"Doing It (Gender) Justice: Reimagining Language Education Through Trans Knowledges"
Kris Aric Knisely
Associate Professor of French and Intercultural Competence, University of Arizona 

As people who teach, learn, and research language, the time for us to work toward forms of gender justice that honor and revel in the knowledges and linguistic practices of trans people has long since been here and it grows ever-more overdue in the ongoing wake of globalized and localized forms of anti-trans, anti-education, and other oppressive actions (Knisely, 2023; Knisely & Russell, 2024). If we are to move toward gender justice in language education, we need not only increasingly inclusionary pedagogies, materials, research, and languaging, but also to think beyond the confines of inclusionary discourses alone. When we unscript the cisheteronormativities and cislingualism that are engrained in much of our field, we open ourselves up to new ways of thinking about language-as-social-verb, learning as participation in languaging communities, and education as a site for gender justice, among other key concepts (e.g., trans translanguaging, undoing competence). In this session, we will engage with some of the burgeoning research into trans ways of doing and teaching language in order to reimagine what we do as language scholar-educators, deepen our understanding of what it means to work toward gender justice in our field, and, ultimately to “stand in the tensions of our own humanity, our own languaging and gendering, our own doing and undoing, and look through it for what might be our greater potentiality” (Knisely & Russell, 2024, p. 254). Together, we will ask: What will we do to work toward a world where language enriches the livability of all of our lives?

Bio: Dr. Kris Aric Knisely (Ph.D., French and Educational Studies, Emory University) is Associate Professor of French and Intercultural Competence as well as affiliated faculty in both SLAT and TSRC at the University of Arizona. Knisely’s research focuses on the interplay between the social, relational practices of doing language and doing gender, particularly as they relate to language education and to trans linguacultures. Dr. Knisely’s work has appeared in a variety of venues including Contemporary French Civilization, CFC Intersections, Critical Multilingualism Studies, Foreign Language Annals, The French Review, Gender and Language, and The Modern Language Journal, among others. Knisely is also co-editor (with Eric Russel, UC-Davis) of Redoing linguistic worlds: Unmaking gender binaries, remaking gender pluralities (Multilingual Matters). 

This event will be held in person in G25 Stimson and will also be streamed live over Zoom (registration required). Join us at the LRC or on Zoom. 

The event is free and open to the public.