Events - Auxin: ‘A Gay Agenda’: Troubling Compulsory...

Auxin: ‘A Gay Agenda’: Troubling Compulsory Heterosexuality in a South African University Classroom

Start: 22/02/2022, 12:45
End: 22/02/2022, 13:45

Contact:Lucy Lucks - 021 808 3717
Location: MSTeams

The Centre for Teaching & Learning invites you to Auxin.

The Topic

'A Gay Agenda': Troubling Compulsory Heterosexuality in a South African University Classroom

Not only does teaching about gender and sexuality diversity lead to interesting and often emotionally evocative pedagogical exchanges, it can also create challenging issues for teachers and students alike. This Auxin presentation focuses on what happens when a module that addresses compulsory heterosexuality and schooling is broached in an undergraduate sociology class. More importantly, it offers an analysis of the critical incidents and tensions that relate specifically to how power, knowledge, and emotion feature in teaching and learning. Using anti-oppressive and affect theories, the presentation offers an analysis of how we might understand pedagogical practice, especially as it relates to addressing the power of normative heterosexuality in a university classroom. With reflections emerging from the module, the presenter argues for more sociological theorisation and analysis of the role of affect in pedagogies that seek to advance liberatory teaching and learning in the area of anti-heterosexist education.

The Speaker

Dennis Francis is a South African scholar and human rights activist whose work engages with questions related to gender, sexualities and schooling. Dennis is a former Dean of Education and currently Professor of Sociology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. Francis's research, located in the sociology of education, focuses on how educational structures, discourses and practices reproduce cisheteronormativity and social inequality in schools, and how these are resisted and challenged. Francis's most recent works are Troubling the Teaching and Learning of Gender and Sexuality Diversity in South African Education (in the Queer Studies and Education book series, Palgrave Macmillan, 2017); and Queer Social Movements and Outreach Work in Schools: A Global Perspective (also in the Queer Studies and Education book series, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, co-editor with Jón Ingvar Kjaran and Jukka Lehtonen. Prof Francis's next book (2022 in press) is entitled Queer Activism in South African Education: Disrupting Cis(hetero)normativity in Schools, under contract with the Routledge Critical Studies in Gender and Sexuality in Education book series.