, reveal the operations of ideology, and foreground desire, embodiment, and affect as vital dimensions of liberatory and justice-oriented learning. Collectively, the six papers demonstrate how queer and trans theories refuse normative closure and open possibilities for more expansive ways of knowing. By attending to the conditions that restrict educational dignity and the practices that envision otherwise, we underscore how learning might be oriented toward dignity, creativity, and collective flourishing.