Queering the Poster: Disruptive Knowledge at the AACN Diversity Symposium

Feminist killjoy Sara Ahmed (²⁰⁰⁶) defines “queer” as “disturb[ing] the order of things” (p. 565). We seek here to conceptualize what queering academic nursing spaces might look like using a poster we presented as a case study. This article complements a previous article that laid out the theoretical framework of queer, norm-critical pedagogy for nursing education, and serves as a case-study for this approach (^{Nye & Dillard-Wright, 2023}). Norm-critical pedagogy disrupts hegemonic norms, power dynamics, and othering processes that are endemic in nursing education (^{Nye et al., 2023}; ^{Tengelin et al., 2019}). A reflexive, norm-critical approach to teaching and learning in nursing education facilitates teaching “against” oppression rather than reinforcing cultural hegemonies—embracing queerness (^{Kumashiro, 2002}). We concluded that article with a “call to question,” an invitation to our colleagues to examine the exercise of norms, power and othering employed in nursing education practice environments, structures, and systems as a way to lead to action.

Here we build on one of the questions we posed in that article: “How do we, as educators, model a norm-critical approach to nursing?” (^{Nye & Dillard-Wright, 2023}). This question first arose in response to a 2021 call for presentations from the American Association of Colleges of Nursing (AACN) Diversity Symposium. Deep in COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) times, we responded to this call with a proposal entitled “Queering the Classroom,” which was ultimately accepted for virtual poster presentation. Giving a poster at a virtual conference in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic required a shift in perspective—a familiar performance through a new, COVID-19 tinted lens replete with both challenges and possibilities (^{Sarabipour, 2020}). This created an opportunity for norm-critical engagement with our nursing educator peers in part because of the immediacy of access to other virtual platforms and resources afforded by a virtual format. We used the platform of the virtual poster session to “disturb the order of things” in the very process of presenting a poster, to both describe a radical anti-oppressive education praxis and to enact it at the same time.

With the current article, we chronicle the process of first theorizing and then developing our multimodal, democratic, space/time-transgressing performance. We begin with the background and...