Conference Agenda

As queer scholars (non-binary trans and gay, respectively), in this paper we explore the potential of a history of education committed to recovering from Western colonial violence trans, gender nonconforming and queer experiences from early childhood to adulthood.

Starting from historical accounts (Actualidade 1879, O Comércio do Porto 1879, Lusitano & Froilaz 1879, O Tripeiro 1926) of the life and education of António Custodio das Neves (1858-1888), born in Portugal’s Douro region, assigned female at birth yet growing up male, and emerging from such accounts as the ‘Woman Man’/‘Man Woman’ [‘Mulher-Homem’ /‘Homem-Mulher’], we confront ‘colonialist practices of avoidance and erasure’ (Barad 2017, 76; 2023, 37) having invisibilised gender-nonconforming, nonheteronormative existences and experiences like his. We commit ourselves to a history ‘with and against the archives’ of a past ‘that has yet to be done’ (Martins forthcoming; Hartman 2008, 13) involving ‘times, places, beings [that] bleed through one another’ (Barad 2014, 179) into our present. Centring education from early childhood onwards as a trope with no less tangible effects, this history addresses ‘meaningful absence’, ‘void’, or ‘gaps’ as ‘excess’: a ‘lively tension, a desiring orientation toward being/becoming’ (Martins forthcoming; Barad 2015, 396; Hartman 2008, 5, 12). Trans/gender nonconforming and queer experiences thus did (not) yet exist (if) only (differently) ‘at their intersection with institutions of disciplinary power’ (Martins forthcoming; Heyam 2022, Mesch 2020) constraining the conditions of their non/existence (Barad 2017, Hartman 2008; Foucault 1972, 1980). Among such institutions were those policing conduct in civil society from a legal perspective, those studying, cataloguing and treating conditions based on then-prevalent views of medicine, psychiatry and psychology, but also educational institutions, from kindergarten onwards. Beyond Modern notions of linear temporality that stabilise boundaries between past, present and future (Thyssen 2024) governing dominant ‘fictions of history’, we endeavour to rescue ‘impossible stories’ (Hartman 2008, 10) ‘that are not the histories … archives wish to recount (Martins forthcoming, Steedman 2001) but may carry with them ('un/timely') 'difference that portends the future' (Grosz 2004, 11) present and yet to come. Any eventual such difference 'matters' as ‘substance and significance’ (Barad 2007, 3) for education, from kindergarten to school and beyond, in Portugal as elswhere in Europe.

The case of António Custodio das Neves is intended as a preparatory excursion into a wider history of gender nonconformity and queerness in education from early childhood education and kindergarten upwards, particularly in Portugal and Norway (see e.g., Askland & Rossholt 2009).

Discussions of Black history and school desegregation in many US K-12 schools have been narrowed to a few heroic figures and moments. Historic representations are currently challenged by a nationwide movement to uphold White supremacy and deny the violent history of racism in the US. The revisionist claims are challenged in this qualitative narrative research project that presents stories gathered from 10 Black educators in Augusta, Georgia, who recount their stories of desegregating schools and institutions as students or educators. This oral history narrative project imagines these stories as the basis for engaging K-12 teachers and students in creating new curricula.

Although African American history is part of the K-12 curriculum, the complexity and diversity in the experiences of African-descended people in the United States is rarely represented (Byrd & Jangu, 2009). Recognizing all of African Americans’ experiences in the US challenges the popular understanding of America, its place in the world, and its moral standing, and thus this full description is generally not welcomed (Hannah-Jones, 2019). Teachers need to be equipped with a rich understanding of the circumstances that African Americans have endured, the economic and political as well as individual, and deliberate forces that created those circumstances, and the triumphs and achievements of African American communities despite the challenges (Byrd & Jangu, 2009). One way to disrupt popular discourses that claim the moral authority of the US and uphold white supremacy is to teach local stories that enhance national examples of resistance, struggle, and achievement in Black communities. We use the words African American and Black interchangeably in this paper to describe people and community in Augusta, Georgia, where people self-identify as African American and Black, and are multigeneration residents of the US. We also follow the authors when referencing research literature as they have used these terms. The experiences of those in the community who personally advocated for change in order to create access and greater justice remind teachers and their students that we are all responsible for creating the communities we want to live in.

The stories told in this oral history research project highlight the brave acts of educators and students in many settings: teachers who took the first steps to create meaningful educational experiences for their newly desegregated classrooms of students, community educational efforts in which media distortions and omissions were countered through forms of public pedagogy, and student responses to experiences of new and hostile school environments. They remind us of the costs of these efforts, as well as the gains achieved. They also remind us of the slippery forms of backlash that have sprung up since the Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court decision (Brown v. Board of Education, 1954), and the insidious ways that discrimination continues to assert itself (Mattia, 2021). These stories are relevant as we struggle to engage students in conversations that counter discourses that uphold white supremacy, or the “majoritarian stories” (Solórzano & Yosso, 2002). These discourses can be found in the language of our students and in the local media presentations on questions regarding school curricula and student activism. “Everyday schooling in America rests deeply on this history [of white coloniality], which positions Eurocentric values and the impetus to control and erase BIPOC at the center of what we view as standard, decent, and desirable for intellectual acuity” (Lyiscott et al., 2020, p. 368). Because of the global resurgence and political support of the erasure of Blackness and colonial harms in national discourses on race and education, it is imperative to highlight history that complicates a simple narrative about the Black experience in the US.