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This study plans to understand how queer experiences are protected or restricted in the academy. Do certain legal protections and shifts in the “normative” social frame on queer experiences empower academics to capture queer perspectives in scholarship? While individual states had seeked marriage equality, it was not until June 26, 2015 that United States legalized same-sex marriage nationally through the Supreme Court in Obergefell v. Hodges. Lived experiences are integral to how scholars navigate their work. Understanding how queer scholarship is impacted in the higher education space provides insight into the relationship between policy making and academic freedom.
I draw from theoretical contributions of queer and trans of color critique (Salas-SantaCruz, 2021), queer social movements and education (Josephson, 2020), and queering higher education organizational analyses (Morley & Leyton, 2023) to theorize how scholars in academia viewed the relationship of their scholarship in relation to their own identity and the political climate.
Organizational theory showcases how outside factors, the Supreme Court, affects actions within the organization. Literature on the power of academic freedom (Gariepy, 2015), has shown when academic freedom has been utilized against public policies.
The author identifies as an Asian American (Taiwanese) cisgender bisexual woman. Because of the author’s own experiences as a queer woman of color in academia, it is important to consider how positionality affects coding of the web scraped data.
This paper takes a quantitative approach and uses data scraping on sites such as google scholar and journal databases for the United States prior and post June 26, 2015. The data scraping would use text scraping and match use case on a list of phrases used by the queer community on paper titles and abstracts. It is important to examine the amicus briefs submitted for Obergefell v. Hodges and papers cited in the opinions from the Supreme Court Justices. The author aims to use platforms such as ResearchRabbit to map the growth of queer scholarship.
Preliminary findings show 59,500 results for the phrase “queerness” on Google Scholar. When the 2015 to 2024 time range was added to the search, 20,300 results remained. In the eight-year period, 34% of the scholarship found on google scholar was produced. This motivates the author to investigate the possible explanations for the amount of scholarship coalesced after 2015.
If there is statistical difference before the court cases are passed, queer academic dialogue could be affected by upcoming cases on the legal dockets. If there is no statistical difference, perhaps academic freedom is enough of a protection that queer scholarship is produced regardless of the national policy. If there is a statistical difference after the court cases are passed, national policy could allow academia to feel more comfortable producing queer scholarship.
As a more conservative Roberts Court reviews cases that the Supreme Court has once set as precedents, it is important to understand how public policy affects scholarship. The significance of this research lies in its contribution to understanding the relationship between academia’s freedom of speech and codified national sentiment.