Susan Talburt
Professor Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies- Specializations
Youth and sexualities; feminist and queer theory; ethnographic and qualitative methodologies; gender, sexuality, and knowledge creation in higher education; neoliberal cultural politics in the academy.
- Biography
Susan Talburt’s research engages gender and sexuality in the fields of youth studies and educational studies. In one strand of research, she uses queer theory to study the ways social scientific research, institutions, and popular culture regulate LGBT youth by framing them as “at-risk” and in need of adult help to develop particular subjectivities and identities. In another strand of inquiry, she theorizes the gendered workings of neoliberalism in governing faculty and student behaviors through such discourses as “the successful student,” “the personal professor,” “the productive faculty member,” “the international imperative in a global world,” or the “academic community.”
She is completing research into the institutionalization of gender studies in Chilean universities. The inquiry includes archival research and interviews with academics, activists, and NGO workers and focuses on the movement of “feminism” from its opposition to Pinochet’s dictatorship (1973-1990) to its integration into political structures during the transition to democracy and, finally, to its academic institutionalization. The project explores the workings of neoliberal institutions, neutrality in democratic consensus, and the transnational movement of feminist knowledges.
She is presently working on a project about the circulation of the figure of the “global gay youth.”
- Publications
Books
Youth Sexualities: Public Feelings and Contemporary Cultural Politics (2 volumes), edited by Susan Talburt (Praeger, 2018)
Nancy Lesko and Susan Talburt, eds. Keywords in Youth Studies: Tracing Affects, Movements, Knowledges (New York and London: Routledge, 2012).
American Educational Studies Association, Critics Choice Book Award, 2014.
Youth and Sexualities: Pleasure, Subversion, and Insubordination in and out of Schools, co-edited with Mary Lou Rasmussen and Eric Rofes (Palgrave, 2004)
Subject to Identity: Knowledge, Sexuality, and Academic Practices in Higher Education (SUNY, 2000)
Thinking Queer: Sexuality, Culture, and Education, co-edited with Shirley R. Steinberg (Peter Lang, 2000)
Selected Chapters and Articles
Susan Talburt and Nancy Lesko, “Toward a Different Youth Studies: Youth-and-Researchers as Affective Assemblages.” In Youth Cultures, Transitions, and Generations: Bridging the Gap in Youth Research, edited by Dan Woodman and Andy Bennett (171-85). New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.
Claudia Matus and Susan Talburt, “Producing Global Citizens for the Future: Space, Discourse, and Curricular Reform,” Compare: A Journal of International and Comparative Education 45, no. 2 (2015): 226-247.
Susan Talburt and Claudia Matus, “Confusing the Grid: Spatiotemporalities, Queer Imaginaries, and Movement,” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography 21, no. 6 (2014): 785-801.
Susan Talburt and Nancy Lesko, “Historicizing Youth Studies.” In The Critical Youth Studies Reader, edited by Awad Ibrahim and Shirley Steinberg (26-37). New York: Peter Lang, 2014.
Susan Talburt and Claudia Matus, “Orienting Ourselves to the Gay Penguin,” Journal of Emotion, Space, and Society 5 (2012): 36-44
Susan Talburt, “After-queer: Subjunctive Pedagogy,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23, no. 1 (2010): 49-64.
Susan Talburt and Mary Lou Rasmussen, “‘After-queer’ Tendencies in Queer Research,” International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education 23, no. 1 (2010): 1-14.
Claudia Matus and Susan Talburt, “Spatial Imaginaries: Universities, Internationalization, and Feminist Geographies,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 30, no. 4 (2009): 515-527.
Susan Talburt, “Toys, Pleasures, and the Future,” in Interrogating Heteronormativity in Primary Schools: Analysing the Work of the No Outsiders Project, edited by Renée DePalma and Elizabeth Atkinson. Stoke-on-Trent, UK: Trentham, 2009.
Susan Talburt, “Developing Students: Becoming Someone but not Anyone,” in Re/Constructing Policy in Higher Education: Feminist Poststructural Perspectives and Policy Analysis, edited by Elizabeth Allan, Susan Iverson, and Rebecca Ropers-Huilman. New York: Routledge, 2009.
Susan Talburt, “Queer Imaginings,” Journal of LGBT Youth 5, no. 3 (2008): 99-103.
Editorial Board Memberships
Feminist Formations