Scott L. Morgensen

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PhD: Anthropology (Women’s Studies)

Areas of Research / Publication

Queer studies; anthropology of sexuality, race, and colonialisms; queer and feminist ethnography; feminist and queer pedagogies; community-based and activist research methods.

Research Interests

I received my doctorate in anthropology and women’s studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. As an ethnographer and community-engaged researcher, I examine the formation and negotiation of relations across differences within cultural and social movements. My work in queer anthropology contributes to studies of sexuality’s racial, colonial, and global formations, as these connect such fields as Indigenous studies, critical ethnic studies, and American studies, and their articulations with my primary fields of anthropology, sexuality studies, and gender studies. I commit my teaching to feminist and queer pedagogies that center anti-racism and anti-colonialism, and I bridge teaching and scholarship through writerly and activist collaborations that support critical learning in the academy and in political communities.

My first book, Spaces between Us: Queer Settler Colonialism and Indigenous Decolonization

(University of Minnesota Press, 2011) examines the role of appropriation of indigeneity, white racial formation, and settler colonialism in the formation of U.S. queer politics. The book interprets ethnographic and historical cases in relation to the activist knowledges generated among Two-Spirit / Indigenous LGBTQ people and allied queer/trans of color activists. Spaces between Us received the Ruth Benedict Book Prize – Honorable Mention from the Association for Queer Anthropology. My current project examines the methodological contributions of queer and feminist ethnography to anthropology and gender and sexuality studies. I am participating concurrently in community-engaged research projects that document activist knowledge within multi-issue organizing and interpret the work of political relationships across differences.

I am a co-editor of the collections “Contested Histories of Racialization and the Legacies of Sir John A. Macdonald” (Journal of Critical Race Inquiry 3:1, 2016), “Karangatia: Calling Out Gender and Sexuality in Settler Societies” (Settler Colonial Studies 2:2, 2012) and Queer Indigenous Studies: Critical Interventions in Theory, Politics, and Literature(University of Arizona Press, 2011). I have published essays in such areas as pedagogies in gender studies, ethnographic methods, colonial masculinity, white settler queer primitivism, settler colonialism and Indigenous politics, and Indigenous HIV/AIDS activism.  I served as President of the Association for Queer Anthropology (2010-12) and as Co-Editor of Journal of Critical Race Inquiry (2014-17). I currently sit on the Board of Managing Editors of American Quarterly and the advisory board of American Ethnologist.

At Queen’s I served six years as Graduate Chair in Gender Studies (2012; 2015-19) during which time I supported the launch of the Gender Studies PhD Program. I co-directed the SNID - Studies in National and International Development lecture series (2010-12) and I currently serve as co-convener of the Queen’s Feminist Ethnography Network, which connects faculty, postgraduate, and student researchers who study and practice feminist ethnography and related methods. In Gender Studies I teach graduate courses on ethnography and activist research, and undergraduate courses on research methods, masculinities, and HIV/AIDS movements.

Recent and Forthcoming Publications (selected)

Review: Written By the Body: Gender Expansiveness and Indigenous Non-Cis Masculinities. By Lisa Tatonetti. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2021. p. 293. Journal of the History of Sexuality (forthcoming 2022).

Accountable Reasoning. Comment: Grant Arndt, “The Indian’s White Man: Indigenous Knowledge, Mutual Understanding, and the Politics of Indigenous Reason.” Current Anthropology 63(1): 22-23 (2022).

Heteronormativity. In Keywords in Gender and Sexuality Studies, The Keywords Feminist Editorial Collective (ed.). New York: New York University Press, 2021.

Encountering Indeterminacy: Colonial Contexts and Queer Imagining. Cultural Anthropology 31(4): 608-617 (2016).

Conditions of Critique: Responding to Indigenous Resurgence within Gender Studies. TSQ 3(1-2): 192-201 (2016).

Graduate Supervision

I currently accept supervisions in the Gender Studies PhD and MA programs, in the following areas: queer/trans studies; sexual and gender politics in transnational perspective; Indigenous studies; colonial studies; studies of HIV/AIDS (histories, cultures, politics); masculinity studies; ethnography; oral history; community-based research; activist research.

Current and Recent Graduate Supervisions

PhD supervisions

Adria-Kurchina-Tyson, Gender Studies PhD Program

Dorcas Okyere, Gender Studies PhD Program (co-supervised with Allison Goebel)

Amanda Watson, Gender Studies PhD Program (co-supervised with Trish Salah)

Geraldine King, Cultural Studies PhD Program

A.W. Lee (PhD 2015, Cultural Studies) (co-supervised with Kip Pegley)
Dissertation:  Performing ManChyna: Unmapping Promissory Exaltation, Multicultural Eugenics and the New Whiteness

Karl Hardy (PhD 2015, Cultural Studies)
Dissertation:  Unsettling Hope: Settler Colonialism and Utopianism

MA supervisions

Kanonhsyoone Janice Hill, Gender Studies MA Program

Sonny Cantalini, Gender Studies MA Program

Sara Shivafard, Gender Studies MA Program (co-supervised with Sari van Anders)

Michael Young (MA 2021, Gender Studies)
Major Research Paper: “Masculintimacies: Relations, Relationality, and Processes of Becoming in Beam & Hemphill's Brother to Brother and Scofield's Thunder Through My Veins”

Nat Rambold (MA 2021, Gender Studies)
Major Research Paper: “‘Our Homo and Native Land’: Colonial Legacies of Queer Masculinity in the Canadian Nation-State”

Steven Watt (MA 2020, Gender Studies)
Major Research Paper: “Collective Care in Response to Domination: Black Queer and Trans Livingness Amidst the Crises of HIV and Incarceration”

Jacob Barry (MA 2020, Gender Studies) (Co-supervised with Trish Salah)
Major Research Paper: “A Retelling of the Trans Autobiography”

Payal Majithia (MA 2019, Gender Studies)
Major Research Paper: “Queering Understandings of Desi and Sanskari in Diaspora”

Michelle Tam (MA 2018, Gender Studies)
MA Thesis:  Queer (and) Chinese: On Be(long)ing in Diaspora and Coming out of Queer Liberalism 

Brett Willes (MA 2017, Gender Studies)
MA Thesis: Drag, Demons and Dirt: Centering Indigenous Thought in Critiques of Prairie Queer Settler Colonialism

Avery Everhart (MA 2016, Gender Studies)
MA Thesis: Crises of In/Humanity: Posthumanism, Afrofuturism, and Science as/and Fiction

Monique Harvison (MA 2016, Gender Studies)
MA Thesis: White Gatekeeping and the Promise of Shelter: Confronting Colonial Logics within Women’s Anti-Violence Services

Natasha Stirrett (MA 2015, Gender Studies)
MA Thesis:  Revisiting the Sixties Scoop: Relationality, Kinship and Honoring Indigenous Stories

Dana Wesley (MA 2015, Gender Studies)
MA Thesis: Reimagining Two-Spirit Community: Critically Centering Narratives by Urban Two-Spirit Youth