LGBT+ Youth, Violence & Political Activism
This talk tracks how cisheteronormativity is (re)produced in South African schools and society through everyday practices, and how these are resisted. In some schools, for example, where cisheteronormativity is ubiquitous and unquestioned, youth’s identification as LGBT+ is itself a significant act of resistance against normative power.
LGBT History Month 2026
Date: Monday 23 February 2026
Time: 14:00 - 16:00
Venue: Room 163, Clarice Pears Social Health and Wellbeing Building
Category: Staff workshops and seminars
Speaker: Professor Dennis Francis
This is an in-person event for UofG Staff and Students Only. A valid UofG Staff or Student email address is required to book your ticket.
Abtract:
This talk tracks how cisheteronormativity is (re)produced in South African schools and society through everyday practices, and how these are resisted. In some schools, for example, where cisheteronormativity is ubiquitous and unquestioned, youth’s identification as LGBT+ is itself a significant act of resistance against normative power. The talk uses this moment afforded by LGBT History Month to draw on cases such as post-apartheid schooling and the #RhodesMustFall moments to crystallise how LGBT+ youth, despite harsh contexts, persist as resistant actors rather than passive targets of a cisheteronormative structure. The talk concludes with a granular analysis of how LGBT+ youth have organised themselves and others through decolonial and liberatory praxis, offering glimpses of what social awareness and change might look like.
Brief bio: Dennis Francis is a South African scholar and activist whose work engages with questions of social inequality and education. Dennis is a former dean of education and is currently a Professor in the School of Education at the University of Glasgow. Their research, located in the sociology of education, employs qualitative approaches, including participatory art-based methods, and focuses on how educational structures, discourses and practices reproduce normativity and social inequality in education, and how these are resisted and challenged. Dennis’s most recent books are Troubling the Teaching and Learning of Gender and Sexuality Diversity in South African Education (2017), Queer Social Movements and Outreach Work in Schools: A Global Perspective (2021, with Jon I Kjaran & Jukka Lehtonen) and Queer Activism in South African Education: Disrupting Cis(hetero)normativity in Schools (2023). More about Dennis can be found here.
Light Refreshments will be available.
This is a Ferguson Bequest funded event.