Considerations for Queer and Trans Educational Research: Critical Methodological Practices in Politically Precarious Times

• In Event: Boots on the Ever-Shifting Ground: Engaging Critical Methodologies in Precarious Times

Abstract

This paper offers a dialogue between two scholars who have conducted queer and trans education studies in the Southeastern U.S.’s “Bible Belt.” Particularly for the past three years, anti-queer and anti-trans legislation focused on PK-12 and higher education settings have shaped our research projects and processes. Laws such as Florida’s “Don’t Say Gay” law (FL HB 1557, 2022), which “prohibits classroom discussion about sexual orientation or gender identity,” and bills such as Alabama’s (HB 312, 2023) censorship of “divisive concepts” have worked to illegalize the teaching and discussion of topics such as racism, gender, and sexuality in PK-12 and collegiate education. These political efforts have directly affected how we can and do conduct educational research in responsible and ethical ways.

In this discussion, we consider how these sociopolitical tensions affect how we engage in research. We explore:
How do these oppressive policies and laws shape both participants’ and researchers’ understandings of longstanding research expectations such as anonymity and privacy?
How do researchers engage in ethical and responsible data collection, analysis, and distribution when the very nature of the study potentially threatens participants’ and researchers’ safety?
How have these contexts shifted the ways that we now understand and practice methodologies?

We will offer examples of our own research projects, informed by queer and trans theories (e.g., Barad, 2015; Britzman, 1998). Due to space constraints, we offer two brief examples:
[Anonymized] shares a mixed methods study, with a focus on survey and interview-based data, with K12 teachers who actively incorporated queer and trans topics in their classes but were fearful of administration and political punishment. Over the course of the study, [Anonymized] had to reconsider, disrupt, and actively “queer” the consent process, as participants needed dynamic and new ways to participate in research that endangered them personally and professionally, and as even anonymous surveys prompted fear and concern given the sociopolitical contexts in which they worked.
In one example, [anonymized] shares experiences from a multi-year community engaged research project in which participants and community research partners shared ongoing and extensive experiences of discrimination and harassment across Mississippi and Alabama. [Anonymized] describes working through the tensions of supporting people experiencing hostility within boundaries set by an over-assertive IRB that viewed the work as ‘too risky’. In another example, [anonymized] shares the ways that school counselors and mental health counselors described their challenges and hurdles in supporting queer and trans youth as healthcare bans and parental notification laws spread across the Southeast.

Authors

• Stephanie Anne Shelton, University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill

• Kamden Strunk, Virginia Commonwealth University