Unfixing knowledges: Queering the literacy curriculum

In the literacy classroom, students have few opportunities to use their literacy practices to contest narratives of race, class, gender and sexuality. Instead, extensive time is spent completing literacy activities associated with what 'good' readers and writers do. Students' literacy practices are often formulaic, repetitive, and serve classroom management strategies producing a mythic narrative of good literacy teaching. This paper introduces a queer literacy curriculum that poses pedagogy as a series of questions: What does being taught, what does knowledge do to students? How does knowledge become understood in the relationship between teacher/text and student? (Lusted, 1986) It emphasizes developing critical analyses of heterosexism, heteronormativity and normativity with the goal of helping students understand binary categories are not givens, rather social constructions we are often forced to perform (Butler, 1990) through available discourses. The paper highlights an interruption into the literacy curriculum where, through collective memory work, students investigated, analysed and contested the usually-not-noticed ways a small understanding of heterosexuality has come to structure their lives

Playing public health: building the HIVe

In thinking through the impact of digital media on how frontline workers, activists, practitioners and researchers understand and fight HIV and AIDS, it is important to acknowledge that digital media does not only provide new channels and strategies for communicating information around HIV prevention and education. It also establishes innovative domains for conceiving of, and building, ‘resilient communities’ like The HIVe. Such digital interventions are cultural assets that confront biomedical and behavioural approaches to HIV prevention and education. Immersive and social technologies, network ubiquity and low cost mobile phones provide new tools for aggregating, representing, collecting and disseminating community-based and led data that ‘plays’ public health differently. This play involves fore-fronting the success of social science HIV prevention and education against the essentialist logic of dominant biomedical approaches. ‘Playing public health’ provides an entirely new and comprehensive picture of the agency of the HIV virus that goes beyond the pathology of the individual. This paper proposes the goal of putting HIV prevention back into the ‘game’ of public health and playing it to win by building The HIVe

Transforming HIV Prevention & Care for Marginalised Populations: using information & communication technologies (ICTs) in community-based & led approaches

[Extract] Information and communication technology (ICT) is transforming community-based and community-led HIV prevention and care services for gay men, other men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender people. This book celebrates and shares crucial work of frontline HIV workers, activists, researchers and educators whom are using innovative ICT. The book builds on, and extends the work included in two earlier issues of Digital Culture & Education (DCE), entitled 'Prevention is a solution: Building the HIVe'(Singh and Walsh, 2012) and 'Innovative programmatic approaches to HIV prevention and care services for gay men, other men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender persons using information and communication technology (ICT)'(Adams, Klindera, Walsh and Wolf, 2014). It also includes three additional articles published by the journal

Transforming HIV Prevention & Care for Marginalised Populations: using information & communication technologies (ICTs) in community-based & led approaches

[Extract] Information and communication technology (ICT) is transforming community-based and community-led HIV prevention and care services for gay men, other men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender people. This book celebrates and shares crucial work of frontline HIV workers, activists, researchers and educators whom are using innovative ICT. The book builds on, and extends the work included in two earlier issues of Digital Culture & Education (DCE), entitled 'Prevention is a solution: Building the HIVe'(Singh and Walsh, 2012) and 'Innovative programmatic approaches to HIV prevention and care services for gay men, other men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender persons using information and communication technology (ICT)'(Adams, Klindera, Walsh and Wolf, 2014). It also includes three additional articles published by the journal

Towards a Theory of Practice: Critical Transdisciplinary Multiliteracies

About the book: Education institutions and organizations throughout the world are currently being held accountable for achieving and maintaining historically unmatched standards of academic quality and performance. Accreditation bodies; policy makers; boards of trustees; and teacher, parent, and student groups all place educational institutions and organizations under unprecedented accountability pressures. The aim of this volume is to explore and better understand how these pressures are impacting a broad range of social and cultural issues and, subsequently, how these issues impact student motivation and learnin

Sexperts! Disrupting injustice through HIV prevention and legal rights education with transgenders in Thailand

In addition to a growing epidemic of HIV among transgenders in Thailand, a low awareness of how to access justice increases their vulnerability to HIV infection. This paper presents a unique case study of how one community-based and led organisation used social networking and instant messaging to address this problem among the transgender community in Thailand. It describes and analyses how online peer-based health counseling integrated HIV education and prevention alongside access to justice through free university-based clinical legal education (CLE). It argues that a community-based approach that integrates HIV prevention and education and access to justice within a wider sexual health programme, through digital technologies, is a sustainable approach for other populations disproportionately at risk of HIV. Furthermore digital media offer strategic opportunities to overcome on-going political violence alongside entrenched stigma and discrimination that disrupt denial of access to justice

Sexperts! Disrupting injustice with digital community-led HIV prevention and legal rights education in Thailand

In addition to growing epidemics of HIV among men that have sex with men (MSM) and transgenders in Thailand, a low awareness of how to access justice increases their vulnerability. This paper presents unique case studies of how two community-based and led organisations used social networking and instant messaging to address this problem. It describes and analyses how online peer-based HIV education and prevention was integrated with access to justice through free university-based clinical legal education (CLE). It argues that re-designing HIV prevention and education through digital technologies with marginalised gay men, other men that have sex with men (MSM) and transgenders is a sustainable community-based and led approach. Furthermore digital media offer strategic opportunities to overcome on-going political violence alongside entrenched stigma and discrimination that disrupt denial of access to justice for populations disproportionately at risk of HIV