Keynote Speakers
Professor Karen Graves
Emeritus Professor of Educational Studies
Denison University (USA)
"Because We Stand in the Center of Progress toward Democracy":
Reflections on the History of LGBTQ+ Educators in the United States
In 1986 the indomitable civil rights activist Bayard Rustin argued that the central struggle for democracy in the United States had shifted to the gay rights movement. From his perspective, the most vulnerable group—the one that people could not bring themselves to accept—held the strategic key for all social change. His logic was that the most vulnerable group was the locus point for any movement toward a just social order; if one could extend respect to the least favored, one could surely respect the human dignity of all. Rustin concluded, “…because we stand in the center of progress toward democracy, we have a terrifying responsibility to the whole society.”[1] In her keynote address Karen Graves situates LGBTQ+ elementary and secondary teachers in the center of the twentieth-century gay rights movement in the United States. Drawing on her 2009 study, And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers, and later work, Graves shows how fierce efforts to exclude LGBTQ+ people from the teaching profession violated basic democratic principles, in school and in society. She argues that state efforts to purge LGBTQ+ educators during the Cold War reflected a commonly held belief, that to control the sexuality and gender identity of teachers was to shape the sexuality of the nation. By the 1970s individual teachers were making legal challenges to job discrimination based on sexuality, helping to advance civil rights for LGBTQ+ citizens. A wave of cultural change buoyed two widespread court victories in 2003 and 2020. Now, current conditions underscore the point that educators must be ever vigilant in safeguarding democracy and education. Broadly, this history addresses tensions between democratic rhetoric and educational practice regarding questions of access, policy reform, citizenship, and teacher agency. [1] Bayard Rustin, Time on Two Crosses: The Collected Writings of Bayard Rustin, edited by Devon W. Carbado and Donald Weise (San Francisco: Cleis Press, 2003), 275. See also, “From Montgomery to Stonewall,” 272-274, and “Black and Gay in the Civil Rights Movement: An Interview with Open Hands,” 281-291, in Time On Two Crosses.
Professor Karen Graves:
Biography
Karen Graves, Emeritus Professor of Educational Studies at Denison University (USA), is a former President of the History of Education Society (USA). Her publications include Girls' Schooling during the Progressive Era: From Female Scholar to Domesticated Citizen (1998), And They Were Wonderful Teachers: Florida’s Purge of Gay and Lesbian Teachers (2009), and Mad River, Marjorie Rowland, and the Quest for LGBTQ Teachers’ Rights (2022), with Margaret A. Nash. In 2023 she worked with co-editors Mirelsie Velázquez and Diana Gonçalves Vidal to edit a special issue of Historia Y Memoria De La Educación on “LGBTQ+ Histories of Education.” In 2015 the American Educational Research Association recognized Graves with its Queer Studies Body of Work Award. At Denison she received the college’s Teaching Excellence and Distinguished Service awards.
Professor Judith Harford
Full Professor of Education
School of Education, University College Dublin
"Words Importing the Masculine Gender Includes Females"[1]:
Gender, Catholicism and the Limits of Educational Democracy within the National University of Ireland
This keynote examines the admission of women to the constituent colleges of the National University of Ireland (NUI) as a lens through which to interrogate the limits of educational democracy. Established in 1908 as part of a political settlement to the ‘Irish university question,’ the NUI was conceived as a national, non-denominational and co-educational institution, open, in principle, to all. Drawing on university archives, student publications, and the records of the National University Women Graduates’ Association, the keynote traces how women navigated a university landscape ostensibly built upon the principles of equality but, in reality, founded upon male, middle-class and largely Catholic privilege. Strangers within, it reconstructs the complex, ambivalent and contested spaces in which women operated, both as students and academics, their presence simultaneously enabled and constrained within the project of a ‘national’ university. [1] University College Dublin Calendar, 1910–11, University College Dublin Archives.
Professor Judith Harford:
Biography
Judith Harford is Full Professor of Education at the School of Education, University College Dublin. The author of over eighty articles and chapters, her books include The Opening of University Education to Women in Ireland (Irish Academic Press, 2008); Secondary School Education in Ireland: History, Memories and Life Stories, 1922-67 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015); and Piety and Privilege: Catholic Secondary Schooling in Ireland and the Theocratic State, 1922-67 (Oxford University Press, 2021), the latter two co-authored with Tom O’ Donoghue. A Fulbright Scholar in the Social Sciences, she is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and the National Academy of Social Sciences, UK. She has held visiting appointments at the University of Cambridge, Harvard University, the University of Toronto and Boston College. She contributes regularly to the national press on educational issues and was VP for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in the College of Social Sciences and Law, UCD in the period 2018-2021. She was awarded the Irish Research Council Impact Researcher of the Year Award in 2022 in recognition of her work in the area of gender and social class inequalities in education.