Queer Roots and Causes

Assistant Professor in the Department of Educational Leadership at Miami University

Co-visionary of Hill L. Waters, an arts-based collective

The victimization of queer youth both within and beyond schooling contexts in recent years has garnered growing public concern. Equally so, the premature deaths of Black youth at the hands of law enforcement and vigilante justices have increasingly captured public attention and calls for change. Despite being seen through monocausal frames, anti-Black and anti-queer violence are overlapping and mutually constitutive. Throughout his talk, Dr. Callier will illuminate connections between anti-Black and anti-queer violence as they shape the lives of youth of color. Centering the lives of three youth, Carl Joseph Walker Hoover, Jaheem Herrera, and Tyrone Williams, he will argue that the systematic premature and preventable deaths experienced by Black and queer youth are a function of state apparatuses and sociocultural institutions constructing youth of color and Black youth in particular as queer subjects.