Chris Peers

My career in the visual arts began as an artist studying at what is now the UNSW Faculty of Art Design and Architecture between 1982 and 1984, where I gained a BA in Visual Arts. I returned to university in 1995 completing a B Art Education with Honours in 1998. I then undertook a PhD on the history of art teacher education in Australia, graduating in 2003. I began teaching in primary and secondary schools in NSW between 2001 and 2006. Since 2007 I have worked at Monash in the Faculty of Education across the early childhood, primary and secondary programs, with special responsibility for the method Visual Arts for secondary teachers.

I am a queer theorist with a current focus on the implications of gender policy for transgender and gender variant people.  My training as a philosopher and queer theorist was undertaken between 2013 and 2021 in the compilation of my second doctorate, under the tutelage of Joanne Faulkner (Macquarie) Paul Patton (UNSW) and Nicole Anderson (Macquarie). This work allows me to explore links between sex identity, gender, the family, and education. In the past, my research has included the history of education, the relationship between educational history and the history of the concept of education, and the ways in which education calculates the value of human capital.

As a specialist in visual art education I am interested in the epistemological privilege enjoyed by mathematics and science, as well as cognitive psychology, in the structure of education as an academic discipline. Some of my work has investigated what has led to the subordination of visual arts in the curriculum hierarchy, which positions literacy and numeracy at its apex.  

I am continuing to explore the conceptual links between the forms of power in educatoin at an institutional level, and parallel forms of power in the family. This line of inquiry also explores the way in which human beings are already positioned in education through concepts of sex and race. In general I am interested in how to translate the work of Jacques Derrida with respect to the question of sex identity, especially the way sex frames authoritative professional roles in education and childcare. 

Chris has supervised students in research about the arts in education; early childhood policy; history and philosophy of education.