Luan Carpes Barros Cassal

Child as method is a critical and interdisciplinary approach interrogating figurations of childhood that engage, organize, justify (and perhaps even resist) sociopolitical processes. In this article, we start by presenting Child as method as a conceptual and methodological tool for critical research in childhood, education, and psychological studies and then show how it informed discussions of and about childhood in two different projects. The first concerns Legal Gender Recognition in the United Kingdom where a Child as method perspective highlights how the idea of developmentalism is embedded in figurations of childhood. This aligns with age conformities of “being more like adults than children,” while also showing how gender recognition and childhood have been built in opposition to each other. The second project mobilizes Child as method as a conceptual and methodological orientation to critically reflect on the role-played by age assessment practices in migration control in Greece. This highlights how “the child” becomes a trope within forced migration policies and practices, and how “childhood” performs a social condition in which children are represented as victims in state and humanitarian discourse. In doing so, this not only creates a “universalised” notion of childhood but also enacts epistemic violence. Indeed, these discourses mobilize action in the form of age assessment for those young people who do not look or perform like “real children,” establishing, in essence, who is and is not welcomed in the Western territory. The article ends by discussing Frantz Fanon as a critical childhood theorist. It depicts how Fanon’s contribution informs, conceptually and methodologically, the research analytic of Child as method. Together with Child as method, we put forward Fanon’s contribution to critical childhood studies while highlighting Fanon’s call for action from everyone, including children.

Many individuals will dismiss the seriousness of ex-partner stalking offences, often as a result of inaccurate and problematic beliefs about the offence (stalking myths). However, to date, stalking myth acceptance measurements have only considered attitudes about stereotypical stalking (male stalking a female). The current research considered whether inaccurate and problematic perceptions of stalking were dependent on the gender and sexuality of the perpetrator, victim, and participant. Additionally, it examined whether existing stalking myth acceptance scales measuring stereotypical stalking attitudes would predict perceptions of stalking incidents that involved female stalkers and/or male victims. Participants (N= 336) completed the stalking myth acceptance scale and then responded to a series of questions measuring their perceptions towards a stalking vignette. An independent groups design was used to manipulate the gender of the stalker and victim. The need for police intervention was greatest for incidents involving a male stalker and a female victim. Female victims of male stalking were predicted as being the most fearful, whilst male victims of female stalking were rated as least likely to be fearful. Heterosexual males and participants with minority sexual orientations were also more likely to identify the perpetrator’s actions as stalking. Finally, the SMA scales predicted participants’ attitudes for stereotypical stalking cases but not for the other scenarios. The findings demonstrate that gender plays a significant role in stalking perceptions and highlights the need for more inclusive SMA measurements to consider problematic attitudes towards non-stereotypical stalking.

In this chapter, the author analyses his past experiences as a Brazilian early-career researcher publishing on queer studies. First, he draws on publications developed as part of a knowledge exchange (KE) project called Diversidade Sexual na Escola (Sexual Diversity at School) which trained teachers on gender and sexuality. Second, he discusses publications coming from engagement with other queer and feminist activists, academics, and students in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He focuses particularly on establishing partnerships through academic projects, activism, and affects for co-authoring, networking, and publishing within the LGBTQ+ community, as well as the challenges that moving to England brought and the need to build new local support networks. He also addresses the context of queer studies in Brazil, and particularly their presence in education policies and research. Finally, he suggests reinforcing partnerships by LGBTQ+ academics to support their capacity to thrive, paying special attention to those from marginalised backgrounds.

Esta é uma entrevista feita com a Professora Berenice Bento, da Universidade de Brasília, realizada em 17 de agosto de 2023. Comentamos os 20 anos de sua tese A Reinvenção do Corpo, agora livro na sua terceira edição. Além disso, Berenice apresentou pesquisas e militância em andamento que serão publicadas nos seus novos livros, Dispositivo sionista e seus descontentes: Histórias de pessoas judias antissionistas e Abjeção: a construção histórica do racismo. Berenice analisa a história e a atualidade das relações coloniais e práticas de guerra e extermínio impostas por países europeus e seus aliados contra populações colonizadas e oprimidas, com destaque para o papel do corpo como meio de disputa, regulação e confronto. Valendo-se de uma abordagem interseccional, Berenice discute raça, gênero, sexualidade, idade, classe e política, fazendo um chamado para ação política e de pesquisa para pessoas acadêmicas.

While migration and queer studies are respected and well-established, their intersection as an interdisciplinary alliance deserves further research. This paper is part of the critical psychology project ‘Queering migration, migrating queer studies’ to discuss and address primarily the main challenges LGBTIQ+ migrants face around accommodation and mental health in detention in the UK context. Given the recent anti-immigration bill passed in July 2023 by the British parliament and the escalating difficulties to obtain asylum in this hostile environment, the paper reviews academic literature published between 2017 and 2023 on services LGBTIQ+ refugees and asylum seekers have received or have had access to in the UK. It critically reflects on what accommodation means within detention and removal centres and how the latter affects mental health and service provision questions for the LGBTIQ+ community.
Bringing to the fore Achille Mbembe’s conceptual framework of necropolitics in dialogue with Frantz Fanon’s psychosocial analytics of racism, this paper shows how LGBTIQ+ migration walks in between Foucauldian biopolitics and necropolitics as an emerging discourse. By mobilising a case study, the paper focuses first on why necropolitics is a useful framework to shed light, expose and resist existing hegemonies on LGBTIQ+ migration issues, particularly in the UK, and second, shows how ‘deathworlds’, and the living dead can be observed in the lives of LGBTIQ+ refugees and asylum seekers coming from Global South and detained in the UK. Nevertheless, we also understand the role of queerness in challenging misconceptions and resisting hegemonies in detention centres, which is a task for critical psychologists

LGBTI+ people living in favelas in Rio de Janeiro (Brazil) have been submitted to several challenges. Since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic brutally has hit favelas with disproportional number of deaths. This health emergency adds to the long-term ongoing epidemic of violence, particularly police violence, in favelas. We acknowledge that this problem is at least partially a product of unconscious racism with historical roots in colonialism. The LGBTI+ community members from favelas are particularly affected by because they are both special targets of violence and ignored or even excluded from public services and policies. Civil society organizations, such as Grupo Conexão G, responded to COVID-19 with food banks and other welfare actions for LGBTI+ people in favelas—which were nevertheless impacted by police violence. Conexão G then created the Observatório de Violência LGBTI+ em Favelas (Monitoring Centre of LGBTI+ Violence in Favelas), in which both authors of this article worked in different capacities. We analyze a report produced by Observatório that shows the reality of violence against LGBTI+ people in favelas. Although we notice unconscious motifs of racism and hatred against the LGBTI+ community, we also identify resistance to violence as an expression of unconscious desires—now for life, rather than destruction. We highlight the ambivalent position of recognition, which frames the possibility for identification while also justifying protection against destruction. As we see it, though, shelter against precarity (such as exposure to harm from COVID-19 and police violence) is necessary to keep one alive, thus producing life lines or desire for life. We conclude that recognition and desire are keys to respond to the harmful effects of racism, colonialism, and hatred against LGBTI+ people; nevertheless, we also advocate for keeping alert to both established and new forms of destruction that threat the LGBTI+ community.

Given the oppressive conditions present in educational spaces and the increasing lethal violence against the LGBTI+ population, it seems essential to consider the school as a place of production of living. We understand that violence and its effects are not ontologically connected to dissident bodies, but rather, we recognize their disruptive force against social norms. Therefore, we seek to make visible ways of being that emerge in the pedagogical process when intersected by oppressions and violence. To do this, we believe that telling dissident stories is an effort against the hegemonic narrative of the victorious group. The present article performs a narrative exercise based on the image of children and adolescents who establish other ways not only of performing but also of ensuring gender recognition in the school environment, thus announcing a queer pedagogy

This paper draws on the author’s experiences as a co-supervisor at the project “Building a process of choosing when ‘to choose’ is not an available verb” between 2009 and 2011. It was an Analysis of the Vocational project in which undergraduate interns in psychology led groups in educational and care settings on choosing. The author discusses two cases about the facilitators’ choices –recruiting new facilitators and the leave of one of them. As it is shown, facilitators make choices according to contexts and pushes from different institutions, such as universities, services, team, gender and race, psychology as a science and a job, and power relations in the city. This critical essay is limited by the more than ten years splitting experience from writing. Nonetheless, this paper can contribute to training psychologists, teachers, and educators.