The Personal Is Pedagogical: Manifesting Queerness in an Academic Department

Abstract

Abstract University visual art education departments are often regarded as having disciplinary strengths in certain areas of scholarship or research, which in turn foster specific research directions with graduate students and programs or coursework for undergraduates. In this article for a special queer-centered issue of Visual Arts Research, lead author Dana Carlisle Kletchka identifies an explicitly queer-affirming academic department that manifests particular social relations through individual politics and identities in relation to queerness, the ways in which queerness is treated throughout pedagogies and curricula, and openness to continually re-examining the ways in which power relationships are constructed and deployed in classrooms and academic spaces. She has faculty write about what it means to work in an explicitly queer-affirming environment: how it impacts their positionalit(ies) as professors, their critical pedagogical practices, and their research. Themes of equity, emancipatory teaching and learning, intersectionality, and critical social justice echoed through their responses.