Healthcare education and research continue to grapple with the limits of inherited epistemologies: frameworks that have long marginalised, pathologised, or erased trans, gender-diverse, and intersex lives. Scholarship on epistemic injustice (Hall 2017; Wesp et al. 2019) and situated knowledges (Haraway 1988) shows how these exclusions are embedded in the very processes through which knowledge is produced and legitimised. Insights from gender/sex pluralism (Monro 2005; 2019; Preciado 2013) further highlight how institutional systems struggle to accommodate the complexity of lived identities within and beyond binary frameworks. Transformative inclusion within healthcare settings therefore requires more than updated curricula or revised clinical guidelines: it calls for new methodological imagination (see e.g. Pendleton & Pezaro 2025).

This year’s TransCare conference invites scholars, practitioners, educators, and community researchers to explore how creative, interdisciplinary, and humanities‑driven methodologies can reshape the production of knowledge in healthcare. Building on the 2024 edition’s focus on educational tools, TransCare turns its attention to the research practices that make such tools possible. We ask how arts‑based, participatory, speculative, and community‑led approaches can open pedagogical and methodological pathways that affirm gender diversity, challenge normative assumptions, and cultivate critical and trans‑affirming pedagogies and research.

To do so, we aim to foreground methodology not as a technical procedure but as a site where knowledge, care, and power intersect. Approaches that centre lived experience, relationality, and reflexivity can unsettle dominant epistemic frames and generate new possibilities for teaching and practice. Attending to the affective and embodied dimensions of research and care (Malatino 2020; 2022) further highlights the need for methodologies that recognise and value ways of knowing and dealing with trans and intersex communities, particularly in challenging social and political settings.

The 2026 edition continues TransCare’s commitment to interdisciplinary exchange by emphasising methodology as a site of care, ethics, and transformation (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017). We welcome contributions that rethink how education and research are designed, conducted, interpreted, and taught, and that imagine new infrastructures for trans, gender-diverse, and intersex–inclusive healthcare education.

Scope of Contributions

We welcome contributions from across disciplines, sectors, and methodological traditions. Submissions may address, but are not limited to, the following areas:

• Creative, arts‑based, and practice‑led research methods in healthcare research and education (including performance, visual methods, creative writing, speculative and design‑based approaches)
• Participatory, community‑led, and co‑produced research
  (with trans, gender‑diverse, and intersex communities; peer‑research models; activist scholarship)
• Methodological innovation in healthcare education
  (curriculum design, pedagogical tools, simulation, experiential learning, digital and hybrid teaching)
• Ethics, care, and relational methodologies (care ethics, feminist and queer methodologies, embodied and affective approaches)
• Interdisciplinary and humanities‑driven approaches to healthcare research
  (critical theory, philosophy of science, STS, medical humanities, sociology, anthropology)
• Research addressing institutional, structural, and epistemic barriers in the inclusion of trans, gender-diverse, intersex and non-binary people (epistemic injustice, gender/sex pluralism, policy analysis, organisational change)
• Methodologies for working in challenging social and political contexts (hostile policy environments, safeguarding, trauma‑informed and resilience‑oriented approaches)
• Innovative approaches to data, evidence, and evaluation (qualitative, mixed‑methods, narrative, autoethnographic, and community‑validated forms of evidence)

We particularly encourage submissions that experiment with form, challenge disciplinary boundaries, or propose new infrastructures for trans, gender‑diverse, and intersex–inclusive healthcare research and education. However, please do not be intimidated: all approaches and levels of experimentation are welcome.

Publication Opportunity

We are also collecting expressions of interest for a collected volume on creative, interdisciplinary, and humanities‑driven methodologies for trans, gender‑diverse, and intersex–inclusive healthcare research and education.

If you wish to be considered for inclusion in this edited collection, please indicate this when submitting your abstract by ticking the box in the form. 

List of References

Hall, K. Q. (2017). Queer epistemology and epistemic injustice. In I. J. Kidd, J. Medina, & G. Pohlhaus Jr. (Eds.), The Routledge handbook of epistemic injustice (pp. 158–166). Routledge.

Haraway, D. (1988). Situated knowledges: The science question in feminism and the privilege of partial perspective. Feminist Studies, 14(3), 575–599.

Malatino, H. (2020). Trans care. University of Minnesota Press.
Malatino, H. (2022). Side affects: On being trans and feeling bad. University of Minnesota Press.

Monro, S. (2005). Gender politics: Activism, citizenship and sexual diversity. Pluto Press.

Monro, S. (2019). Non-binary and genderqueer: An overview of the field. International Journal of Transgenderism, 20(2–3), 126–131.

Pendleton, J., & Pezaro, S. (2025). From midwife to lead perinatal practitioner: A utopian vision. Birth, 52(3), 511–516.

Preciado, B. P. (2013). Testo Junkie: Sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era. The Feminist Press.

Puig de la Bellacasa, M. (2017). Matters of care: Speculative ethics in more than human worlds. University of Minnesota Press.

Wesp, L. M., Malcoe, L. H., Elliott, A., & Poteat, T. (2019). Intersectionality research for transgender health justice: A theory-driven conceptual framework for structural analysis of transgender health inequities. Transgender Health, 4(1), 287–296.