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Can queer research occur in schools? What might such research look like and who is able to conduct it? This paper engages with these questions in order to tease out some of the challenges and possibilities for undertaking queer research in this setting. Answers to these questions are explored by drawing on insights from two studies undertaken in secondary schools in New Zealand. This research analyses how these projects were conceptualised as "queer" and the extent to which this "queerness" was realised. It might be argued that to "successfully" conduct queer research, a researcher must identify as queer a debate which has particular pertinence to the current research because the researcher here identifies as "straight". Employing theoretical ideas from Butler and Warner, I delineate how -- as a straight person -- I account for attempting queer research in schools. The paper argues that although the heteronormative regulatory practices of schooling make queer research particularly difficult, it is not impossible. The nature of queer research in these settings however means that its contours are often ambiguous and unpredictable and its effects largely unknowable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heteronormativity operates by normalising heterosexuality as preferred and acceptable, while simultaneously casting homosexuality as abnormal other. To understand how New Zealand secondary schools might be conceptualised as "heteronormative spaces", this paper analyses heteronormalising educational processes which centre heterosexuality and relegate homosexuality as "deviance". These practices are revealed through focus group discussion with same-sex attracted and heterosexual 16- to 20-year-olds. How heteronormalising processes are deployed and the constraints they create for students' sexual and gendered subjectivities is examined. The complexity and power of heteronormalising practices is also analysed by revealing how attempts to acknowledge and include same-sex attracted youth may unwittingly reinscribe otherness. Such insights highlight the power of heteronormativity and some problematics of implementing classroom strategies to combat it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Young people may face conflicting and confusing messages about what it means to respond well in relation to homophobia and transphobia. Consequently, we ask – What might it mean to respond well to homophobia and transphobia? This strategy, inspired by Anika Thiem and Judith Butler, is recognition of the ambivalent conditions which structure attempts to respond well to bullying related to gender and sexuality. Such an approach is counter to educational responses that suggest a remedy in advance of the enactment of perceived bullying. Our paper draws on research conducted by the authors in four such schools, two in Australia and two in Aotearoa/New Zealand. It is a deliberate turn away from focusing on who should be held to account for homophobia and transphobia. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

How does the COVID-19 pandemic shape subjectivity? This paper is concerned with contributing to theorising subjectivity at an ontological level. It draws on a feminist new materialist understanding of subjectivity as an intra-active becoming of human-non-human matter that includes smell. Smellwalks are mobilised to apprehend how subjectivity is altered via restrictions around movement and social connection during lockdown. This sensory method recognises knowing is not simply a cognitive practice and that odour actively shapes understandings of ourselves and the world. The varying presence and absence of odours in and out of lockdown eventuate a re-arrangement of subjectivity which draws on Vannini's (2020) notion of atmospheric dis-ease. Lockdown produces a subjectivity of dis-ease which generates changes in perception of self and others, as sources of potential viral contagion. Lockdown's material conditions engender a 'socially flattened' and 'suspended subjectivity' as our 'normal' selves are experienced as being put on hold until the global crisis abates., (© The Author(s) 2022.)