Watch the Webinar: Queer and Trans Perspectives in Academia

During Pride Month 2021, SAGE Publishing (the parent of Social Science Space) hosted a panel discussion about the significance of LGBTQ+ narratives in higher education. The discussion examined the potential queer methodology and queer studies have in creating space for a more interdisciplinary and intersectional approach to the social sciences, positively disrupting the established deterministic modes of analysis. In taking LGBT studies and approaches beyond gender and sexuality, topics like queer heritage and gender abolitionism were explored. The conversation consequently highlighted the limitations in our vocabulary and understanding.

Ideas surrounding visibility and its implication for safety and identity were one of the many concepts that the panel challenged, as well as the tensions between our recent understanding of sexuality and identity and researching the LGBTQ+ community’s archive. The panel was rounded off with discussion of new possibilities for research and the challenges faced by universities and the social sciences to be more expansive and inclusive in their thinking.

Panelists:

Andrew Delatolla | Lecturer of Middle Eastern studies in the school of language, culture, and society at Leeds University, and research fellow at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics. His research focuses on issues of race, gender, and sexuality in relation to statehood and state formation. His recent publications include Civilization and the Making of the State in Lebanon and Syria (Palgrave, 2021) and Sexuality as a Standard of Civilization (ISQ, 2020).

Megan Todd | Senior lecturer of sociology at the University of Central Lancashire. Her projects include research on LGBTQ+ domestic abuse service users and online hate directed at sexualized and marginalized bodies. Bey, the author of Sexualities & Society (SAGE Publishing, 2020). is currently developing work on universities’ management of their LGBT+ heritage.

Marquis Bey | Assistant professor of African American studies at Northwestern University, whose research engages with the intersection between blackness and transness. Their work focuses on blackness and fugitivity, transness, and black feminist theory. Bey is the author of the forthcoming Black Trans Feminism (Duke University Press, 2022).

The panel is moderated by SAGE Publishing’s Lina Ashour.