U.S. LGBTQIA+ Students’ Experiences Studying Abroad

• In Event: Examining LGBTQIA+ student global mobility: Research at the intersection of queer identities in international higher education

Proposal

Little empirical scholarship has explored the role queer identity plays in an education abroad context. To date, there are only five empirical works focusing explicitly on LGBTQIA+ identifying students, where all participants in these five studies were exclusively LGBTQIA+ (Bingham et al., 2023) despite the fact that LGBTQIA+ students are more likely to study abroad than their heterosexual and cisgender peers (Bryant & Soria, 2015). The empirical scholarship has found queer identifying students faced homophobia, transphobia, sexual assault and rape, as well as a reinforcement and reduplication of hetero- and homonormative (Duggan, 2003) norms within their own queer communities (i.e., community policing - Brown, 2014; Donahue & Wise, 2021; Kimble et al., 2013; Michl et al., 2019; Willis, 2015). With such little scholarship affording attention to U.S. college LGBTQIA+ students on education abroad programs, zero scholarship investigates the role identity plays in political activism or protest during an international exchange educational opportunity.
This paper documents the findings from three rounds of interviews with U.S. college students who identify as part of the LGBTQIA+ community and also participated in a study abroad program for one semester or an academic year between Fall 2020 and Spring 2023. Among the findings, students spoke about the role of political discourses in their experiences, particularly comparing and contrasting politics more broadly in their host country and the U.S., as well as focusing explicitly on the distinctions of queer politics and rights in their host country compared to the U.S. The study focused specifically on the opposing political and social climates of the host countries and the students’ home country as pertains to LGBTQIA+ individuals center in many of the conversations with the n = 24 students interviewed. Furthermore, political activism is evoked through curated community each student fostered while abroad and their media consumption, but also through the political act of adopting queer as an overarching umbrella term to describe one’s own identity label when considering the anti-LGBTQIA+ backlash occurring in many state legislatures in the students’ home country and/or home states.
This paper extends this scholarship and presents the results from the qualitative study that employed semi-structured interviewing with a sample of n = 24 U.S. LGBTQIA+ college students who studied abroad during Spring 2023 or between Fall 2020 and Fall 2022. Each interview was conducted via Zoom, lasting roughly 45-75 minutes each. The interviews were transcribed through Rev.com and made reliable by a graduate research assistant. Once transcript reliability was complete, the research team utilized a Constructivist Grounded Theory (Charmaz, 2014) to conduct the data analysis. In this presentation, we will be drawing from specific examples to highlight how the heightened use of the word queer is a form of political activism in such a wrought time in LGBTQIA+ history, but also pulling examples from the qualitative interviews that demonstrate an active engagement with U.S. and host country politics indicative of a heightened political awareness that extends beyond their home country.

Authors

• Patrick Bingham, Wake Forest University

• Hunter Swanson