Hannah Dyer

Biography

Dr. Hannah Dyer is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Child & Youth Studies and holds a PhD from the University of Toronto. Her research employs interdisciplinary methods to investigate how sexuality, gender and nation-state become entangled in theories of child development. She is interested in how aesthetic and expressive cultures of childhood reframe relationships to political crises, historical traumas and social debates about belonging. Drawing on queer theory and psychoanalytic theories of aesthetic expression, her work examines the affiliations between processes of cultural belonging and the child's psychological interiority. She turns to children's art and art about childhood to better understand how to repair justice and build hope in the aftermath of violence. Hannah's current project, The Queer Aesthetics of Childhood, explores what traces of history and memory can be observed in children's art and asks how children's aesthetic expressions can cause us to re-think what we know of gender and sexuality. While taking the child's material vulnerabilities and pressing need for care into account, this work also draws from the humanities' emphasis on aesthetics, fantasy and futurity.

Research Interest

Critical theories of childhood; Gender, sexuality and queer theory; The politics of girlhood; Children's art and the aesthetics of childhood; Geo-political conflict; Race/Racialization and diaspora; Memory studies and narrative; Film and visual studies; Psychoanalysis and object-relations