Queer(y)ing board games as public pedagogy: ‘Playing out of bounds’ to activate LGBTQIA+ agency in academia and beyond

LGBTQIA+ people (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, plus more) face discrimination across many social contexts, including academia. This chapter considers board games as a mode of public pedagogy that interacts with formal pedagogy to sustain situations of injustice for LGBTQIA+ people both in and beyond academic settings. The chapter also considers how injustices affecting LGBTQIA+ people intersect with those relating to factors of race, Indigeneity, disability, age, social class, and more. The methodological approach is that of co-creative writing-based inquiry through witnessing and assemblage. Collaborative prose poems are used to reveal similarities and differences in the experiences of eight LGBTQIA+ co-creators writing from different-yet-intersecting backgrounds of lived experience. The prose poems show how literal board games reflect and reinstate ideologies that support maintenance of metaphorical power games involving social privilege and injustices in and beyond academic cultures. However, reflecting the argument from queer theory that agency often resides in the same locations as its regulation, the chapter also shows how queer pleasures can be found in board games despite their problems and poses agential possibilities through approaching academia’s metaphorical games in ways that queer(y) their rules to creatively broaden out the fields for play.