About Dr. JJ Wright & the queer joy! project
Dr. Wright is a scholar-advocate who works closely with regional, provincial, and inter/national organizations on projects to advance gender, racial, and disability justice. She frequently consults with community organizations on their projects, as well as collaborates with these groups for her ongoing research. Some of the organizations Dr. Wright has partnered with includes Egale Canada, the Sex Information and Education Council of Canada, the Canadian Women’s Foundation, West Coast LEAF, and The ArQuives: the largest independent LGBTQ2+ archive in the world.
The Queer Joy! Project is funded by a SSHRC Insight Development Grant awarded with Dr. Casey Burkholder, and it extends Dr. Wright’s research with 2SLGBTQ+ Canadians to examine queer joy as a transformative method of resistance against anti-2SLGBTQ+ hate and gender-based violence.
The project is using participatory visual arts-based methodologies (e.g., collaging, zine-making, short film creation) with 2SLGBTQ+ youth in Alberta and New Brunswick to explore queer joy as a method of enduring and thriving amidst an increasingly hostile and violent political climate. While the project is tracking queer, trans, and Two Spirit youth’s experiences of anti-queer and trans violence broadly speaking, it has a particular focus on gender-based violence prevention. The Queer Joy! Project considers how 2SLGBTQ+ sexual cultures, as countercultures, revise dominant approaches to sexual ethics, shift affective structures, and offer knowledge in service of educational and policy efforts to curb sexual and gendered violence.
Dr. Wright’s previous project, The Queer Sexual Joy Project, was a collaboration with Canada’s leading 2SLGBTQ+ advocacy organization, Egale Canada, and it was funded by the Public Health Agency of Canada. This work focused on understanding meaning-making about consent and gendered violence through the perspectives of queer and trans young people, particularly the ways that queer and trans sexual joy offers new forms of relationality grounded in authenticity, compersion, care, and mutuality. Here you can find: the main report of findings titled “Learning From Queer and Trans Sexual Joy: Cultivating Just, Pleasurable, and Affirming Sexual Cultures”; a report detailing six 2SLGBTQ+ youth- recommendations for a queer joy-centered approach to gender-based violence prevention education, and; the Queer and Trans Sexual Joy research zine.
Among other funded projects, Dr. Wright is part of a 2.9-million-dollar, 5-year longitudinal study with Egale Canada (Dr. Brittany Jakubiec and Dr. Celeste Pang), Dr. Merrick Pilling, and Dr. Becky Barrett funded by Public Safety Canada, which explores the impact of COVID-19 on 2SLGBTQIA+ communities’ experiences of hate and gender-based violence.
Dr. Wright is also part of a $3,000,000 project with the University of Alberta and the 2SLGBTQ+ Canadian Chamber of Commerce, which is examining the notion of ‘emancipatory entrepreneurship’ and the possibilities for removing systemic barriers that perpetuate economic precarity among 2SLGBTQ+ communities in Canada.
Dr. Wright is on the Editorial Board of four journals: Sex & Sexualities (American Sociological Association journal), the International Journal of LGBTQ+ Studies, the Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality, and Atlantis: Critical Studies in Gender and Social Justice. They are also on the Board of Directors of Community-based Research Canada (CBRC) and the Queer and Trans Health Collective. Additionally, they are Co-President of the Canadian Society for the Study of Education’s Queer Studies in Education and Culture (QSEC) Association.
SELECT AWARDS AND NOMINATIONS
In 2024, JJ was nominated by a community partner for an “Emerging Community-based Researcher Award ” from Community-based Research Canada. In 2019, JJ was the recipient of the University of Toronto’s “Graduate Award for Scholarly Achievement in the Area of Gender-Based Violence”, awarded to one graduate student across U of T’s three campuses. Their doctoral research was also funded by two Ontario Graduate Scholarships, a University of Toronto Graduate scholarship, and numerous other awards and grants. Additionally, JJ was nominated for a “Teaching Excellence Award” in 2019, 2020, 2024, and 2025 by their students.
KEEP IN TOUCH
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