Gauging Affective Atmospheres in Language Teacher Education Through Dialogic Queering as Transformative Research

Abstract

Inspired by feminist queering and affect theories to disrupt research norms, we drew on our felt experiences to explore the affective atmosphere of language teacher education. In this experimental work, we harnessed affect and queer theories to contest the gendered, classed, and heteronormative atmosphere of language teacher education using a form of post-qualitative inquiry that we named “dialogic queering”. Given our marginalized backgrounds (queer; academic of colour; working-class female academic), dialogic queering creates spaces to explore difficult but genuine thoughts and feelings while challenging norms entrenched in language teacher education. Underpinned by critical empathy, dialogic queering allowed us to decenter prescriptive methodologies to explore the entanglements of gender diversity, inclusion, and queer theory. This queering embodiment demonstrates how norm-resistant approaches can empower language educators and researchers to disrupt the cis-heteronormative and neoliberal ways of thinking, learning, researching, and writing. We hope that our work can convey to readers the potentiality and power of dialogic queering as a form of post-qualitative inquiry to engender insights about language teacher education and research that surprise, resonate, and transform.

Open-Upings

We would like to open by introducing how our experiences as ‘outsiders’ in academia led us to dialogic queering. Coming from a working-class Irish migrant background, being the first in her family to attend university as well as being a single mother by choice, Maggie (she/her) considers herself an outsider in academia. In Julian’s (they/them) case, they came to Australia a decade ago after many years of living, studying, and working in North America. They are proud to be a transnational language educator of color and the only non-binary teaching academic in their program. ¹

We are both mid-career language educators and researchers Down Under. Over the past decade, we have encountered pervasive narratives which affect who we can be as queer, a woman, working-class, non-White, and nonconforming teacher educators and researchers. Working in increasingly neoliberal workplaces with ever increasing workloads alongside unprecedented levels of surveillance and regulation has taken its toll on teachers’ mental wellbeing (Guerrero‐Nieto & Castañeda‐Trujillo, 2024) and poses an added hardship to those who do not fit with the dominant sociopolitical norms (Moore, 2020).

Over the same period, research into language teacher emotion has proliferated in general (De Costa & Nazari, 2024; McAlinden, 2018; Nelson, 2009, 2016; Trinh & Herrera, 2020). In addition, work that is critical and intersectional is also on the rise (Coda & Moser, 2023; Paiz & Coda, 2021). While it is reassuring to see research exploring teacher emotion from an intersectional and critical perspective, there is much more work to do, particularly work which contests Eurocentric, neoliberal teaching and research practices.

While we have also long witnessed the progressive movement for queering language education, it remains on the periphery. For the past two decades, queer and feminist scholars and educators have shouldered the advocacy work alone. In Australia, Cynthia Nelson (1999, 2006, 2009, 2016) spearheaded this advocacy by examining queer identities in English language teaching (ELT) classrooms and explaining why queer inquiry should be enacted in language education. More recently, work that moves beyond studying LGBTQIA + identities in language education is fundamentally challenging normative ways of thinking, researching, and producing knowledge in academia (see for example, Coda, 2021, 2023; Paiz, 2018, 2019, 2020). Ethan Trinh’s heartfelt pieces (Trinh, 2020; Trinh & Behizadeh, 2023) exemplify how to disrupt research norms in ELT education by centering queering in their work. Our work—standing on the shoulders of these rainbow warriors, and at the periphery with them—blends feminist affect theory with queerness to better understand language teacher education through felt experience (Sedgwick, 2020).

In this article, we explore how ‘Queer Thinking’ (Nelson, 1999, 2006, 2009, 2016) and feminist affect theory (Ahmed, 2014, 2020a; Sedgwick, 2020) can be applied in educational research and practice to disrupt cis/heteropatriarchal norms. Grounded in post-structuralist inquiry, queer thinking challenges us to deconstruct educational norms and move beyond inclusion to question how knowledge, power, and normalcy influence language teacher education (Nelson, 1999, 2006, 2009, 2016). Whilst we are inspired by this provocative school of thought to trouble any form of normativity observed, performed, and reproduced in and outside of language education, we acknowledge our positioning and practices are also shaped by our critical care and advocacy for the minorized students whose diverse gender identities (e.g., non-binary) and intersectionality (e.g., culturally and linguistically marginalized) are often made invisible, ignored, suppressed, and discriminated against. For us, including gender diversity in language education doesn’t necessarily mean simply inserting LGBTQIA + materials and discussions in teaching as tokenistic exercises without challenging the students (and ourselves) to critically examine and trouble gender norms in a respectful and safe space. We argue that it is equally vital to help students discern how, where, and why the power relations come into play between the hegemonic binarism and oppressed gender diversity. Hence, our queer positioning draws upon Mary Armstrong’s (2008) stance of working towards a ‘queer pedagogy of conflicted practice,’ as well as Ashley Moore’s (2020) ‘queer inquiry’ to amplify marginalized voices and increase representations of LGBTQIA + community in reality.

In the following, we first discuss what queering means to us and present the queer and feminist thinkers and theories that inspired our work. We then illustrate the queering inquiry process informed by post-qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre, 2018, 2021, 2024) before sharing a representation of our work. We end by reflecting on and discussing the process and sharing our inklings (findings). As we hold a safe space for each other throughout the process of dialogic queering, we invite readers to hold safe spaces for us and ride with us with an open mind. In solidarity.

What Does Queering Do?

The world is queer: there is nothing more self-evident than the fact that, in the everyday reality of our lived experience, things are ambiguous and the human being is a project in the making. We are caught between being, in a frame of what has been laid out, fixed, embedded, and being activated by an horizon of originality, creative re-invention, radical surprise and wonder.

Baden Offord (2024, p. 1).

To bring folks along to this dialogic queering process, we begin by exploring the meanings of ‘queering’. If we go back to basics, queer refers to ‘differing in some way from what is usual or normal’ and typically has the negative connotation of being ‘odd, strange, weird’ (Sullivan, 2003). With a DNA in post-structural feminism (Sedgwick, 1993, 2020), the noun queer has been ‘queered’ and liberated from its static binary fence. By drawing attention to the uncertainty and instability of identity and social categories, feminist poststructuralism (Ahmed, 2014, 2020a, 2020b; Nelson, 1999, 2006, 2009) enacts queering as an alternative way of doing research and teaching. It stirs the normative pot, asking for silenced voices to be heard (loud and clear), and unapologetically challenges fixed categories that suppress and refuse differences within and across gender, sexuality, language, class, and race (Ahmed, 2014). When used as a verb, queer can be fired up to disrupt the regimes of normalization that produce binary categories (Male/female, Straight/gay, White/colour with initial capitalization added to emphasize the dominant groupings).

Queer resists academic orthodoxies by refusing to be specified; it is a “term that can and should be redeployed, fucked with and used in resistant and transgressive ways” (Browne & Nash, 2016, p. 9). One meaning of queer is that of a critical and political identity. Queer, queering, and queer theory are anti-hetero-cis-normative (Ahmed, 2014, 2020a). Sara Ahmed (2014) proposes that queer can refer to a critical and political identity that challenges all normativities: “Heteronormativity involves the reproduction or transmission of culture through how one lives one’s life in relation to others” (p. 149). Tied to heteronormativity is cisnormativity that reproduces gender binarism (male/female) as another form of hegemonic oppression linked to patriarchal and cis/heteronormative power over diverse gender and sexual identities (Butler, 1990). This is further reinforced through institutional and academic discourses in language teacher education that perpetuate pervasive feeling scripts and affective architectures (Ahmed, 2014; Boler, 2004) that dictate who we can be (Nelson, 1999).

So, how does queering respond? The queer eye is critical and keeps an eye open to the dogmas of normalcy and emboldens us to resist and ‘unthink normalcy’ (Britzman, 2014). Queering comes with a political mission to disrupt neoliberalism, cis/heteronormativity, and White supremacy (Cumming-Potvin, 2022). Let’s face it— life is not always simple, rosy, and cookie-cutter; it is complicated and messy (McKenzie et al., 2024). Following this reasoning, the word ‘queer’ is multi-faceted and colourful like a rainbow, be it used as an adjective (different/odd/strange), noun (an LGBTQIA + identified person), or verb (to reject normativity). This makes queering more representative of realities—diverse, intersectional, and above all, human (Chen et al., 2024).

Affective Atmospheres in Language Education

For there are no new ideas. Only new ways of making them felt…

Audre Lorde (2017, p. 1).

Thinking with Audre Lorde, we emphasize the significance of affect, emotion and felt experience in our work. Focusing on felt experience (Sedgwick, 2020) as a way of knowing (epistemology) is a further step to intentionally subvert patriarchal research norms by recognizing feeling/emotions as a legitimate source of knowledge. Undefinable yet transformational, affect theory (Ahmed, 2014, 2020a; Sedgwick, 2020) is part of an ever-evolving and mutating “rangly and writhing poly-jungle of a creature” (Seigworth & Pedwell, 2023, p. 4) that seeks to draw attention to how affect and emotion shape and are shaped within dominant discourses. Affect is not only personal feelings and emotions but forces that drive thoughts and actions and our relations with others (Ahmed, 2014; Seigworth & Pedwell, 2023).

Doing this work means noticing the gnarly sensations and feelings that arise as we re-tell and un-tell stories related to our work as we gauge the affective atmosphere of language teacher education. Affective atmospheres (Anderson, 2009) are all around us—we experience them through empathy, we breathe them in, we feel them, but struggle to represent them in language (Reddy, 2023). Zembylas (2020, p. 557) proposes that affective atmospheres are “a fundamental aspect of how we experience the world, and more specifically, how our activities and social relations are entangled with the spaces in which we act or dwell”. When paying attention to affective atmospheres, we notice and stay with ambiguity and uncertainty (Anderson, 2009).

To navigate, negotiate, and survive in this complex affective reality, queer and female teachers and academics need to redefine their teacher identities to create space for vulnerabilities (whether or not they should queer pedagogy), fears (whether their queering curriculum would expose their queer selves in public, thus putting them at risk), shames (the fact that they have to box their queer identities and queering approaches in the normative closet), and grits (how they exert strategies to safely address LGBTQIA+ and gendered violence issues and materials in class).

Dialogic Queering as Transformative

Consider how the capacity of two people to negotiate their differences and generate shared values and norms can serve as a model to template for democratic deliberation and co-existence in the wider society. Consider how words travel, and discourses proliferate, influencing and reconstructing other places and times. Consider what happens when the visions, identities, and experiences of the authors travel through this [article] to motivate social change. Consider the creative construction of new worlds and realities through such mobile courses. Consider how talk develops critical orientation on social structures and institutions we already have by allowing people to pool their diverse experiences together and reimagine change.

Suresh Canagarajah (2023, p. 2).

In traditional qualitative research, the researchers initiate the research, have authority over the whole process, and usually gain power and prestige from their research (Ellis, 2007). Rather than following conventional qualitative research methods, we engaged queer and affect theories to challenge methods that reproduce norms. Notably, critical feminist and queer researchers have developed different ways of creating knowledge to respond to the limitations of traditional research approaches (Browne & Nash, 2016; Ellis, 2007; St. Pierre, 2024). In a dialogic approach, meaning emerges through intimate relational encounters (Ellis, 2017) that consider power, language, and identity (Canagarajah, 2023; Lin & Bauler, 2023) and which are forged via relational systems of support and allyship (McKenzie et al., 2024). Unlike conventional qualitative research, researchers are not positioned in asymmetrical dualistic power relations of subject and object (Britzman, 2014; Ellis, 2007; Haraway, 1988).

Hence, our queer dialoguing did not require “the man and the methods” (St. Pierre, 2024, p. 574) of conventional approaches. It would be incommensurate with queer and affect theories to compress and collapse the complex, fluid, messy, oftentimes unintelligible assemblages into tidy systematic codes and themes (St. Pierre, 2021, 2024). Inspired by Elizabeth St. Pierre, we adopted a post-qualitative inquiry approach that refuses “representationalist logic” (St. Pierre, 2021, p. 6) whereby experience is accepted as a representation of an external knowable reality and there are clear processes and procedures that lead to neatly packaged data and findings:

…the post qualitative inquirer does not know what to do first and then next and next. There is no recipe, no process. This is truly experimental inquiry—attending to the surprises that point to difference and refusing the impoverished answers... Data became irrelevant, and data analysis was writing as inquiry and thinking with concepts (St. Pierre, 2018, p. 2).

Enacting dialogic queering was daunting and confusing but it also felt liberating. It enabled us to think with embodied experience without a specific aim driving our encounters; uncertainties swirled around overlapping with awe and confusion. As we experienced the uncertainties and intensities of this work, we often found ourselves floundering, but we continued with no first, next, or last! We embraced the uncertainties and allowed our vulnerabilities, such as fears and shames, to travel with our affective exploration, charted by our queer thinking represented in dialogic writing.

Solidarity

Dialogic queering cannot happen in a vacuum: our marginalized intersectional backgrounds negotiating and contesting cis/heteropatriarchy were significant. We both wanted a space in which we felt safe to experiment and speak freely and feel our feelings. We had to be much more than colleagues. To do this, we held a safe space for each other characterized by mutual respect, care, and critical empathy (McAlinden & Dobinson, 2022). ‘Critical empathy’ was intrinsic to feeling safe with each other; however, it does not mean that we felt the same feelings or had the same experiences (Zahavi & Overgaard, 2012). Believing that we feel or experience life in the same way as others can lead to false understandings and appropriations (Ahmed, 2014; Boler, 2004; Pedwell, 2012). Empathy does not mean we can understand the experiences of others as if they are our own (McAlinden, 2014, 2018). Empathy is a mediator of solidarity in our dialogic queering, but we are careful not to overstate our solidarity (Ahmed, 2014, p. 189).

Representations of Our Felt Experience

While our work refuses the logics of linear representation, we acknowledge the importance of sharing our process. Our dialoging occurred organically via multiple online and face to face meetings and were thought-written reiteratively spanning nearly two years (November 2023 to October 2025). We used Microsoft Teams to facilitate and record our conversations synchronously and OneDrive Share Doc to continue our asynchronous dialoguing in writing. The online sessions were recorded for further queering (analyzing) and reflection, which also served to provide glimpse into the process (see Figure 1).

Figure 1.

Screenshot of Maggie’s and Julian’s Queer dialoguing via teams

Our process was intentional, but also emergent (becoming). We drew intentionally on queer and affect theories to make meaning from our conversations, but we did not start with pre-set research questions or a list of topics. We created space for ideas and affects to flow and emerge that resonated with us. We often started with something that bothered us, especially distressing past incidents, or tensions that arise in our lives. We engaged in meta-talk about what we wanted to explore further. We created rough transcriptions that we added to a working document. We continually re-read and re-wrote the transcripts and spoke about the value or significance of ideas, particularly those that troubled us and required further queering. As we reviewed the ideas in the transcripts, we focused closely on areas that resonated and dissonated and used questions to explore the potential of this form of inquiry:

• What insights can felt experiences give us?

• What can dialogic queering do for us (authors and readers) and for teacher education more broadly?

• What are the implications of this work on language teacher education and research?

Using these provocations, we revisited our dialogues. In Figure 2, for example, we used the commenting feature to dialogue how we understood ‘queering’, illustrated in Julian’s comment that “Queering is troubling and critically reflecting and contesting thinking…”. Maggie troubled (queered) this approach by challenging each other to redefine “Are [we] using queering or dialogic queering?” Different from normative ways of doing research with authors writing specific parts, there was NO structured allocation. What we created, would not exist without the meshing and overlapping of selves in dialogic writing.

Figure 2.

Screenshot of the iterative reflexive process via OneDrive share doc

Note that this work is not a finished product or finding (St. Pierre, 2024); it is a representation shaped by realities, affects, discourses, ideologies and practices related to language teacher education (Ahmed, 2014; Nelson, 2006, 2009, 2016; St. Pierre, 2024). As we share our dialogues, our content warning for readers is that this might be difficult and cause dissonance and feelings of uncertainty and confusion as we depart from the conventions of academic work. However, feeling ‘uncomfortable’ or ‘confronted’ embodies queering, the purpose of which is to transform normative ways of thinking, doing, researching, and writing. We encourage readers to notice the uncertainty that arises from thinking with this type of work.

Queering Language Teacher Education

M2: J, you know, with all the normative conceptions of teacher education swirling around us, we need to explore our own uncritical acceptance and adoption of these norms including the demand to be certain kinds of teachers and our own complicity in this. I can’t stand the discourses of ‘excellence’ and ‘professionalism’ that swamp me at work, yet I am often compelled to enact it even though I refuse it ideologically. This contradiction really troubles me. It feels so constraining and oppressive, but I am bound by it if my need to be accepted and included is stronger than my courage to refuse it. It took me a long time to understand how relations of power shaped my experience of the world as well as my capacity to act in the world. I grew up feeling the impact of the UK class system and British colonisation of Ireland (my ancestral home) but was also taught that I lived in a meritocracy. I thought it was only me as an individual who was responsible for my successes and failures in life because of my own efforts. I knew from an early age what I could and could not do and be as a working-class girl. Working-classness is not visible or permitted in academia. When I first went to university, I was so ashamed of my language and my poverty that I hid them. Now, I am not ashamed of this, but instead find myself ashamed about my complicity in the white academic cisheteropatriarchy – I am a good homo-academicus!

J: I feel humbled (also privileged) to share your deepest felt experience and emotion, M, as I wouldn’t have known these dark sides had you not queered with me here. I agree that we surely cannot, and should not, be asked to separate who we are and what we do in and outside of work. I am particularly impressed with your brutal honesty about your vulnerable (dark) side of abiding by the ‘white academic heteropatriarchy’. Many of us, including me, (un)intentionally conceal our ‘nonnormative’ identities to fit in. As a queer educator of colour, it hurts me to think that queer teachers and researchers are silenced into ‘concealing their LGBTQIA + identity’ to ‘avoid normative policing by others’ (Riquelme-Sanderson & Longoria, 2023, p. 3). This cis-/heteronormative censoring is particularly damaging in countries dictated by authoritarian and religious dominance. Taylor Le Cui (2021, 2023) reveals the sad truth about how Chinese gay academics mask their queer identities to mitigate the risks of being exposed to the public and hence persecuted. As much as they would like to queer the curriculum in class, they need to be extremely cautious about addressing LGBTIQA + issues. Another compelling case study published by Bruno Andrade and Ethan Trinh (forthcoming) also opens our eyes to the (c)overt discrimination and violence, be it verbal, cyber, or even worse, physical, against queer English language teachers in Brazil. The list can go on.

M: Being present and open in this part of the dialogue is a struggle. So many fleeting feelings and thoughts arise as I read and think alongside you when you share the experiences of queer academics in China and Brazil. This reminds me of the idea that affect is sometimes on the edge of semantic meaning or beyond it. I am breathing in the affective atmosphere but can’t respond in a way that seems worthy or appropriate – there are no words to express this. As I grapple with this, my bodily feelings act as reminders of past suffering. My lived and felt experiences enable me some understanding of their experiences as it certainly evokes strong difficult feelings. I am not saying I understand their lived and felt experiences. Growing up female and working-class does not make it easier to understand, but that it does create a momentary sense of solidarity.

J: This is how I feel, too. Without this safe, dialogic, and stimulating third space we are creating for each other and inviting readers to hold it for us (if they agree), I doubt if we could make any difference to the current landscape of language education and research. That is, are we only teaching and researching like business as usual, feeling (too) ’comfortable’ and ’complacent’ in a normative box? Are we willing to queer our practices, disrupt the hetero-patriarchal power and Eurocentric hegemony that refuse diverse realities and reduce identities into binaries?

M & J: We notice how the sharing of experiences from queer academics in China and Brazil creates affects that move between us, creating tension as we grapple with comprehending the enormity of their situation. At the same time, we question the point of this and if it can make any difference to anyone but ourselves.

M: As I think with this, I also feel some optimism arise. Dialogic queering gives us permission to pay attention to the fleeting and sometimes rare visceral intensities that move and drive us in all aspects of life, which in turn may move us with hope towards action. But I also can’t help but be reminded that we can’t influence these harmful ideologies in contexts that we have no influence over or no direct experience of and we might even cause more harm than good.

J: That is why we need to ACT now! Despite the challenges, it is inspiring to see queer scholars and allies use queering as a research approach. They acknowledge the role intersectionality and gender diversity play in their teaching and research practices and how it is pivotal to be authentic about one’s (queer) self in the geopolitical, sociocultural, and epistemological contexts while using resistance strategies to navigate the binary system and contest normativity in language education (see for example, Coda & Moser, 2023Nelson, 1999, 2006, 2009; Paiz, 2018, 2019, 2020; Riquelme-Sanderson & Longoria, 2023; Trinh & Herrera, 2020). Working with you to experiment with dialogic queering in research speaks volumes about how I/we can generate new norms in academic writing and conventional methodology.

‘Queering Me Safely’: A Space for Vulnerabilities

In this section, we confide in each other on fear, shame, and uncertainty felt in our experiences and how this affects us. Our solidarity and care for each other and desire to learn from this process carry us through difficult conversations and irreducible differences.

J: I fervently believe that our queer/feminist positionalities are not fixed but continue to evolve. As we are queering/unravelling how our emotions intersect with our experiences, it is vital to allow vulnerabilities in. For example, I sense vulnerability arising when you talked about having a working-class upbringing, as well as the shame and complicity you felt about working in “the white academic cis-heteropatriarchy”. This truth telling process requires courage to share some of the ‘dark sides’ of our selves. Diving deeper is daunting, but sharing our vulnerabilities feels possible.

I also find solace in enacting dialogic queering by holding a safe, respectful space for and with you, M, as you have been an LGBTQIA + ally who advocates for gender diversity, equity, and inclusion in language.

M: The idea of holding a ‘safe space’ together was the first idea that resonated for me in the work together. It started with a strong feeling that I feel safe with J, and I wondered why. Safety is often thought to mean the absence of fear, harm, and danger. But the discourse of the comfort in “safe spaces” can be evoked by institutions in a tokenistic way while maintaining harmful structures and relations of power by avoiding difficult conversations (Ahmed, 2014, 2020b; McKenzie et al., 2024). This framing closes the possibilities that can arise from staying with discomfort. In our safe space, we are safe to feel unsafe. Safety connotes threat, presence and potential of fear, harm and danger and vulnerability. Safety does not mean we are free from hurt, but we can feel safe to express and feel our hurts – we can feel vulnerable and unsafe but be safe from the harm that expressing our vulnerabilities to others can create.

J: Totally, M! I really appreciate that you feel safe to discuss these vulnerabilities as I know it is definitely NOT easy in a public academic space like we are in now. For me, dialogic queering is challenging and confronting as well as cathartic and transformative. It pushes me to be my authentic self, the one that is willing to take risks and unearth the troubling thoughts and emotions with you (and the readers) regardless of how messy and difficult they are. Whilst confusing, uncertain, and scary (sometimes), the queering process emboldens me to call out my own normative practices and complicity in the white dominant academia, thus purging my shames and vulnerabilities that I had tried to camouflage.

J & M: Our dialoguing revealed how affect theory and queer thinking provided provocative tools to question educational norms. This collaborative and critical examination of safety simultaneously troubled and advocated for the notion of safe spaces in academic work. It led us to new understanding of the potential of dialogic queering to forge understanding and solidarity between researchers, as well as illustrate the value of affect, vulnerability and authenticity in the negotiation of meaning across difference.

Our Conflicted Practice

Deconstructing cisheteronormativities while also advocating for inclusion is contradictory and ontologically paradoxical. But as Armstrong (2008) suggests, contradictions can be pedagogically productive even if they cannot be reconciled theoretically. Engaging intentionally with both the discourse of identity and identity politics has contributed to our own well-being and commitment to advocacy work as teacher educators. Identity work has enhanced our capacity to reveal how we are influenced as individuals by norms related to gender, race and class personally (Chen et al., 2024; Jogulu & McAlinden, 2023; McKenzie et al., 2024). As illustrated in the dialogue below in which we explore these tensions, while not reconcilable, they are mutually influencing, if not mutual.

J: M, I have been troubled by our ‘paradoxical’ stance on using Nelson’s (1999, 2006, 2009) queer thinking to defy cisheteropatriarchy entrenched in (language) education. Theoretically, I am vouching for this ‘hardcore’ queer(y)ing approach to post-structuralist inquiry to deconstruct any forms of knowledge claims, including both hegemonic normativity and queer inquiry. Pedagogically, as a queer language educator who deeply shares the intersectional identities with those minorized students, be they queer, nonnative English speakers, or non-White ethnic groups, I am nevertheless drawn to the fact that “rational deconstruction may be damaging when not balanced with a consideration of students’ affective responses to bigoted ideas” as rightly critiqued by Ashley Moore (2020, p. 1126). If we can’t purposefully create a safe space to allow queer students to see their gender diversity being upheld, respected, and open for discussion that engenders a political act to contest cis/heteronormativity, I’d say we’re doing them a disservice and injustice. I am thinking here with bell Hooks (1994, p. 61):

When our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. Indeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond between the two—that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other.

M: I am also struggling to reconcile these two approaches. As a critical feminist qualitative researcher, I pay close attention to the claims to knowledge and truth that underpin research and practice and pay attention to onto-epistemological inconsistencies. At the same time, I wanted us to find a way to keep both inclusion approaches and poststructuralism in our work. We occupy institutional positions as language teacher educators. These positions give us power but also constrain us. We find ourselves in a contradictory space in which we work within structures we critique, benefit from systems we oppose, and use identity categories we know are problematic. We cannot resolve this contradiction, but we can make it visible and generate practices and structures that don’t require marginalized people to prove their worthiness for inclusion.

J: Truthfully, our use of inclusive language and advocacy for making marginalized voices heard and intersectionality visible are shaped by our critical care. That said, inclusion of more queer representation and intersectionality in language education also comes with the political aim to disrupt norms, to identify and contest fixed knowledge claims, and to embrace discomfort and uncertainty during difficult conversations among ourselves and with students. Here, we are thinking with Armstrong’s (2008) ‘queer pedagogy of conflicted practice’ to reflect our walk at the crossroads of post-structuralist inquiry and advocacy for gender diversity and radical inclusion.

M & J: As a conflicted practice (Armstrong, 2008), we advocate for inclusion through identity categories while acknowledging this does not change the structures that create the exclusion in the first place (Ahmed, 2014; 2020b). This is not a resolution; it is an ongoing negotiation. We engage with identity categories even though they are epistemically incommensurate with queer inquiry because it is still important to advocate for the safety of queer teachers and students at the (inter)personal and social levels. Alongside this strategic inclusion work, we aim to draw attention to the relations of power that create essentialized identity categories and remain alert to how our work may reinforce exclusionary norms and even generate new ones.

Dialogic Queering of Critical Episodes in Language Teacher Education

M: Julian (I am serious, so it warrants your full name ), I am excited to do this alongside you. But I am worried that I will not be able to do this in a way that is meaningful for readers, that this is self-indulgent, and I will not be able to capture anything worthwhile.

J: Certainly, M! This is a safe space that I am holding for you, us, and with the readers. I know how ‘scary’ it might seem to be so brutally honest with anyone about certain critical episodes in your lived experience and academic trajectory that you might not want to reveal in scholarly publishing at the outset. I have been there, done that, and now it is my turn to pay it forward in solidarity. I will start by sharing how I (re)discovered my queer identity as a non-binary practitioner researcher of colour, trailblazing the academic landscape of Global North. In my recent deep soul searching in trio-ethnography with colleagues (see Chen et al., 2024), I laid it bare about how my academic pursuits in the Eurocentric, normative education system had whitewashed me in teaching and research undertaking, and how troubling, acknowledging, and reconciling with this unspoken shame through queering had liberated and allowed me to redefine my authentic self as a queer academic of colour with pride.

M: As fear moves in and out of my conscious perception and bodily sensation, it moves between J and me and then it attaches itself to this process. In this work, we run the risk that we perform an identity that is not merely acceptable and palatable to our audience, but which positions us as virtuous models of our profession who ‘speak our truth’ and shed our egos. At the same time, the interpersonal risk of not withholding something of ourselves is even higher. There are certain experiences that are too much for others to hear or bear that produce an unbearable gush of feeling and sympathy from others that can make us cringe.

J: It might sound counter intuitive— as ‘fear’, ‘shame’, and ‘vulnerability’ typically connote negative affects and signal weakness— I nevertheless find feeling these ‘negative affects’ triggered by queering integral to unearthing my authentic self. This hard truth did not knock at my door until I did some deep soul searching that you, M, and readers already saw in my queering pracademic identity depicted above. Despite the inner fear and shame that I had to unmask, and vulnerability I had to expose, I embraced these feelings as they were part of me, only deeply buried in my then ‘normative’ academic closet. I was not aware of the power of queering till I undid these affects and reclaimed my queer self in-the-making through this troubling but rewarding process. Truth be told, I would have still been brainwashed by Eurocentric normativity permeating my academic pursuits had I not pushed myself to question who I really was in those entangling affective atmospheres. Queering never tries to stay comfortable or take an easy route, particularly in a world that is dominated by White patriarchy and binarism. Queering enables us to look deeper from within and beyond before we can really see the realities intersecting gender diversity, sexual orientation, affects, and in our case, teaching and research in language.

M: As I am re-reading the headings of the critical episode that I wrote about, I notice that I have a section called ‘worries’. This word does not express how bad I felt at times during that episode. It was much more intense than worry. I recall a lot of fear and irritation fluctuating. Irritation arose as a defensive reaction to the students asking for live virtual seminars rather than the recordings that I had provided. I was mentally and emotionally exhausted and did not have the energy to teach the course synchronously, but I felt that I had no choice. I was afraid of what students might say in the evaluations if I did not. I did not feel I was permitted to express any of this. Looking back, my confidence and agency were disrupted. What I experienced was made much worse by the expectations placed on me by the profession and the workplace.

J: Really sorry, M. You seem to have been bombarded by student demands, emotional exhaustion, and negative affects triggered by fears, irritation and worries. No wonder it was taking an emotional toll on you! I totally get it and know where you are coming from. I have been through a similar scenario where a student misconstrued everything I said in an email and used it against me despite my well-intentioned support and accommodation of their needs. I was also worried about what they would put in the student evaluation survey. The emotional turmoil was surely taking a toll on me, making me second guess my teaching professionalism and my integrity as a language teacher educator.

M: I was stressed by being so pressed for time in setting up the unit for online delivery and was upset by the lack of student engagement. I had sore shoulders, a blinding headache pervaded by a feeling of dread. As each day passed talking to a blank screen and looking at the blank spaces where students were meant to be, the lack of interaction became debilitating.

J: I feel sad to hear of the emotional labour you had to carry while teaching intensively in Vietnam, particularly during the pandemic time! The affective whirlpool you were dragged into seemed to be worsened by the stress and pressure in the teaching and administrative demands, entangled with the genuine care you had for those students offshore. If we analyze this critical episode only through the perspective of language teaching and learning, we overlook the affective atmosphere that influenced your feelings, self-belief, empathy, and how the demands imposed on you caused you so much worry about how students would perceive and interact with you. It is entangled, and we need to acknowledge and problematize that.

M: Thanks J. When I wrote about the critical episode during COVID there was so much that I left out. It is cathartic to share more here with you.

J: If you agree, I think we need to pay it forward to the broader teaching and research communities in language education regarding the lessons we have learned throughout this queering process and any insights we could offer for like-minded colleagues.

M: I agree. I know so many colleagues who have had similar experiences, and it makes me wonder if it would be the same if we were in a male dominated profession. Even if we can’t immediately change the structures that create these situations, we should not have to be alone or be silent about it. The feelings of disempowerment and lack of agency I experienced motivated me to protect myself from that happening again. Since then, I have a better understanding of how my expectations of myself are tied up with the affective atmosphere of teacher education which fixates on the need to do more and be better.

J & M: Through our dialogue, affects like fear and solidarity moved between us. This movement of negative affects beyond our individual selves created a sense of possibilities (and hopes) arising from honest self-expression. Paying attention to difficult felt experiences in this way digresses from the norms of neoliberal academic work which expects us to be ‘proper’ corporate citizens regardless (Guerrero‐Nieto & Castañeda‐Trujillo, 2024). As we revisit these critical episodes together, the inadequacy of conventional language like ‘worries’ becomes apparent through our dialoguing. We question how emotion words fail to capture affects circulating between us (Sedgwick, 2020), and how we are trapped in conflicting relations of power with students (Seigworth & Pedwell, 2023). This dialoguing reveals the tensions inherent in relations of supposed equality of power which create a confusing and contradictory affective atmosphere. On the one hand, we want to be caring and supportive of students, but on the other, the harms we have experienced, such as anonymous student evaluations, continue to circulate and affect us. Queer work requires that we stay with the impossibility of resolving these tensions rather than seeking resolution and moving on (Sedgwick, 2020).

Sharing Our Sparkles and Darkles

In this closing section, we share critical reflections on our work and respond to the research provocations to develop insights into the key concepts.

What Insights Can Felt Experience Give us?

Felt experience encouraged us to pay at least as much attention to affect as we would to our thoughts and created an inquiry space that we had read about but never encountered. Affect theory (Ahmed, 2014; Sedgwick, 1993, 2020; Seigworth & Pedwell, 2023) provided a means to access and think with felt experience. This not only included interpretation of bodily feelings and emotional language but also enabled us to think with the affective architectures, discourses and feeling scripts that shaped our felt experience as teacher educators. Drawing on affect and empathy theories drew us to an understanding and experiencing of feelings/emotions as not only personal but as agentic and epistemic (Ahmed, 2014; Sedgwick, 2020). For example, we experienced empathy throughout this process as not only a means to access our own feelings/emotions, but also as an epistemic catalyst (McAlinden et al., 2022) and now as a mediator of dialogic queering (Chen et al., 2024). In contrast to lived experience, thinking with felt experience brought the agency of affect and empathy to all aspects of our inquiry. Critical empathy enabled us to feel safe enough with each other to pay attention to emotional dissonance when it arose. It helped us to engage in dialoguing in a way that did not erase the differences between us (Ahmed, 2014). Felt experience mediated via empathy enabled us to notice and navigate the feeling scripts that we had internalized about being educators and researchers. For example, we noticed the affective force of uncertainty that was immanent within the affective atmosphere of post-qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre, 2018, 2021, 2024).

Felt experience also enabled us to gauge something of the affective atmosphere (Anderson, 2009; Reddy, 2023; Zembylas, 2020) of language teacher education. It helped us experience spaces and environments (atmospheres) as dynamic fields of interaction (Anderson, 2009) that we experienced differently based on who we are and where we are coming from rather than assuming we and others experience atmospheres in the same way. We wonder what might happen if we use felt experience to create a safe space for students (and us) to critically examine how normative beliefs, feeling scripts, and affective architectures constrain who we are and how we research/learn/teach/think in language education. In our inquiry, our ‘selves’ were often blurred, creating a sense of an indeterminate self that is always feeling and becoming in relations with. We experienced fleeting moments of agency as we disentangled ourselves from scripts that we had long been complicit in. We recognized that we occupied positions of privilege as mid-career academics and coordinators of language programs in Australian higher education which afforded us power and privileges to say things and reclaim aspects of our identities that would otherwise have remained hidden. This power is also afforded by academia and the broader context of Australia that allows us to do this unconventional inquiry in an atmosphere in which we feel relatively safe. We acknowledge that for many of our colleagues around the world, this kind of work is becoming less possible and less safe as the cisheteropatriarchy reasserts itself as we all watch on with horror and apprehension. We stand with our colleagues and acknowledge the suppressive atmosphere that has severely affected their work and even safety. In unity.

What Can Dialogic Queering Do for Us (Authors and Readers) and for Teacher Education More Broadly?

Dialogic queering is a form of post-qualitative inquiry (St. Pierre, 2018, 2021, 2024) — it is not a (conventional) method and cannot be separate from our felt experience vis-a-vis dominant power relations. Through creating and being with this process together, we were able to disrupt our ways of doing academic work and to feel a fleeting sense of agency and hope. As teacher educators, we will continue to feel pressure to be a certain kind of teacher-educator and to conform to neoliberal, hetero-cis-patriarchal norms of the profession (Frenzel et al., 2021; Guerrero‐Nieto & Castañeda‐Trujillo, 2024; Keller & Becker, 2020).

Channelling felt experience empowered us to call out harmful norms. By contesting these norms, our outsiderness was emphasized and we exposed ourselves to scrutiny and judgement; however, we drew queer strength, critical empathy, and genuine care for and from each other through dialogic queering (Browne & Nash, 2010; Seigworth & Pedwell, 2023; Trinh, 2024).

Queering also emboldened us to be critical about our felt experiences and to represent them truthfully in this paper. The post-qualitative approach helped us (de)reconstruct those critical episodes/encounters in dialogic writing (St. Pierre, 2018, 2021, 2024). We understand the primacy of emotional authenticity which provoked our continued dialoguing through a queer eye. We also acknowledge that even though we have exposed highly personal aspects of our thoughts and feelings, these are still filtered through what we choose to say and what we choose not to.

There is also still a lot of work to do to create space for this kind of norm-defying work in language teaching and research and to explore its possibilities. In Julian’s case, being able to reclaim their queer academic identity has transformed their teaching and research as well. They have started to queer curriculum design and pedagogy and how they could bring critical episodes in their class by intellectually stimulating and challenging students to problematize normative, Eurocentric materials with them and each other (McKenzie et al., 2024). Their recent research (Chen et al., 2024) has also been geared towards this newfound terrain where they start to explore queering as a research approach in disrupting academic writing, thinking and doing, and bring out criticality and creativity in Julian, their co-authors, and readers. This makes Julian feel hopeful and grateful for the new teaching/research path they are charting. For Maggie, this work has motivated her to make more small shifts in her teaching and research practice, and selection of course content. She has started to be much more intentional about bringing critical feminist and queer approaches to her research as well as her teaching. Listening to Julian’s critical reflections and sharing how class and gender norms affect her with them makes Maggie feel less alone but not less outside. Being able to collaborate with someone so willing to work honestly at this periphery and so passionately is inspiring and motivating.

In a queerness spirit, we advocate for others in similar positions to engage with and explore this transformative approach. If we, in our seats of power and privilege, cannot include some ways of working that enable us to at least partially disentangle ourselves from the power relations that we are critical of, then there is little hope that we can do this for and with students who are trapped in unequal power relations, particularly those who are underrepresented or marginalized.

What are the Implications of This Work on Language Teacher Education and Research?

Given that so much ‘standardized’ academic work is just extraction and regurgitation, this dialogic queering process is refreshing, stimulating, and exhilarating! Using queer dialogic writing as a form of post-qualitative inquiry, we are also echoing Deleuze (1993/1997, p. 1 as cited in St. Pierre, 2018) that “writing is a question of becoming, always incomplete, always in the midst of being formed, and goes beyond the matter of any liveable or lived experience”. Different from conventional research practices, we did not divide our work into separate components for us each to work on or collapse our dialogues into manageable codes and ‘simplified’ categories. Post-qualitative inquiry inspired and challenged us to take risks in experimenting with dialogic queering as a norm-resistant approach to thinking, researching, and writing in academia.

Indeed, this unconventional, alternative approach to academic work unlocks untapped research capacity and potential to bring criticality, authenticity, and empathy to the fore. That is, the dialogic process embedded within post-qualitative inquiry enables colleagues (queer or not) to engage queer and affect theories to think, write, and study in a manner that does not reproduce norms, and which cannot be confined into standardized ‘methodological’ boxes.

Bringing queerness and felt experience to academic work challenges the neoliberal temporal regimes by slowing down learning and research, and by refocussing on the relational aspects of academic work and fostering a critical ethics of care (Mountz et al., 2015). It might mean disrupting norms by selecting readings and learning activities that are class, gender and queer inclusive (Coda, 2021, 2023; McKenzie et al., 2024; Nelson, 1999, 2009; Paiz, 2018, 2019, 2020), or reflecting on how our use of language might exclude students or make them feel unwelcome. We can draw attention to the use of pronouns and invite queer thinking about how and why pronouns should be used according to what power relations. We can add to the canonical readings and topics that appear in language education courses and publications globally by including post-structural, decolonial, queer and feminist academics and teacher educators in a variety of languages, as well as introducing critical reading of the canon. We can pair widely read and cite readings with critiques highlighting what or who is being erased or excluded. Students can be encouraged to interrogate the reading list and question its intention and purpose. While these may appear as small shifts, they challenge what counts as legitimate knowledge and practice.

Conclusion Unbound

While there have been many exciting and creative disruptions to academia led by feminist, queer and post-colonial scholars in the humanities and education, we have not seen much dialogic and creative processes in language teacher education with the exception of queer researchers and allies (cf. Andrade & Trinh, 2026; Chen et al., 2024; McKenzie et al., 2024; Trinh, 2020, 2024; Trinh & Behizadeh, 2023). Equally troubling are the White hegemonic knowledge claims and normative methodological undertakings that suppress (gender) diverse realties and reduce intersectional entanglements into over-simplified categories. Even though we acknowledge that language teacher education has worked hard to disrupt racism and the white cis-male heteropatriarchy and the legacy of colonialism via inclusive practices, it still maintains many of the elitist patriarchal and White supremacist practices of the academy despite the increasing diversity of language scholars and its strong social justice agenda (Coda & Moser, 2023; Guerrero‐Nieto & Castañeda‐Trujillo, 2024; Paiz & Coda, 2021; Trinh, 2024). Queer and affect theories have enabled us to consider more critically the affective atmosphere of language teacher education and research and to create ways that we can reposition our research and practices to be more reflexive and less complicit in the systems of oppression that we seek to challenge. We hope that our work can inspire others to keep disrupting the status quo through queer thinking to subvert rigid binaries in language education and research, thereby creating their own queer sparkles.