Harking from Aotearoa New Zealand, this book provides an account of the postqualitative approaches employed to map the worlds of four trans secondary students and the possibilities for gender justice that these worlds offer. Reading these maps through an agential realist lens affords a sense of the material-discursive, multiplicitous, dis/continuous, and more-than-human becoming of these students, their genderings, and the worlds that co-constitute them. These dynamics are a hauntological matter: the im/possibilities of students’ presents are never simply here-now, entangled with pasts that have (not) been and futures that will (never) be. This is manifestly evident in the way the colonial invention of gender haunts students’ worlds, constraining response-abilities, but also in the wondrous potentialities that lie in wait at the edge of possibility, reminding us that more just worlds are always already present (even if only as exclusions). An agential realist ethics of response-ability requires tracing the entanglements that constitute the ongoing reconfiguration of relations that embody reality, or spacetimematterings, as a means of renegotiating im/possibilities.

Since completing their PhD in 2022, Ampersand (And) Pasley has been engaged in projects on sexisms in Australian universities, intersex communities and rainbow violence prevention in Aotearoa New Zealand, and research temporalities during their VisitANTS Fellowship at the University of Oulu, Finland. They are currently wrapping up their Marsden-funded study, which builds on the content of this book, co-designing gender-affirming education with trans and irawhiti takatāpui young people, and is in the process of building the legacy of this work, cultivating collaborations across Europe, Australasia, and Turtle Island. They also lead ongoing research into early childhood education and care, and in/accessible tertiary teaching and learning. In addition, Ampersand is co-editor-in-chief of the journal, Knowledge Cultures, co-leads the Australasian Queer Research Network, and their teaching addresses coloniality, sexuality education, gender and disability studies, and inclusive pedagogy.