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'New Brunswick or Queer': Building Queer Joy through Participatory Collage-Making with 2SLGBTQIA + Youth in New Brunswick, Canada

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Title: 'New Brunswick or Queer': Building Queer Joy through Participatory Collage-Making with 2SLGBTQIA + Youth in New Brunswick, Canada
Language: English
Authors: Melissa Keehn, Casey Burkholder (ORCID 0000-0003-3979-7021)
Source: Gender and Education. 2025 37(5):543-561.
Availability: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
Peer Reviewed: Y
Page Count: 19
Publication Date: 2025
Document Type: Journal Articles
Reports - Research
Education Level: High Schools
Secondary Education
Descriptors: LGBTQ People, Transgender People, High School Students, Workshops, Minority Group Students, Student Experience, Coping, Social Bias, Foreign Countries, Psychological Patterns, Art Activities
Geographic Terms: Canada
DOI: 10.1080/09540253.2025.2506362
ISSN: 0954-0253
1360-0516
Abstract: Amid ongoing debates on the rights of queer and trans youth across North America, this study explores novel support approaches within one Canadian province's schools. Amendments to New Brunswick's Policy 713 in 2023, the 2SLGBTQIA + school inclusion policy, requiring parental consent for youth' chosen names and pronouns, stirred controversy across Canada. Additionally, a ban on third-party sexual health information in schools brought forth by the previous Conservative government has heightened educational tensions, and inspired antiqueer and antitrans policy making across Canada (see Moe 2023; Smith 2024). This inquiry draws from four participatory collage-making workshops held in the fall of 2023 across New Brunswick with 180 young people, from grades 9-12. Using participatory visual methods that centred creative expression and resistance, the workshops aimed to amplify queer and trans youth voices about their school experiences. Participants responded to prompts that asked them to create collages on the themes of queer and trans joy in schools, exploring current expressions and future possibilities amid educational and political challenges. Through collaging, a participatory visual research method, the study explores how youth navigate and express joy amidst growing hostilities in their educational environments.
Abstractor: As Provided
Entry Date: 2025
Accession Number: EJ1488281
Database: ERIC
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  Value: <anid>AN0186130425;gae01jul.25;2025Jun26.02:19;v2.2.500</anid> <title id="AN0186130425-1">'New Brunswick or queer': building queer joy through participatory collage-making with 2SLGBTQIA + youth in New Brunswick, Canada </title> <p>Amid ongoing debates on the rights of queer and trans youth across North America, this study explores novel support approaches within one Canadian province's schools. Amendments to New Brunswick's Policy 713 in 2023, the 2SLGBTQIA + school inclusion policy, requiring parental consent for youth' chosen names and pronouns, stirred controversy across Canada. Additionally, a ban on third-party sexual health information in schools brought forth by the previous Conservative government has heightened educational tensions, and inspired antiqueer and antitrans policy making across Canada (see Moe 2023; Smith 2024). This inquiry draws from four participatory collage-making workshops held in the fall of 2023 across New Brunswick with 180 young people, from grades 9-12. Using participatory visual methods that centred creative expression and resistance, the workshops aimed to amplify queer and trans youth voices about their school experiences. Participants responded to prompts that asked them to create collages on the themes of queer and trans joy in schools, exploring current expressions and future possibilities amid educational and political challenges. Through collaging, a participatory visual research method, the study explores how youth navigate and express joy amidst growing hostilities in their educational environments.</p> <p>Keywords: 2SLGBTQ+; collage; New Brunswick; queer joy; youth</p> <hd id="AN0186130425-2">Introduction</hd> <p>It usually goes something like this: We walk into a high school, or public library, carrying overflowing boxes and giant IKEA bags full of art supplies. We are always too noisy and we always drop something. We sign in at the office or front desk. Someone meets us and takes us to a space: maybe the library, maybe a classroom, maybe a smaller meeting room off of the cafeteria. We turn on Chappell Roan or MUNA, move the desks and chairs around, organize our supplies, and we begin transforming the space. The youth arrive and the queering and artmaking begins: often messy, sometimes chaotic, and always a practice in queer joy.</p> <p>This kind of work that we do with queer and trans youth in New Brunswick, in Atlantic Canada, has been unfolding during a time when the rights and lives of queer and trans youth in this province are up for public debate. The amendments to the province's 2SLGBTQIA + school inclusion policy (Policy 713) by the former provincial Conservative government instigated a wave of moral panic about the place of sex, sexuality, and gender in schools (Silberman [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref1">46</reflink>]). The amendments to Policy 713 took hold in September 2023, requiring schools and teachers to seek parental permission before using the names and pronouns of youth under age 16 (Leblanc-Haley [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref2">25</reflink>]).</p> <p>We begin this inquiry by explicitly positioning ourselves like we always do in our youth-based workshops, because we feel it important that young queer and trans people be in community with an intergenerational network of queer folks working, thriving, and living. As Casey often articulates in her classes with pre-service teachers, she wishes she had met more queer educators when she was a young person. We are two white educational researchers – Casey is a white cis, bisexual university professor and Melissa is a white cis lesbian faculty lecturer. In our work together, we draw on the affordances of queer joy alongside queer and trans youth because we believe they have something to offer, something else to say, about antiqueer and anti-trans conditions in New Brunswick, Canada – something that exceeds the then-government's queer panics, and is rooted in resistance.</p> <p>Between October 2023 and November 2023, we engaged 180, mostly white, young people (in grades 9-12) in four separate participatory collage-making workshops in schools after instructional hours and in a community centre across New Brunswick. Using participatory visual methodologies (Mitchell, De Lange, and Moletsane [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref3">29</reflink>]) and a framework of queer joy (Duran and Coloma [<reflink idref="bib18" id="ref4">18</reflink>]; Burkholder et al. [<reflink idref="bib13" id="ref5">13</reflink>]), we prompted youth participants to think about queer and trans joy in schooling spaces and asked them: What do you want to say about queer and trans joy in schools? What does this joy look like now and what might queer joy look like in the future? The four workshops were part of a broader SSHRC-funded study called <emph>Pride/Swell+</emph>: an intergenerational (age 14-50+) art activism and archiving project that brings together queer and trans children, youth, adults, and elders from across Atlantic Canada to engage in art and media production. As we look back on these workshops, our inquiry is guided by the following questions: How do queer and trans youth mobilize queer joy during escalating educational and political hostilities? And what can collaging – as an art practice and participatory visual research method – teach us about queer joy?</p> <p>Queer joy is a resistive strategy significantly influenced by queer of colour joy (Tristano [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref6">49</reflink>]) and Black joy (Michell 2022) that gestures away from the deficit – the suffering queer – and toward the joyful and complex as an act of refusal (Wright [<reflink idref="bib52" id="ref7">52</reflink>]). By imagining queer joy in this way – productive, radical, and powerful, even during moments of devastation – we believe it can offer the chance to address oppressive, queerphobic and transphobic conditions and policymaking in schools. We want to think about the ways in which young people in our workshops mobilized joy through their collective artmaking – addressing a gap in the literature that exists between the spaces queer and trans youth communities create for themselves and the national and provincial reports and discourse which position 2SLGBTQIA + schooling experiences solely through deficit orientations (see: NBSWES [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref8">33</reflink>]; Peter, Campbell, and Taylor [<reflink idref="bib36" id="ref9">36</reflink>]). Importantly, while queer joy circulated in different ways in the workshops, we acknowledge its complications: some youth were unable to access joy, some teachers or adults shifted how it circulated the space, and we also did not witness expressions of Black joy (Mitchell [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref10">28</reflink>]) or queer of colour joy (Tristano [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref11">49</reflink>]) in these mainly white spaces, speaking to a limitation of this work.</p> <hd id="AN0186130425-3">Queer joy during dark times</hd> <p>Queer joy is an emerging theoretical framework and pedagogy (Wright and Burkholder [<reflink idref="bib53" id="ref12">53</reflink>]) that centres the pleasures, worldmaking, joy, and other affective emotions that are an ordinary part of queer cultures, identities, and histories, and resists deficit narratives (Shuster and Westbrook [<reflink idref="bib45" id="ref13">45</reflink>]). Muñoz ([<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref14">32</reflink>]: 112) notes that 'heteronormative culture makes queers think that both the past and the future do not belong to them. All we are allowed to imagine is barely surviving the present.' We draw on Muñoz ([<reflink idref="bib32" id="ref15">32</reflink>]) to position queer joy as a response to homogenizing images of queer anger, grief, 'barely surviving,' and trauma. Queer joy allows queer and trans people to articulate a circulating range of feelings tethered to things like queer intimacy, queer love, trans love, self-love, failure, and queer labour. While social and political oppressions and hardships are tethered to queer communities and cultures, our choice to affirm and articulate joy in the face of inhospitable conditions has the potential to be part of, or be itself, an expression of liberation (see also, Quinlivan [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref16">39</reflink>]).</p> <p>Importantly, our conceptualization of queer joy draws on the theorizing of Black queer joy (Mitchell [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref17">28</reflink>]) and queer of colour joy (Tristano [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref18">49</reflink>]). While we are deeply indebted to their foundational work, we find ourselves working and making art with mostly white queer and trans youth. But we highlight the importance for visual expressions of queer of colour joy and Black queer joy in the context of New Brunswick's homonormative (Duggan [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref19">17</reflink>]) and white settler colonial schools and queer organizing spaces (Burkholder [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref20">9</reflink>]).</p> <p>We work from Mitchell's (2022) position that Black queer joy serves as an expression of joying heteronormative and white colonial publics, offering a space for sustenance and liberation in the face of queer and racial battle fatigue. We are inspired here to locate queer joy as something that can radiate <emph>beyond</emph> queer communities, and be practiced in institutionally unqueer spaces like New Brunswick's schools (while recognizing that these spaces can also be queered by the presence of 2SLGBTQIA + teachers and youth!). We are also drawn to the possibility of queer joy being an expression of liberation and resistance to systemic violence: Tristano ([<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref21">49</reflink>]) writes alongside Tuck and Yang ([<reflink idref="bib50" id="ref22">50</reflink>]: 277) to highlight how colonial logic ignores queer of colour 'community building, constellations of care, and splendid moments of joy' – conditioning marginalized communities into believing that their bodies are only capable of carrying trauma and grief. Queer of colour joy, Tristano ([<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref23">49</reflink>]) argues, offers its own kind of resistance to these pain narratives, and emerges through experiences of queer of colour mutual aid, pleasure, and shared intimacy. We draw on Tristano ([<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref24">49</reflink>]) theorizing to position queer joy in a similar way: An expression of queer pleasure and resistance to the white settler colonial logics and cis heteronormativity that impact all bodies, genders, and sexualities in New Brunswick public schools.</p> <p>We also look back to important scholarship on queer studies in education as we seek to articulate what queer joy offers as a theoretical framework. In the early 2000s, Kumashiro ([<reflink idref="bib24" id="ref25">24</reflink>]) brought queer desirability into conversation with anti-oppressive education in his work with pre-service teachers – an important foundation for queer joy within education. Earlier, Epstein and Sears ([<reflink idref="bib19" id="ref26">19</reflink>]) offered that queer pedagogy is an important interjection that challenges hegemonic understandings of gender and sexuality – so too did Britzman ([<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref27">7</reflink>]) as she challenged educators to rethink the ways that queerness has been conceptualized, and addressed in schools:</p> <p>The case of how gay and lesbian studies has been treated in a sentimental education that attempts to be anti-homophobic serves as my example of where arguments for inclusion produce the very exclusions they are meant to cure. Part of the tension is that in discourses of inclusion, there tend to be only two pedagogical strategies: provisions of information and techniques for attitudinal change. These two strategies are emblematic of the limitations produced when subjects are reduced to the problem of remedying homophobia, a conceptualization that stalls within a humanist psychological discourse of individual fear of homosexuality as abject contagion and shuts out an examination of how the very term homophobia as a discourse centers heterosexuality as the normal. (<reflink idref="bib158" id="ref28">158</reflink>)</p> <p>Our work builds from Britzman's interjection (and also the important work of McRuer [<reflink idref="bib27" id="ref29">27</reflink>]; Quinlivan [<reflink idref="bib39" id="ref30">39</reflink>]), to disrupt the ways in which queerness has been narrativized and depicted in curriculum and pedagogy in schools. Our work together, centreing queer joy, is an act of refusal.</p> <p>Inspired by Britzman's foundational work, we want to position queer joy as a project of repair and an expression of liberation (Tristano [<reflink idref="bib49" id="ref31">49</reflink>]) and pleasure during these dark times – something worth sharing to broader publics. In a world that is so incessantly inhospitable, queer joy becomes an imaginative exercise that can invoke alternative realities and timelines into the thinkable, and thus possible.</p> <hd id="AN0186130425-4">The Pride/Swell + project</hd> <p>The four workshops described in this work are part of a broader SSHRC-funded participatory visual research study called Pride/Swell +.[<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref32">1</reflink>] Pride/Swell + is a participatory art activism and archiving project that seeks to support and resource an intergenerational collective of queer and trans folks from across Atlantic Canada – New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland – through DIY artmaking, dialogue, and queer archiving. Casey (the PI of the project) began the project during the 2020 lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic, sending monthly art supplies with themed prompts via mail to 50 participants (between July 2020 and July 2021). Since 2020, over 300 participants and members of the research team have attended four in-person meet-ups in Fredericton, New Brunswick, and dozens of workshops held in art galleries, parks, community centres, youth centres, and public libraries across Atlantic Canada (see: Burkholder et al. [<reflink idref="bib14" id="ref33">14</reflink>]).</p> <p>The majority of Pride/Swell + workshops and meetups are located outside of schooling systems because of our experiences of the general antiqueer practices in schools and their tokenistic attempts at providing queer and joyful spaces for 2SLGBTQIA + youth (Burkholder, Hamill, and Thorpe [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref34">10</reflink>]). But given rising transphobia and queerphobia across Canada, and within New Brunswick at the time of our writing (Poitras [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref35">37</reflink>]), we see value in providing intentional spaces where queer and trans youth can talk about local schooling issues, interact with the Pride/Swell + archive (<ulink href="http://www.prideswell.com">www.prideswell.com</ulink>), and make art together to teach peers and teachers about queer cultures, everyday experiences, and (of course!) queer joy.</p> <hd id="AN0186130425-5">New Brunswick or queer?</hd> <p>When we began writing this article in June 2024, the New Brunswick Conservative government had defunded critical training for teachers on gender and sexuality diversity, scaled back comprehensive sexuality education across the province, and created a situation where teachers must misgender youth under age 16 without parental consent (Poitras [<reflink idref="bib37" id="ref36">37</reflink>]). These transphobic tactics by the then-provincial government are part of the broader anti-gender ideology movement unfolding across North America, where US State Legislatures have introduced 471 pieces of anti-trans and anti queer legislation (ACLU [<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref37">1</reflink>]) and where several Conservative provincial governments across Canada have banned gender-affirming surgeries for youth, limited youth access to puberty blockers and hormone therapy, and reinforced school-based transphobia through policy (Alphonso [<reflink idref="bib4" id="ref38">4</reflink>]; Bellefontaine [<reflink idref="bib5" id="ref39">5</reflink>]). Recently, we have seen an expansion of transphobic legislation within the US, as President Trump's 2025 Executive Order that sought to pose limits on trans and nonbinary gender identities (Trump 2025). In their book on the history and philosophy of sex education in the US, Bialystok and Anderson ([<reflink idref="bib6" id="ref40">6</reflink>]: 109, 92) suggest that 'rather than attempt to purify the curriculum of the controversy that surrounds it,' educators might instead highlight an ethics-forward sex education that promotes values like 'self-care, truth-telling and mutuality.' We seek to implement similar practices – as well as community care, femme labour, strategies of repair, and joy – in our youth-based workshops and in our own teaching with pre-service teachers (Burkholder and Keehn [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref41">11</reflink>]).</p> <p>Originally, Policy 713 was enacted in 2020 by New Brunswick's Department of Education to set the minimum standards for schools to create safer and affirming environments for 2SLGBTQIA + youth, workers, teachers, and their families (Policy 713, [<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref42">38</reflink>]/[<reflink idref="bib38" id="ref43">38</reflink>]). Following then-Conservative Premier Blaine Higgs' decision to restrict pronoun and name usage in classrooms, queer and trans children and youth under 16 needed to obtain permission from their families before schools can use their names and pronouns (Leblanc-Haley [<reflink idref="bib25" id="ref44">25</reflink>]). Queer and trans youth face institutional queerphobic and transphobic violence in New Brunswick schools (Burkholder [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref45">9</reflink>]). For example, in the 2023–2024 New Brunswick Student Wellness and Education Survey, which surveyed over 50,000 youth between grades 4-12, 12.7% of '2SLGBTQIA + status' youth between grades 6–12 reported experiencing physical assault within a 2-month time period (NBSWES [<reflink idref="bib33" id="ref46">33</reflink>]). Gender and sexually diverse identities and communities are continuously downplayed across sexuality education classrooms (Burkholder and Keehn [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref47">12</reflink>]; [<reflink idref="bib11" id="ref48">11</reflink>]), erased from history in social studies (Burkholder [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref49">9</reflink>]), policed through dress codes and gendered bathrooms (Keehn [<reflink idref="bib22" id="ref50">22</reflink>]), and criminalized through transphobic policy (Mundie [<reflink idref="bib31" id="ref51">31</reflink>]). We work from the position that queer and trans youth can teach us so much about how they sustain themselves and practice joy within these experiences of marginalization, and that teachers can learn from these teachings.</p> <hd id="AN0186130425-6">Collage as queer method</hd> <p>Participatory visual research centres the co-production of visual texts with participants in response to a particular prompt (Mitchell, De Lange, and Moletsane [<reflink idref="bib29" id="ref52">29</reflink>]), and we engage in do-it-yourself (DIY) visual methods with participants – like zine making (Yeung [<reflink idref="bib54" id="ref53">54</reflink>]), drawing (Brown et al. [<reflink idref="bib8" id="ref54">8</reflink>]), or collaging (de Rijke [<reflink idref="bib16" id="ref55">16</reflink>]) – to co-construct knowledge about communities, local politics, experiences, and broader social worlds (see also Renold [<reflink idref="bib41" id="ref56">41</reflink>]). As Kathleen Quinlivan states ([<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref57">40</reflink>]), 'Perhaps because researching queerly in schools puts researchers inevitably in such uncomfortable places, they are well placed to develop methodological approaches that explore the uncomfortable possibility of knowing the unexpected?' (<reflink idref="bib58" id="ref58">58</reflink>). We find this provocation particularly suitable in our own context, where the education system tries to silence queer and trans youth voices, cultures, and identities through curricular erasures and entrenching transphobic violence through policy (Burkholder [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref59">9</reflink>]).</p> <p>Across all four workshops, we invited the young people to articulate and express queer joy through the production of collages. Collages are cut-and-pasted visuals where makers rework and piece together images using repurposed and re/upcycled texts. Importantly in our work, the undertaking of collage-making is a critical part of the research process, where knowledge is developed during the very process of creating the collages themselves (Højring and Bech-Danielsen [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref60">20</reflink>]). In this way, our analysis of how and where queer joy exists among queer and trans young people is grounded not only in the collages, but in what we observe and notice during the workshops – youth voice, concern, critical inquiry, community-building, agency, and joy become centred in the artmaking. Butler-Kisber and Poldma ([<reflink idref="bib15" id="ref61">15</reflink>]: 3) writes that 'collage forces us to think and work in a non-linear way in a jumble or a network' – <emph>how queer!</emph> – and so we are motivated to position collaging as queer praxis (Kangas et al. [<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref62">21</reflink>]): It has a distinctly DIY ethos that functions as a 'collective resistance to commodified culture. It favours alternative spaces ... where artistic creativity, community building, politics and identity work can take place' (Sharp and Nilan [<reflink idref="bib44" id="ref63">44</reflink>]: 72). In our four workshops together, we collaborate with youth to queer imagery through the example of queer joy, and in return, they illustrate the ways in which their worldmaking and agency circulate schooling systems – feeling and expressing joy (or not) in all its magnitude. We also work alongside participants to engage in a visual analysis of the works they produce (Rose [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref64">43</reflink>]), by engaging them in group conversations and gallery walks, where they annotate artworks with their understanding of what is being said and what is being left out.</p> <hd id="AN0186130425-7">Setting up the workshops, queerly</hd> <p>The workshops took place in three separate schools (outside of instructional hours) and one community centre in New Brunswick. In October 2023, we facilitated a collage-making workshop with 7 high school youth at a rural high school just outside the city of Fredericton. Then, again in October 2023, we facilitated a collage-making workshop with 70 queer and trans youth at a high school in the city of Saint John, where a GSA student conference was taking place with over 300 youth and teachers in attendance. We also facilitated a collage-making workshop with 50 Francophone youth from GSAs across the province at a community school in Fredericton during a weekend in November 2023. After, in December 2023, we were invited to facilitate a collage-making workshop with 50 queer and trans youth at a trans youth student conference at a community centre in the town of Riverview. Importantly, while our workshops were facilitated in school buildings, they were not done in partnership with schools, districts, or workers.</p> <p>Each of the workshops ran between 40 and 60 minutes. At the locations, we arrived early to set up the space: We displayed stacks of magazines, maps, photographs, sparkly washi tape, scissors, glue, glitter, markers, and old books around the room, turned on music, rearranged the seating to disrupt any kind of conventional classroom organization, laid out a few snacks, and displayed the existing Pride/Swell + archive on the walls (see more, here: https://visit.virtualartgallery.com/sanctuaryhowwelive/). After the youth arrived, we introduced ourselves and the Pride/Swell + project, sought their consent to participate in collage production, and then we invited them to make collages with us by prompting them with the questions: 'What do you want to say about queer and trans joy in schools? What does this joy look like now and what might queer joy look like in the future? What are the barriers to queer joy in your schools?' We also sat down and made collages ourselves, while chatting with workshop participants. Collage emerges here as a critical and accessible response to this localized violence, in that it offers the means to highlight youth voice and critical inquiry, who are positioned at the centre of the Policy 713 amendments but have been left out of any kind of official decision-making process. Importantly, we gave the youth minimal directions and guidelines, with the hope that they would teach us about joy in their own ways through the collage-making process, situated in a particular moment of time, place, and politics. After the collages were finished, we invited them to share their productions to the larger group and asked for their consent to take field notes and photographs of their work to display on social media and on the Pride/Swell + project website.</p> <p>After the Riverview workshop, we recorded a conversation between us and reflected on the student conversations and dialogue that came up during the artmaking. We later transcribed these recordings, part of which make up some of the data in this paper. Then, we analyzed the collages by thinking alongside Rose ([<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref65">43</reflink>]), who offers guidelines for capturing the meanings that art-makers assign to visual images and texts. Importantly, Rose ([<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref66">43</reflink>]) discusses how visual data is created within a specific set of circumstances – and when interpreting an image, researchers should consider how the visual text was created, which materials were used in the process, and the social, political, institutional conditions that inform the image at the time of its making. We kept these considerations at the fore as we browsed the visual texts, looking for common themes and interpretations of queer joy, recognizing that the youth may or may not directly address the recent Policy 713 amendments (as we ourselves did not explicitly mention the policy revisions in setting up the workshop space). During our analysis, we worked from Kangas et al. ([<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref67">21</reflink>], 360) who note that 'collaging is about working with gaps, overlaps, holes, absences and silences – or lapses and excesses of meaning – that queering also aims to bring to the fore.' We looked for the ways the young people used artmaking to fill in the local silences around school-based queerphobia and gender-based violence, including the silences of educational leaders in the province who chose to remain publicly silent in the wake of the Policy 713 amendments.</p> <hd id="AN0186130425-8">Findings</hd> <p>Through a visual analysis (Rose [<reflink idref="bib43" id="ref68">43</reflink>]) of the youths artmaking, an analysis of the collage-making workshops themselves (Højring and Bech-Danielsen [<reflink idref="bib20" id="ref69">20</reflink>]), and our recorded fieldnotes, two key findings emerged: (<reflink idref="bib1" id="ref70">1</reflink>) Queer youth in New Brunswick facilitate the expression of queer joy in complex ways; and (<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref71">2</reflink>) teachers shift a space and impact how queer joy is articulated in school-based contexts. We describe each of these findings below.</p> <hd id="AN0186130425-9">Learning about joy through collaborative artmaking</hd> <p>Queer joy is a project of world making (finding joy amidst policy and discursive and embodied violence) and of remaking the world (resisting dominant constructions of the at risk and long suffering queer). At each of the four workshops, we observed the youth queering and joying the collage materials to show us where queer and trans joy exists in their schools. The majority of the printed texts and magazines we use in the workshops are published between the 1940s-1980s and depict deeply heteronormative imagery of nuclear families, normative white and able bodies, and relationships, which we always attempt to queer and remix together with participants as a gesture toward queer joy. Through the processes of rearranging, combining, and piecing together the materials in response to our prompts, the youth layered the problematic and heteronormative images into scenes for which they were not originally intended, to suggest queerness and gesture toward queer joy as a reparative strategy. For instance, one student from the rural GSA workshop cut out images of stereotypically normative white, heterosexual, and cisgender women and turned them into queer femmes by using the caption 'These guys kiss'; while another student at the Francophone workshop glued several humans onto their composition, transforming straight women into social lesbians with the caption, 'Lesbians Go Wild in Lesbos!' (see Figure 1). In showing how queer joy can exist in schools (through queer physical intimacy and pleasure), both these collages trouble the normative assumption that queerness in school settings is solely an experience of victimization and hardship. Experiencing pleasure and having intimacy, as the youth demonstrate, is an important function of queer joy in schools.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 1. Youth created 'These Guys Kiss' and 'Lesbians go Wild' collages.</p> <p>The youth also used the collage materials to speak back to the gender-based violence in their schools, including speaking directly out against the Policy 713 amendments. Contrary to many mainstream schooling narratives about queer victimization, we found powerful narratives attesting to the presence of queer joy as resistance, reflecting scholarship on queer joy conducted elsewhere (Nicholas, Sullivan, and Callahan [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref72">34</reflink>]). One student who attended both the Riverview and Saint John workshops spoke at length about their frustration at the now transphobic Policy 713 – and in response, they collaged together a piece using local newspapers and called out the New Brunswick government with the caption 'This Needs to Stop' (see Figure 2). Another student at the Riverview workshop cut out different kinds of cisgender bodies and heads and rearranged them to play with gender identity and expression in more expansive ways, titling their collage 'Trans Joy is Resistance' (see also Figure 2).</p> <p>Graph: Figure 2. Student-produced 'This Needs to Stop' and 'Trans Joy is Resistance' collages.</p> <p>We imagine these angry and playful collages in direct response to the transphobic rhetoric coming from the then-New Brunswick Premier, who declared in a media interview in December 2023: 'No one is denying, you know, gender diversity is real. But we need to figure out how to <emph>manage it</emph>' [emphasis our own] (Alam [<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref73">2</reflink>], para. 5). Many gender diverse youth at our workshops resisted his offer of being managed in this way, and brought joy into the workshop space and their collage-making to interrogate the amended Policy 713 and to educational logic trying to minimize queerness or make it not a part of childhood.</p> <p>Some youth collaged about the production of queer joy being situated in spaces free of gender-based violence and discrimination. For instance, one student pasted images of people who are joyful in their composition under the caption, 'When the 14 year old boy doesn't call me a slur!!' (see Figure 3). In order for queer joy to circulate schools, the youth tell us that they need to be and feel liberated from homophobic and transphobic violence. Interestingly, while GSAs and 'safe space' programming are often used in New Brunswick schools to address this violence (GNB/LGBTQ Resource n.d.), the youth at our workshops did not speak about or champion these spaces in their dialogue or collages (even though many of them were part of active GSA groups). Sometimes, GSAs can be tokenistic school-based practices (see also Britzman [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref74">7</reflink>]; Quinlivan [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref75">40</reflink>]), where youth are expected to seek inclusion in marginal spaces maintained by broader violence and discrimination (Burkholder, Hamill, and Thorpe [<reflink idref="bib10" id="ref76">10</reflink>]). And while we recognize that spaces like GSAs can be sources of queer joy for some youth, we did not hear or see what this looks like across our four workshops.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 3. Student-produced collage from the Saint John workshop.</p> <p>In each of these examples, the youth worked to both queer the heteronormative collage material (joyfully!), while also teaching us where and how queer joy exists in New Brunswick schools, like in their queer intimacies and in their resistance to gender-based violence. Importantly, some youth told us that schools need to be sites where they could feel safe and experience belonging in order to practice joy.</p> <p>To that end, we are cognizant that queer joy is not always accessible, that people can feel it in different ways, and that it sometimes fails in queer collectives (Nicholas, Sullivan, and Callahan [<reflink idref="bib34" id="ref77">34</reflink>]). While many of the youth at the workshops played with joy through collage-making, others were notably turned off by the activity and discussed how the amendments to Policy 713 pushed them back into the metaphorical closet. They expressed fear at the dangerous circumstances Premier Higgs had created in their schools, and acknowledged that they were unable to feel joy during that particular moment in time, and instead negotiated with concern, grief, ambivalence, and sorrow instead, which came out in their collage-making (Figure 4).</p> <p>Graph: Figure 4. A student's 'I Hate it When it Rains' Collage from the Riverview workshop.</p> <p>Our findings reaffirm the importance of centreing complex narratives of joy (Morris, Greteman, and Weststrate [<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref78">30</reflink>]). The youth in our workshops taught us that in taking up queer joy as a theoretical framing in educational research, we need to also account for the fear, concern, and fragmentation they also experience in New Brunswick schools. Queer hardships, the youth articulated, should be considered in conversations of queer joy.</p> <p>Importantly and problematically, many of the collage materials we used during these workshops with youth only featured whiteness and settler bodies in the images. At a recent Pride/Swell + workshop at a queer nightclub in Fredericton in February 2024, a Black participant commented that they did not see themselves represented in the visual texts or in Pride/Swell+'s archive more generally. In response, we sought a diverse selection of print materials that centeredBlack folks and people of Color at the Philly AIDS Thrift Store which we visited while attending the American Educational Research Association in April 2024. Moving forward, we continue to seek out ways to facilitate more liberatory spaces of collage-making and dialogue, including being mindful of the homonormative (Duggan [<reflink idref="bib17" id="ref79">17</reflink>]) and white settler logics that existed in most of our New Brunswick workshops.</p> <hd id="AN0186130425-10">Teachers and researchers shifting the space</hd> <p>One of the unanticipated findings from our workshops was how much teachers shifted the space through their embodied power relations. We argue alongside Kangas et al. ([<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref80">21</reflink>]) that spatial politics, particularly concerning the power relations of teachers, impacts practices of queer joy in schooling contexts. At the same time, we were also implicated in the power structures operating in and around the workshops (Allan [<reflink idref="bib3" id="ref81">3</reflink>]): Power flowed through our own adult logics and gaze, our unwitting cues about our own politics, and the fact that we positioned ourselves as researchers in the workspace. And we offer this provocation in response: If New Brunswick teachers are interested in seeking ways to help young people access queer joy in their classrooms in the midst of educational violence, we propose that they set up space for youth to form communities outside of teacher surveillance, and set up opportunities for them to talk about topics outside of the formal curriculum (which can be oppressive and not queer, see: Burkholder [<reflink idref="bib9" id="ref82">9</reflink>]) and to engage with the joys of gender and sexuality as it relates to them.</p> <p>We suggest that teacher discomfort (Burkholder and Keehn [<reflink idref="bib12" id="ref83">12</reflink>]) has implications for how queer joy exists and is noticed in classrooms and schools. Across all four workshops, the youth made temporary queer communities as they made things together. After settling in, some of them quickly rearranged themselves around the room to sit with friends. While the majority of the youth worked on creating collages in response to our prompts, several others took the opportunity to chat or browse through the collage materials, and some left the workshop and didn't return. We welcome this kind of non-participation in our workshops (Switzer et al. [<reflink idref="bib47" id="ref84">47</reflink>]), where we see the youth's choice to forgo artmaking as an expression of autonomous and agentic action (Weaver et al. [<reflink idref="bib51" id="ref85">51</reflink>]) and an act of resistance to our own adult presence. In this way, we see queer joy forged through how the youth were joyfully queering (Mitchell [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref86">28</reflink>]) the space for themselves.</p> <p>At the Saint John workshop, 40 youth who were part of the larger GSA conference began showing up to our space to meet with friends or make collages – and we responded by creating new workstations on the fly, resourcing chairs from other rooms, and making room for everyone who showed up unexpectedly. The workshop was busy and crowded, and the collage materials we had placed on the tables quickly became a heaping and chaotic mess of paper scraps, discarded materials, and to our dismay, glitter glue (see Figure 5). It took us almost 90 minutes to clean up. A total mess.[<reflink idref="bib2" id="ref87">2</reflink>] In this example, we see queer joy forming amongst the youth, as they created spaces of community for each other, turning the library into a site of care, repair, and mutual aid.</p> <p>Graph: Figure 5. Making a mess with queer youth at our Saint John workshop.</p> <p>We argue that the four workshop spaces unfolded in the way that they did – resistive, queer, joyful, complex – because we try to disrupt the over-directing and surveillance that often happens in classrooms through our facilitation praxis (see also Quinlivan [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref88">40</reflink>]). We do this, for instance, by sitting away from the young people in the workshop, trying not to move into their space, and making our own collages to shift the power relations we ourselves bring into the space as researchers and educators (see Figure 5). For example, Casey's collage, which she made at the Riverview workshop, offers a tongue-in-cheek reference to then-Premier Higgs' narrative about queer youth in the province, where you supposedly can't be queer in New Brunswick until you are 16 years old (serving as inspiration for our article's title) (Figure 6).</p> <p>Graph: Figure 6. Casey's 'New Brunswick or Queer' Collage from the Riverview workshop.</p> <p>Our decision to perform queer labour alongside the youth follows Parker's ([<reflink idref="bib35" id="ref89">35</reflink>]) findings, which suggests that working together within a queer collective on mundane tasks (in our case, collaging) facilitates the circulation of queer joy. In working together, we play music, set up cool vintage materials, give people space to chat together and make decisions with the folks around them, and do not set up any explicit rules. In response, the way the youth set up their own work space often exists in tension with the normative practices of schooling – they said 'fuck' and 'Jesus' alot, wore fishnets and crop tops and flagged themselves, they sat on each others' laps, chatted openly about their queerness, played on their phones, and created anti-school messaging in their collages. This too, we argue, is a kind of resistive queer joy in practice. And the art that many of the youth made, including our own collages, hardly ever followed the prompts. As Kangas et al. ([<reflink idref="bib21" id="ref90">21</reflink>], 361) argue, 'collage[s] are meant to be undisciplined, in a word, queer.' In this way, their collages push against the normative practice of schooling where youth must produce a product that is evaluated against some kind of curricular standard.</p> <p>Noticeably, when some teachers came into the space, they circulated the room and gave minor redirections to the youth. Some teachers would say well-intentioned comments like, 'the students are so brave' or 'it's so nice they have a safe spaces' – mirroring the normative rhetoric of educational inclusion, where historically marginalized are invited to feel included in systems that actively oppress them (Britzman [<reflink idref="bib7" id="ref91">7</reflink>]; Kokozos and Gonzalez [<reflink idref="bib23" id="ref92">23</reflink>]; Quinlivan [<reflink idref="bib40" id="ref93">40</reflink>]). As a former high school teacher herself, Melissa can totally relate to the desire to do and say all these things (circulate! surveil! give formative feedback!). During these moments, we saw a breakdown in the kind of queer joy articulated by the youth – a queer joy made visible through an expression of youth resistance to normative schooling and through worldmaking spaces free of gender-based violence and carceral responses to queer intimacy. The way all of us adults shifted the workshop space, however unintentional, is something worthwhile to think about.</p> <hd id="AN0186130425-11">Discussion and conclusion</hd> <p>And then it usually ends something like this: We put the finishing touches on our collages, say goodbye to the youth, take down the Pride/Swell + archive, and start cleaning up the art supplies, the tables, the glitter (but really, does that ever get cleaned up?). We turn off the music, rearrange the furniture, sign out at the office, and drag our boxes and bags back to the car. We reflect, we laugh, and we gossip about the teenage drama we overheard, the art, the fashion, and the conversations that circulated the workshop space – messy, chaotic, and queered toward joy.</p> <p>Despite the former-Conservative New Brunswick government's attempts at erasing and downplaying queerness, the youth in our workshops showed us that queer joy in schools continues to circulate through acts of resistance, flagging, and world building. We also learned that queer joy can be accessed through artmaking in a queer student collective, as long as space is given for personal and queer expression. Torres ([<reflink idref="bib48" id="ref94">48</reflink>]:, 4) writes that 'in the face of oppression and discrimination, experiencing joy can be a radical act. It can defy the expectations of those who seek to diminish queer existence and can serve as a form of resistance.' The collages and collage-making workshops we analyzed in this paper do just that: The queer joy that youth brought to life in their art-making and in the spaces they created for themselves during the workshops was a form of resistance to the state's repression of queer and trans youth rights.</p> <p>In looking back on our findings, we want to propose that collage-making is particularly suited to facilitating expressions of queer joy in school-based settings (see also Renold and Timperley [<reflink idref="bib42" id="ref95">42</reflink>]). Collages make space for excess – pushing boundaries, playing with scripts, and bringing seemingly opposing elements together to queer and joy normative contexts (Mitchell [<reflink idref="bib28" id="ref96">28</reflink>]). Given minimal rules and guidelines and lots of space for community-building, gossiping, and care, the youth glued, remixed, layered, laughed, destroyed, helped, and glitter bombed their way into queer joy. At the same time, some youth from the workshops had difficulty accessing queer joy, or did not want to experience it. And some' of their joy was impacted by the circulating adults. But their contributions to the queer joy workshops are invaluable, as they showed us that even when we create conditions to foster queer joy – like disrupting power relations, queering the workshop space, providing so much glitter glue, and letting the 'fucks' and 'Jesuses' and queerness flow – that youth bring their own complexities, discomforts, anxieties, and agencies into the space, and that too is a powerful thing. We are gently reminded by Morris, Greteman, and Weststrate ([<reflink idref="bib30" id="ref97">30</reflink>]), who suggest that working within intergenerational queer collectives 'is messy work that requires negotiation, emotional labour, and failure in order to generate new knowledge, relationships, and methods of care for one another within a shared community' (<reflink idref="bib186" id="ref98">186</reflink>). We think about how our own workshops showed us how queer joy is also messy work (quite literally at times), and comes tethered to different ways of knowing and being queer, which we seek to embrace in all its magnitude. At the same time, we recognize that our workshops failed to confront the compulsory homonormativity and white supremacist settler colonialism that circulated the collage materials and discussions. We recognize the need to more intentionally disrupt these problematic practices in future projects, and work toward making anti-racist, art-making spaces (i.e. paying local Indigenous artists to share their creative knowledge with participants, and intentionally seeking a collage materials with images of Indigenous, Black, crip, fat, and people of Color).</p> <p>We remain hopeful that queer and trans youth across the province will, in the words of Halberstam (2011: 110), continue to joy and to 'make a mess, to fuck shit up, to be loud, unruly, impolite' in both their future artmaking and in the spaces and communities that they create for themselves in schools. While media and public discourse presents a troubled image of queer and trans youth in this province (Silberman [<reflink idref="bib46" id="ref99">46</reflink>]) and elsewhere, the youth in our workshops tell us something quite different – and what we found was an overwhelmingly complex and powerful joy rooted in queer youth resistance and worldmaking. As it turns out, you <emph>can</emph> be queer and young <emph>and</emph> joyful in New Brunswick schools – and that, we argue, is a powerful and resistive thing.</p> <hd id="AN0186130425-12">Disclosure statement</hd> <p>No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).</p> <ref id="AN0186130425-13"> <title> Notes </title> <blist> <bibl id="bib1" idref="ref32" type="bt">1</bibl> <bibtext> Pride/Swell+ received ethics in 2022 from [anonymized for peer review]'s Research Ethics Board and is on file as REB-2022-077</bibtext> </blist> <blist> <bibl id="bib2" idref="ref71" type="bt">2</bibl> <bibtext> Here, we experienced a true failure in queer joy. We tried to keep Manalansan's ([26]) suggestion that 'mess, clutter, and muddled entanglements are the "stuff" of queerness' during this moment (p. 94). But it was a lot.</bibtext> </blist> </ref> <ref id="AN0186130425-14"> <title> References </title> <blist> <bibtext> ACLU. 2023. 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In choosing a research path at the intersection of resistance&activism, gender, sexuality, DIY mediamaking, art production and participatory archiving, Casey engages in research for social change through participatory visual approaches to local issues with youth and pre-service teachers.</p> </aug> <nolink nlid="nl1" bibid="bib46" firstref="ref1"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl2" bibid="bib25" firstref="ref2"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl3" bibid="bib29" firstref="ref3"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl4" bibid="bib18" firstref="ref4"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl5" bibid="bib13" firstref="ref5"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl6" bibid="bib49" firstref="ref6"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl7" bibid="bib52" firstref="ref7"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl8" bibid="bib33" firstref="ref8"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl9" bibid="bib36" firstref="ref9"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl10" bibid="bib28" firstref="ref10"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl11" bibid="bib53" firstref="ref12"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl12" bibid="bib45" firstref="ref13"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl13" bibid="bib32" firstref="ref14"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl14" bibid="bib39" firstref="ref16"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl15" bibid="bib17" firstref="ref19"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl16" bibid="bib50" firstref="ref22"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl17" bibid="bib24" firstref="ref25"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl18" bibid="bib19" firstref="ref26"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl19" bibid="bib158" firstref="ref28"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl20" bibid="bib27" firstref="ref29"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl21" bibid="bib14" firstref="ref33"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl22" bibid="bib10" firstref="ref34"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl23" bibid="bib37" firstref="ref35"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl24" bibid="bib11" firstref="ref41"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl25" bibid="bib38" firstref="ref42"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl26" bibid="bib12" firstref="ref47"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl27" bibid="bib22" firstref="ref50"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl28" bibid="bib31" firstref="ref51"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl29" bibid="bib54" firstref="ref53"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl30" bibid="bib16" firstref="ref55"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl31" bibid="bib41" firstref="ref56"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl32" bibid="bib40" firstref="ref57"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl33" bibid="bib58" firstref="ref58"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl34" bibid="bib20" firstref="ref60"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl35" bibid="bib15" firstref="ref61"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl36" bibid="bib21" firstref="ref62"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl37" bibid="bib44" firstref="ref63"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl38" bibid="bib43" firstref="ref64"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl39" bibid="bib34" firstref="ref72"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl40" bibid="bib30" firstref="ref78"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl41" bibid="bib47" firstref="ref84"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl42" bibid="bib51" firstref="ref85"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl43" bibid="bib35" firstref="ref89"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl44" bibid="bib23" firstref="ref92"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl45" bibid="bib48" firstref="ref94"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl46" bibid="bib42" firstref="ref95"></nolink> <nolink nlid="nl47" bibid="bib186" firstref="ref98"></nolink>
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  Data: 'New Brunswick or Queer': Building Queer Joy through Participatory Collage-Making with 2SLGBTQIA + Youth in New Brunswick, Canada
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  Data: English
– Name: Author
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  Group: Au
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Melissa+Keehn%22">Melissa Keehn</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="AR" term="%22Casey+Burkholder%22">Casey Burkholder</searchLink> (ORCID <externalLink term="https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3979-7021">0000-0003-3979-7021</externalLink>)
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  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="SO" term="%22Gender+and+Education%22"><i>Gender and Education</i></searchLink>. 2025 37(5):543-561.
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  Data: Routledge. Available from: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. 530 Walnut Street Suite 850, Philadelphia, PA 19106. Tel: 800-354-1420; Tel: 215-625-8900; Fax: 215-207-0050; Web site: http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
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  Label: Peer Reviewed
  Group: SrcInfo
  Data: Y
– Name: Pages
  Label: Page Count
  Group: Src
  Data: 19
– Name: DatePubCY
  Label: Publication Date
  Group: Date
  Data: 2025
– Name: TypeDocument
  Label: Document Type
  Group: TypDoc
  Data: Journal Articles<br />Reports - Research
– Name: Audience
  Label: Education Level
  Group: Audnce
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22High+Schools%22">High Schools</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="EL" term="%22Secondary+Education%22">Secondary Education</searchLink>
– Name: Subject
  Label: Descriptors
  Group: Su
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22LGBTQ+People%22">LGBTQ People</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Transgender+People%22">Transgender People</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22High+School+Students%22">High School Students</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Workshops%22">Workshops</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Minority+Group+Students%22">Minority Group Students</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Student+Experience%22">Student Experience</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Coping%22">Coping</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Social+Bias%22">Social Bias</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Foreign+Countries%22">Foreign Countries</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Psychological+Patterns%22">Psychological Patterns</searchLink><br /><searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Art+Activities%22">Art Activities</searchLink>
– Name: Subject
  Label: Geographic Terms
  Group: Su
  Data: <searchLink fieldCode="DE" term="%22Canada%22">Canada</searchLink>
– Name: DOI
  Label: DOI
  Group: ID
  Data: 10.1080/09540253.2025.2506362
– Name: ISSN
  Label: ISSN
  Group: ISSN
  Data: 0954-0253<br />1360-0516
– Name: Abstract
  Label: Abstract
  Group: Ab
  Data: Amid ongoing debates on the rights of queer and trans youth across North America, this study explores novel support approaches within one Canadian province's schools. Amendments to New Brunswick's Policy 713 in 2023, the 2SLGBTQIA + school inclusion policy, requiring parental consent for youth' chosen names and pronouns, stirred controversy across Canada. Additionally, a ban on third-party sexual health information in schools brought forth by the previous Conservative government has heightened educational tensions, and inspired antiqueer and antitrans policy making across Canada (see Moe 2023; Smith 2024). This inquiry draws from four participatory collage-making workshops held in the fall of 2023 across New Brunswick with 180 young people, from grades 9-12. Using participatory visual methods that centred creative expression and resistance, the workshops aimed to amplify queer and trans youth voices about their school experiences. Participants responded to prompts that asked them to create collages on the themes of queer and trans joy in schools, exploring current expressions and future possibilities amid educational and political challenges. Through collaging, a participatory visual research method, the study explores how youth navigate and express joy amidst growing hostilities in their educational environments.
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  Data: 2025
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  Data: EJ1488281
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        Value: 10.1080/09540253.2025.2506362
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      – Text: English
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      Pagination:
        PageCount: 19
        StartPage: 543
    Subjects:
      – SubjectFull: LGBTQ People
        Type: general
      – SubjectFull: Transgender People
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      – SubjectFull: High School Students
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      – SubjectFull: Minority Group Students
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      – TitleFull: 'New Brunswick or Queer': Building Queer Joy through Participatory Collage-Making with 2SLGBTQIA + Youth in New Brunswick, Canada
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