2024 Graduate Student Research Conference
“Despite and Because of Difference”
Cultivating Critical Conversations for the Future of Education
In times of polarization, social conflict, and continuing systemic violence, it is the responsibility of education to play a significant role in addressing this systemic violence, deconstructing hierarchies, and embracing differences. No longer are educational policies bound only to social and political norms dictated within their own states, but are also influenced and shaped by transnational, capitalist corporations that determine the allocation of power (Grewal & Kaplan, 1994). Historically, anti-colonial, anti-racist, queer, labour, student, and feminist political organizing have resisted these structural and cultural injustices. As a part of these movements, transnational feminists, led by feminists of colour, resist homogenizing and exclusionary practices that historically favour white, Eurocentric understandings of the world (Herr, 2014). As inspiration for the 2024 Graduate Student Research Conference (GSRC), we lean on a transnational “feminist ethics of complex solidarity” (Tambe &Thayer, 2021, p. 20). As such, we aim to engage in meaningful conversations and learn from the experiences of collectives that seek to collaborate on shared concerns despite and because of their differences.
Our vision for the 2024 GSRC is to foster these productive dialogues and create space for knowledge exchanges and the development of potential political solidarities among participants that inspire the creation of a more equitable world, rooted in the necessary embracement of our differences. This entails the arduous scholarly task of constructing cross-discipline analyses of power structures and systems that produce hierarchies of sameness and injustice in education (Keating, 2005), in tandem with articulating points of resistance that emerge through local practices. It also encompasses scholarship that centers innovative pedagogies, curricula, and educational leadership strategies that inform the future of transformative and inclusive education.
This year’s proposed themes for GSRC invite researchers, graduate students at all stages of their research, practitioners, and artists alike to disrupt the presumed legitimacy of dominant educational narratives by identifying the ways in which overlapping oppressions affect each of our educational disciplines, highlighting existing modes of resistance, and imagining new ways of moving forward. Further, we challenge conference participants to consider what a world would look like in which we not only connect, but flourish, at our points of difference.
We enthusiastically invite you to contribute to GSRC 2024 by sharing your latest research, professional experience, and transformative ideas to engage in transnational conversations that will contribute to the building of better futures!
Opening Performance
Poetry Reading by Kai Butterfield
Kai Butterfield is an artist, Ontario Certified Teacher, and PhD student in the Department of Social Justice Education at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education (University of Toronto). They live intentionally as a reverberation of their Guyanese, Grenadian, and Bermudian ancestors’ will, which continues to stretch across time and space.
Through their academic and artistic work, Butterfield critically examines Eurowestern understandings of the human to imagine life beyond destructive ways of being. Their doctoral research is focused on theorizing an anti-colonial, anti-capitalist, and abolitionist approach to restorative justice that does not reproduce anti-Black notions of the human. Similarly, Butterfield uses poetry to explore the ways that Black women and queer people refuse the systems that seek their death, opening possibilities for Black liberation.
suddenly, in its trembling,
I remark my hand,
taken for granted in the unceasing activity of my work.
trembling now,
my hand has made itself seen,
emerging from the blur of my labours to reveal a swelling at the joints of fingers, wrist,
a brittleness of the nails,
a hot and reddened palm.
I see now that the trembling hand hesitates before it grasps,
as it has been changed,
fatigued by that grasping.
it refuses to grasp, if only for a moment,
to delay the repetitive and quotidian work of capture.
if this grasp is the act of knowing,
then everything I have come to know has been measured by a closed fist,
even you, my friend,
I have come to know even you by this, my foreclosing hand,
palm, numb, bruised,
overwrought with feeling,
how can I discern you by this hand if not to grasp you firmly?
learning your form by its sharp pressure on my insensible flesh,
and by the faint imprint that you leave behind.
such is the nature of grasping.
I collapse you like that
I obscure you like that,
made absent behind my fingers,
disappeared into the hold of my palm,
I nearly change your form,
I nearly break your body down,
in that suffocating enclosure that I have named understanding,
but you rename trap,
vise,
your words,
gasped,
breathlessly,
scraping up, out,
from an airway
constricted by my holding.
never again can I offer you an open-handed greeting,
that is not haunted by closure.
there must be something else for us,
god, there must be a relation beyond possession,
a repurposing of the hand,
for I cannot risk you any longer, cannot risk us,
I cannot risk what we could be to one another if I allowed you to elude me in your complexity,
If I give up the pursuit of you, motivated by the prospect of capture, grasp,
I must give up this brutal mode of understanding,
so that the hand
might lay down its ways and learn to hold anew.
may the hand relearn the practices of the body,
may the hand relearn the gentle planes of the cheek,
may the hand relearn the rise and recession of the chest,
the shallow cupping of collarbone,
the yielding of teeth and lips to breath,
may I seek you like that?
may I seek you softly,
when next we meet?
