Reimagining the queer classroom
Digital archive of queer scholarship at the Hunt-Simes Institute in Sexuality Studies
(About Us)
Education isn't neutral. It's a chance to imagine differently.
Our mission at hand
At HISS, we believe the classroom is more than a place to learn, it’s a space to question, collaborate, and reimagine. Too often, queer students are asked to adapt to systems that were never built for them. HISS set out to change that, creating a queer-led classroom where creativity, care, and embodied learning come first.
Over three years, we gathered emerging and established thinkers to experiment with what a truly inclusive education could look like. This archive exists to document that journey, and to invite others to keep imagining new ways of learning.
Our queer school is rooted in care and creativity. It centres experience over structure and invites reflection, revision and resistance. The HISS School Charter captures our values.
(Our Approach and Values)
This approach informs everything from how workshops are facilitated to how relationships are built across disciplines, generations and identities. HISS embraces the unfinished nature of learning, making space for uncertainty, play and discomfort as part of the process.
It’s a school that resists easy answers and static roles — where students, facilitators and collaborators learn with and from each other in ways that are embodied, situated and always evolving.
HISS School Charter
Disorientation
We disorient from harmful practices experienced in formal schooling.
Celebration
We celebrate queerness and transness however it manifests.
Commemoration
We commemorate queer and trans elders, past, present, and future.
Nurture
We nurture bodies, hearts, minds.
Listen
We listen with patience and care to diverse experiences and knowledges.
Question
We question norms, assumptions, privilege, and power.
Honour
We honour the interplay between comfort and discomfort.
Disrupt
We disrupt with purpose so that old and new ways of being can flourish together.
Experiment
We experiment with teaching and learning for justice and care.
** Drafting a Queer Normal School **
Explore our yearbook collections
Over its three-year arc, HISS explored what it means to learn, feel, and grow through a queer lens.
Queer Age / Queer Youth
Queer Relationality
In 2024, Queer Relationality explored how queer ways of being are shaped through connection — to others, to space, to institutions and to ourselves.
Through zine-making, critical karaoke and collaborative filmnotes, participants examined how relationships can become sites of knowledge, care and creative resistance.
Homecoming
In 2025, Homecoming brought together alumni and new cohorts to reflect, reconnect and collectively imagine what queer schooling could look like beyond the walls of the classroom.
It marked a moment of return and renewal, where the Queer School Charter was drafted, not as an endpoint, but as a shared beginning.
We thank all the queer scholars, educators and artists who shaped the HISS classroom. They held space, asked questions and reimagined what teaching can be.
(Our Faculty Scholars)
Lee Wallace
Victoria Rawlings
HISS is coordinated by Lee Wallace and Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow Victoria Rawlings.
Supported by the Sydney Social Sciences and Humanities Advanced Research Centre (SSSHARC).
Queer thanks go to more people than we can name. We're especially grateful to FASS Dean Lisa Adkins for backing us from the start; to Kelly Panchyshyn and Rachel Yang, who welcomed over a hundred faculty and students with humour and grace; to Huy Nguyen for transforming HISS into this beautiful digital home; to the SSSHARC team for their strategic, emotional, and operational support;
and to our fellow residents at RD Watt, who let us turn Level 2 into a queer classroom across three Mardi Gras seasons. We couldn’t have asked for better friends and allies.
Our 2023 HISS Faculty
Our 2024 HISS Faculty
Our 2025 HISS Faculty
Acknowledgements
With thanks to our partners and supporters who made HISS possible.
We also thank our Dean and acknowledge the Hunt-Simes and Norman Haire bequests, whose generous funding supported grants-in-aid for incoming students across all three years of the program.
(Institution Partners)
