Event Speaker: Dr. Kris Knisely
Language education represents a site for identity (re)construction, mediated through experiences of doing language with others and of learning to do language differently. Through acts such as speaking, reading, and writing, learners must linguistically position themselves and be positioned by others. In this way, language education encourages learners’ reflections on their own identities in relation to the broader social world. Although language learning allows students to (re)imagine, (re)invent, and explore new linguistic and cultural identities, there is often limited attention to trans knowledges and linguistic practices in the curriculum, textbooks, research, and pedagogy of language classrooms, leaving many educators to report feeling particularly un- or under-prepared to engage in gender-just language teaching. In following, this talk will invite reflection on possibilities for remaking, reimagining, and reinventing our language classrooms, materials, and pedagogical approaches to resist normativities and recenter trans knowledges without a hyperfocus on narratives of oppression. Together, we will consider how this ongoing process of queer and trans remaking, reimagining, and reinventing can help us to better serve all students, particularly in terms of increasing classroom inclusiveness, fostering tolerance of ambiguity, and the development of linguistic, symbolic, and intercultural competencies. As we illustrate and exemplify these discussions of gender-just language teaching, we will draw on Kris Knisely’s research with French language learners and nonbinary French languagers. These examples will allow us to collectively consider the unique pedagogical opportunities that teaching trans knowledges and linguistic practices can afford when they are situated in a trans-affirming, gender-just pedagogical framework.
Dr. Kris Aric Knisely is an Assistant 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, and Gender and Language, among others. Knisely is also the co-editor (with Eric Russel, UC-Davis) of Redoing linguistic worlds: Unmaking gender binaries, remaking gender pluralities, to be published by Multilingual Matters in 2023.
This event is co-sponsored by the Department of French & Italian and the Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies.
