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(PDF) Gauging Affective Atmospheres in Language Teacher Education Through Dialogic Queering as Transformative Research
Gauging Affective Atmospheres in Language Teacher Education Through Dialogic Queering as Transformative Research
Research Article

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

International Journal of Qualitative Methods
Volume 25: 1–13
© The Author(s) 2026
DOI: 10.1177/16094069251414253
journals.sagepub.com/home/ijq

Julian Chen1  and Maggie McAlinden2 

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 cisheteronormative 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.
Keywords
queering, affect theory, affective atmospheres, feminist inquiry, critical dialoguing, critical empathy, intersectionality, language
teacher education, post-qualitative inquiry

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 nonbinary 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 (GuerreroNieto & Castañeda-Trujillo, 2024) and poses an added
hardship to those who do not ﬁt with the dominant sociopolitical norms (Moore, 2020).

School of Education, Curtin University, Perth, WA, Australia
School of Education, Edith Cowan University, Perth, WA, Australia

Corresponding Author:
Julian Chen, School of Education, Curtin University, Level 4, Building 501, Kent
Street, Bentley, WA 6102, Australia.
Email:
[email protected]
Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use,
reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as speciﬁed on the SAGE and
Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).

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

International Journal of Qualitative Methods
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”

Chen and McAlinden
(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,

International Journal of Qualitative Methods

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).

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 preset 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.
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

Chen and McAlinden

Figure 1. Screenshot of Maggie’s and Julian’s Queer dialoguing via teams

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

Figure 2. Screenshot of the iterative reﬂexive process via OneDrive share doc

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’ (RiquelmeSanderson & 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?

International Journal of Qualitative Methods
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 workingclass 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

Chen and McAlinden
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 ontoepistemological 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 poststructuralist 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 trioethnography 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

International Journal of Qualitative Methods
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, selfbelief, 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.

Chen and McAlinden
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 likeminded 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

10
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 teachereducator 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

International Journal of Qualitative Methods
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. Postqualitative 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 poststructural, 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

Chen and McAlinden
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.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to send their love and gratitude to the two
scholars who took the time to review the ﬁrst submission of this paper
so thoughtfully and critically. Your insights enabled us to dig deeper
and work harder to honor the work that has come before us and to take
our thinking further. We would also like to thank reviewers of earlier
versions of this work sent to another journal who said our work would
be better in a different type of journal – if the previous version had
been accepted, the paper in its current form would not exist and we
would not be so changed.

ORCID iDs
Julian Chen  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7788-0462
Maggie McAlinden  https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2933-6371

Funding
The authors received no ﬁnancial support for the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Declaration of Conﬂicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conﬂicts of interest with respect to
the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes
1. In the spirt of queering as a feminist, anti-normative research
approach, we queer academic writing throughout the article. We
purposefully use queer/feminist languaging (e.g., ‘Open-upings’
to contest a traditional section title as in ‘Introduction’). By doing

so, we hope to inspire readers to also queer their own practices by
disrupting normative (standardized, Whitewashed) teaching,
writing, and researching.
2. We use our initials (M & J) in the process of dialogic queering
onwards to show our close, strong bond with each other.

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