Project title
Learning from Trans Digital Spaces to improve Educational Digital Spaces for Transgender and Gender Non-Conforming Students.
Project abstract
Digital communities and online spaces have been documented to be supportive and welcoming for transgender and gender-nonconforming people (TGNC) (Miller, 2017; Austin et al., 2020), offering opportunities to develop a sense of belonging and community while enabling individuals to exchange knowledge. However, in physical, digital, and online spaces within Tertiary Education, TGNC people still experience harassment, ostracization, and microaggressions related to their presentation of gender (Singh et al., 2013; Pitcher, 2017; Bonner‐Thompson et al., 2021). Current research describes the unique ways that queer/TGNC people create and utilize their digital spaces with regards to their identities and communities, with concepts such as trans technologies (Haimson et al., 2019) and agentic learning (Kennedy, 2021) discussing both technological and sociological structures within these contexts. This research aims to learn from naturally occurring Trans Digital Spaces to improve the digital learning experience in university contexts for TGNC students while broadly benefiting all learners.