Browsing by Author "Thorpe, Amelia"

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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.