Introduction

Abstract

This special edition brings together scholars from across the globe to provide further knowledge and critical insight into what it means to create trans-affirmative pedagogical spaces and to examine the limits and productive potentialities for gender expansive education. It is grounded in a commitment to generating both epistemological and empirical insights into creating the necessary pedagogical conditions for fostering trans and nonbinary liveability in the education system. The first paper serves as a grounding and framing of the entire special edition. While it serves as a standalone article, it is also conceived as both a synthesising introduction and a point of reference or lens through which to situate the special edition with respect to thinking about the pedagogical implications and contribution of Transgender Studies. The papers that follow exemplify a commitment to what Stryker (2006) refers to as ‘desubjugated knowledges’ and specifically to ‘the kind of knowledge that transgender people . . . have of their own embodied experience, and of their relationship to the discourse and institutions that act upon and through them’ as a basis for thinking through and extending our pedagogical understandings of transgender and gender expansive education (13). Stryker highlights that this knowledge ‘may be articulated from direct experience, or it may be witnessed and represented by others in an ethical fashion’ (13). It is this very ethical commitment that is at the heart of all contributions included in this special edition.