Browsing by Author "Burkholder, Casey"

Now showing 1 - 11 of 11
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    A queer agenda for possible futures: Education, activism, and identity
    (University of New Brunswick, 2024-04) Thorpe, Amelia; Burkholder, Casey
    2SLGBTQ+ identities and experiences have long been erased and underrepresented in social, educational, and political spheres across Canada. This dissertation addresses questions of activism, history, identity, community, and education through a five-part, article-based exploration of the construct of Pride and queer histories of activism and organizing. Using autoethnography, semi-structured interviewing, and narrative inquiry, I address the ongoing institutional erasure of gender and sexually diverse identities within schools and explore the capacity of informal community education spaces and histories to help address this deficiency and inform the development of a public queer pedagogy. I (cautiously) position Pride as educative, with attention to the urgent need to queer and repoliticize 2SLGBTQ+ spaces and organizations to disrupt discourses of homonormativity and homonationalism. I suggest that queer histories, queer organizing, and queer activism have immense potential to speak back to the erasure of gender and sexual diversity in formal education and contribute to an experiential and relational queer pedagogy rooted in radical queer futurity.
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    Co-producing Digital Archives with 2LGBTQ+ Atlantic Canadian Youth amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic
    (Emerald Publishing Limited, 2021) Burkholder, Casey; MacEntee, Katie; Mandrona, April; Thorpe, Amelia
    Purpose: We explore the co-production of a digital archive with 50 2SLGBTQ+ youth across Atlantic Canada during the COVID-19 pandemic in order to catalyze broader public participation in understanding 2SLGBTQ+ youth-led activism in this place and time through art production. Design/methodology/approach: Through a mail-based participatory visual research project, and an examination of collage, zines, and DIY facemasks, we highlight how the production, sharing, and archiving of youth-produced art adds to methodological discussions of exhibiting and digital archiving with 2SLGBTQ+ youth as a form of activist intervention. Findings: In reflexively examining the co-curation of our art through social media and project website, we argue that co-producing digital archives is an important part of knowledge mobilization. Also, we consider how the work has been interacted with by a broader public, so far in an exclusively celebratory manner, and note the benefits and challenges of this type of engagement to the youth and to our understandings of 2SLGBTQ+ youth archives. Originality: We suggest that these modes of engaging in participatory visual research at a distance offers original contributions in relation to how participation can be understood in a digital and mail-based project. We see participant-control of how to share our works within our digital archives as a contribution to our understanding of people’s capacity to negotiate and take ownership of these spaces. These strategies are participant-centred and suggest ways that archiving can be made more accessible especially when working with communities who are socially marginalized or otherwise excluded from the archival process.
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    Exploring the experiences of refugee newcomer youth in a New Brunswick high school history class: a curriculum critique
    (University of New Brunswick, 2020) Saunders, Shana Lynn; Whitty, Pam; Burkholder, Casey
    Using critical discourse analysis, autoethnography, and qualitative interviewing methodologies, I examine the New Brunswick high school Modern History 11 curriculum and the experience of four Syrian newcomer youth who have encountered it. The thesis draws from a range of theoretical traditions, including critical race theory, performativity and gender theory, postcolonial theory and Foucault's ideas about the relationship between power and knowledge. Through my experience teaching the curriculum, I argue that it is Eurocentric and white supremacist, militaristic, and patriarchal. The existing curriculum emphasizes the history of European war, especially the two World Wars, which are sanitized and glorified, and valorizes military experience. I subject the History 11 curriculum document to a critical discourse analysis and compare these findings alongside the perspectives of Syrian refugee newcomers who have personally experienced war. I describe how four Syrian refugee youth experience a New Brunswick curriculum that portrays war as a geopolitical inevitability and technical problem without adequately considering its human consequences or moral dimensions. I consider how working critically with social studies curricula can enhance education about war for all students, suggest curricular reform that would encourage a commitment to peaceful conflict resolution, and recommend educational practices that focus upon possibilities for building awareness, empathy, and compassion among students from distinct cultures with widely divergent stories to tell.
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    From care to accountability: Creating radically loving alternatives to shame, punishment and disposability as Black, Indigenous, Latinx, racialized men and non-binary persons
    (University of New Brunswick, 2023-08) Davila, Javier; Burkholder, Casey
    This autoethnographic study documents my collaborative work with the Good Guise, a Toronto arts-based collective of Black, Indigenous, Latinx, racialized men and non-binary persons grounded in the principle: ‘No One Is Disposable.’ In 2021, we explored ‘pods’ (Mingus, 2016) in creating care and accountability practices that resist neoliberal and carceral structures. Drawing from Transformative Justice, Black Queer Feminism, Abolitionist theory and Disability Justice, I investigate zine-making, personal narratives and pod-mapping as abolitionist education tools. As the sole mixed-race, conditionally white-presenting member, I employ a ‘Praxis of Critical Race Love’ (Buenavista et al., 2021) to confront male and white supremacy while collaborating with an advisory panel of racialized women. Findings emphasize interdependence and radical love. I propose ‘Liberatory,’ ‘Love’ and ‘Abolition as Praxis’ (Chartrand & Piché, 2019; Gumbs, 2020; Rodríguez, 2018) in conjunction with pods as primary strategies for racialized men to challenge colonialism and address gender-based violence and harm.
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    Naci Nkiluwahton Wolastoqey Latuwewakon (Translation: Looking for Answers for Maliseet Language): Wolastoqey language reclamation through cellphilm and storywork
    (University of New Brunswick, 2025-10) Beaver, Darrah (Pine); Burkholder, Casey; Saul, Roger
    As a member of the Wolasotoqiyik (also known as the Maliseet Nation), we now speak and come to know through the language of settler culture on our home territory, thinking in objectified perceptions, while our own melodic Wolastoqey language sits endangered, taking with it our stories, concepts, words and what is left of our traditional worldview. This qualitative study is framed within Indigenous Research Methodology, as the work is motivated to assist in the process of decolonizing education, through ancestral language reclamation at home and school. Leaning into people’s everyday media-making practices with cellphones and digital technology, the research process described in this article-based dissertation connects Wolastoqey language learning between youth and Elders, in a way that celebrates the knowledge and key role of these generations. In partnership with my home community, Neqotkuk (Tobique First Nation), in northwestern New Brunswick, together through public dialogue, storywork, and participatory visual research, we began to awaken our language through increased use of Wolastoqey Latuwewakon (Maliseet language). In response to community needs, this study focused on accessibility and presenting research to mobilize immediate action. This research design has empowered Wolastoqey language speakers and worked with their wisdom to support my community towards a decolonial language revitalization path. The dissertation highlights important starting points for reclaiming and revitalizing Indigenous languages, focusing on what each community needs and focused on methods that attract and engage young people. Decolonizing education through language revitalization can be a strength-based and youth-driven approach, shifting the individual effort to a collective movement that promotes language learning.
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    Queer(ing) joy: Interrogating deficit approaches to gender and sexuality education in New Brunswick, Canada
    (University of New Brunswick, 2025-09) Keehn, Melissa; Saul, Roger; Burkholder, Casey
    This qualitative and article-based dissertation examines how queer joy confronts pervasive deficit framings about queer and trans youth in schools in New Brunswick, a small and rural province in Atlantic Canada—offering insights into the challenges, affordances, and broader implications of inciting joy in spaces that routinely perceive queer and trans youth through a lens of perceived lack: lack of joy, community, desire, complexity, and even personhood. In it, I engage in a document analysis of local policies, resources, press releases, government discourse, instructional materials, and curriculum related to gender and sexuality education in the province’s school system—looking at what they generate, where they operate, whom they fail, and what is absent from their promises as an inclusive framework. Then, I consider queer joy as a better conceptual possibility in view of this analysis, positioning joy as the counter to these educational structures and broader political incursions against queer and trans youth in schools. My study also reflects that possibility in action, drawing on two participatory visual workshops and accompanying focus-group interviews with four 2SLGBTQIA+ youth involved in a Gender and Sexuality Alliance (GSA) from a rural New Brunswick high school, where we reflected on their experiences in the province’s school system. This dissertation highlights how current gender and sexuality education in New Brunswick can be both repressive and supportive, and foregrounds ways that queer and trans youth are living, queering, and figuring out new ways of doing things that surpass what current educational practice and policy assumes.
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    Temporal Seeing as Visual Literacy
    (Sage Journals, 2024-03-28) Saul, Roger; Gerbrandt, Julianne; Burkholder, Casey
    Temporal seeing is a mode of visual perception that interrupts the spatial bias we bring to visual literacy practices. Although an image only captures one moment in time, there are multiple spatioanalytical tools we can use to consider any image. Spatial literacy, which is the practice of analyzing objects through their properties in space, tends to be the default analytical mode for making sense of imagery. For people to bring a commensurate temporal richness to their articulated visual readings, we first highlight the perspectival richness of time and temporality. We next present five precepts that can guide enriched temporal seeing: contextual histories; relational chronologies; internal rhymicity; desequenced and resequenced narrative; and critique and meaning-making. Finally, we suggest that temporal seeing holds a series of educative possibilities for expanding the interpretive frames and perceptual apparatuses of literacy researchers and practitioners.
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    The politics of Macbeth: disrupting ‘foul play’ in the high school English language arts classroom through rhizomatic bricolage & autoethnography
    (University of New Brunswick, 2019) Quiring, Jill Kathryn; Burkholder, Casey
    This thesis examines how Shakespeare’s Macbeth might be taught in ways that consider and disrupt unequal relations of power in the play itself, in curricula, and in society. Using rhizoanalysis, bricolage, and autoethnographic methodologies, this study critically examines the play itself, the Atlantic Canada English language arts curriculum guide for grades 10 -12, and the researcher’s instructional experiences related to teaching the play. The work asks how the application of post structural, critical, and feminist theories to the teaching of Macbeth might work to disrupt normativity in the classroom and beyond, and considers how teachers of English language arts might cultivate educational praxis that transforms the literature classroom into an emancipatory site.
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    Understanding the settlement experiences of newcomer adult EAL students as they seek belonging within their new communities in urban New Brunswick
    (University of New Brunswick, 2021-12) Dias, Andrea Maria; Kristmanson, Paula; Burkholder, Casey
    This study explores the settlement experiences of newcomer adult EAL students as they seek belonging within their new communities in one urban New Brunswick city. In adopting a critical multicultural education framework, which uses a critical and transformative meta-orientation, identity work, anti-racist education, and culturally responsive teaching, I explore how social interaction and belonging are understood by nine participants in one urban New Brunswick city. Using a case study methodology, I triangulate my findings using a focus group, a participatory map-making activity, and individual interviews. Three themes emerge from the research and are discussed as: attachment and community, comfort and security, and local knowledge and local language. I suggest implications for teachers, policymakers, settlement language organizations, and the larger community, including newcomers themselves.
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    What, A Giant Beaver? Using imagery to share Wolastoqiyik knowledge with publics in Wolastokuk
    (University of New Brunswick, 2022-12) Sacobie, Percy; Burkholder, Casey
    Wolastoqiyik (Maliseet) traditional knowledge, in particular stories, legends, or fables, has been passed on for hundreds of generations, and up until modern times, it was mostly done orally. My critical introduction to my thesis describes the depiction of one Wolastoqey Glooscap story. Glooscap has many different spelling variations, for example, Kluscap, Gluskabi, Kloskomba, Gluskab, Glooskap, and Koluscap. I use Glooscap, as that is the way I know. Glooscap is a cultural hero who, with his relatives, are vital characters in shaping the land and taming the animals of the Maritimes, Quebec, and parts of the United States. He can be associated with the Wolastoqiyik, Mi'kmaq, Passamaquoddy, Abenaki, and Penobscots peoples. My critical introduction to my thesis seeks to demonstrate a correlation between the ecological changes my ancestors had lived through and the story about these changes. This story has survived for thousands of years. The environmental changes I explore include a former ice dam formed thousands of years ago at the mouth of the Wolastoq. I also highlight changes in animal life as giant beavers that roamed this territory, who were distant relatives of modern-day beavers. Referencing maps and archeological data, I show how these ecological changes directly relate to the Wolastoqey story about Glooscap and this Giant Beaver that roamed these lands. Within this critical introduction to my creative thesis, I share my creative process to make visible to readers how my final painting has been shaped. My creative thesis depicts my vision of the Wolastoqey story, Glooscap and the Giant Beaver. The final piece is a 24x8 foot acrylic painting that will be added to the City of Fredericton's permanent collection and displayed indefinitely at Fredericton's International airport. The piece's intended purpose is to help educate people from all walks of life about the original inhabitants of the area, the Wolastoqiyik, and how one story displays their deep connection to the land they have lived on for thousands of years. The story and the Wolastoqiyik will help all people who inhabit this area connect to the land themselves as they hopefully understand how the lands had been shaped and how the Wolastoqiyik (the people of the beautiful and bountiful river) had chronicled how it happened.
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    Who cares?: Marginalization, wellbeing, and flourishing in high school
    (University of New Brunswick, 2023-06) Wilson, Jonathan W.; Burkholder, Casey
    This research is an exploration of marginalized students’ perception of wellbeing in high school. Wellbeing has been described as the perception of positive emotions, feelings of self-confidence, and sense of comfort is coping with stressful and challenging situations (Oberle, 2018). When a person experiences positive wellbeing, they are more likely to flourish (Parker & Levinson, 2018). In this study, I wonder: to what extent is wellbeing constrained and supported in the context of a large urban high school in New Brunswick, Canada? This participatory visual research project was conducted with thirteen grade eleven and twelve students—who identify as Indigenous, 2SLGBTQ+, racialized, and/or disabled—to elicit their insight into what supports and inhibits their wellbeing at school. Through participatory mapping, photovoice, and focus groups, key themes relating to: relationships, physical space, teaching and assessment, and recognition of marginalized identities emerged as key determinants of wellbeing.