Queering Practice: Rethinking Power, Participation, and Change

This interactive KNOT explores how critically examining and disrupting normative assumptions around human experiences of gender and sexuality can strengthen community engagement, social change work, and institutional transformation. Drawing on queer theory, lived experience, and practitioner knowledge, participants will explore how heteronormativity subtly shapes systems, expectations, and outcomes across sectors. Through collaborative reflection, case studies, and creative prompts, students will consider what it means to make their practice more relational and inclusive.

Designed for students from any disciplinary background, this workshop aligns with SoCIETIE’s commitment to equity, transformation, and deep engagement. It will challenge students to think critically and act boldly, equipping them to question power, embrace complexity, and co-create change with community partners.

Students will be asked to read a short provocation (provided) and reflect on a moment in their life, study, or work where they conformed to, resisted, or questioned an expected norm.

• How to identify and critically engage with normative assumptions in institutions and engagement models

• How queering practice can generate more inclusive, reflexive, and imaginative approaches to change

• Ways to integrate queer ethics—ambiguity, resistance, relationality—into project design, community work, and problem-solving

• Strategies for navigating power, identity, and discomfort in collaborative spaces

Check out a big range of LGBTIQA youth led resources on this page: https://www.minus18.org.au/

This workshop is open to everyone, including those outside the LGBTIQA community. If you haven’t previously questioned gender or sexuality norms in your own life, this session may be especially valuable for expanding how you think about power, inclusion, and change.

Participants will draft a short “Queering Practice Intention” to guide their future work—this may be a statement, a question, a story, or an act of resistance. These reflections could be shared (anonymously or openly) in a collaborative digital space (as an example).