Embodied Knowing: How Trans Critique Creates Liberatory Pedagogical Possibilities

Abstract

This dissertation engages in a cultural analysis of how systems of power can be created, reinforced, and transformed in learning environments in ways that create liberatory praxis by bringing Critical Pedagogy, Cultural Studies, and Trans Pedagogy into conversation with one another. In this work, Cultural Studies offers a framework to analyze how power and culture shape classrooms. Critical Pedagogy advances this aim to analyze and propose re-structurings of the classroom that center critical engagement and lateral learning structures. Through my engagements with Critical Pedagogy and Trans Pedagogy, hierarchical learning models and binaries of “inside” and “outside” of the classroom are collapsed. To contextualize my contributions, I present the first comprehensive genealogy of the nascent field of Trans Pedagogy published to date. As an offering to the growth of the field of Trans Pedagogy, this genealogy covers the intervening texts of the field between 2008-2024. Through my research of Trans Pedagogy, I present the emerging themes and questions of this field in this genealogy. The second half of this dissertation details my contribution to Trans Pedagogy. Through an autoethnographic approach, I also develop a “Liberatory Trans Pedagogy” as my contribution to the growth of the field of Trans Pedagogy. A Liberatory Trans Pedagogy offers an “educator’s toolkit” in which I detail nine elements as to what engaging in this pedagogical praxis can entail. As evidenced by my dialectical and student-forward approaches in the classroom, education through a Liberatory Trans Pedagogy becomes a praxis that is critical, meaningful, and generative for both instructors and students. Together, my students and I pedagogically collapse hierarchical structurings of the classroom to instead be rooted in lateral frameworks of engagement. By inviting my students into the process of the co-construction of understandings and class engagement, students become active agents in our course, their educations, and beyond. A Liberatory Trans Pedagogy attends to students’ needs and interests while simultaneously preparing them to be critically engaged citizens beyond the classroom. Liberatory in this work is a critical pedagogical praxis in which students are invited to foster their understandings of power, norms, and strengthen their community collaboration, advocacy, and intellectual interdependence. In this work, “trans” embodies multiplicity as a crossing between disciplines, transformation of classroom dynamics, and transcendence from traditional academic norms and pedagogical hierarchies through engagements with a Liberatory Trans Pedagogy.