LJ Slovin

LJ Slovin received their PhD in Curriculum and Pedagogy from the University of British Columbia. Their first book, Fierce, Fabulous, and Fluid: How Trans High School Students Work at Gender Nonconformity, is based on a yearlong ethnography conducted with trans youth in a high school. In the study, Slovin interrogates how dominant approaches to trans-inclusivity in schools reproduce constrained understandings of trans identity that are informed by and uphold structures of whiteness, settler colonialism, and ability. Slovin focuses on how this context demands significant labour from youth, including work they must perform daily to navigate relationships with teachers, peers, the curriculum, policy, the physical space of the school as well as to build worlds outside of adult surveillance to exist in their genders more capaciously. Before joining as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Bonham Centre, Slovin was an instructor at the Institute for Gender, Race, Sexuality and Social Justice at UBC and in the Women’s Studies Program at Langara College. They will join the faculty at the School for Child and Youth Care at the University of Victoria in 2025. Slovin was a Vanier Scholar, the 2020 recipient of the Pat Clifford Award, and the 2021 recipient of the Queer SIG Article of the Year Award at AERA. Their work has been published in Curriculum Inquiry, Sex Education, Journal of LGBT Youth, and RERM.