Critical Hope and Resistance through Collective Poetic Inquiry: A Response to Federal Attacks on Queer and Trans Communities By Scholar Advocates

In early 2025, the U.S. federal administration has made sweeping and targeted attacks that impact queer, trans, non-binary, and gender expansive (QT/TGE) communities across the U.S. with the most harmful attacks directed at TGE youth and adults and those with intersectional forms of marginalization. As scholars in an academic social work program who hold intersectional QT identities, are allies/accomplices to QT communities, and/or engage in scholarship that promotes equity for QT communities, we have felt the impacts of these attacks daily since day one of the administration. The new and rapidly escalating federal threats compound the already hostile and increasingly anti-TGE political climate across U.S. states. We find ourselves grappling with chaos and a multitude of challenges: the erasure of federal funding for TGE-related research, the urgent need to bolster safety and ethics plans for our QT research participants, and the looming fear and worry that our research could be twisted and manipulated to further an anti-QT agenda. Moreover, we have been forced to curtail our social media presence, identify safety plans for ourselves and our families, and confront and cope with the collective trauma we are experiencing. Together, in the face of these daunting obstacles, we have not faltered and have re-committed ourselves to building community and identifying strategies for resistance.

It is with this spirit of critical hope that we engaged in a process of collective poetic inquiry (Faulkner, 2017) to process, share, and illuminate how the first 90 days of the administration has impacted us personally, professionally, and communally. The use of poetry as a scholarly method aligns with our values of challenging stigma (Author et al., 2021) and using research as a form of resistance (Strega & Brown, 2015). Poetry and the arts can serve as powerful tools to disrupt traditional academic conventions, amplify marginalized voices, and confront oppressive systems. We center our own experiences as queer, trans, and non-binary people; allies/accomplices; white, BIPOC, and Latina communities; parents; tenured, pre-tenure, and non-tenure track faculty; graduate students; U.S. citizens and immigrants; Disabled, neurodivergent, mad, and non-disabled individuals; scholars who engage in QT research; social workers, community organizers, and activists; and as a community committed to promoting intersectional social justice — always, and, in particular, during this time when attacks on marginalized communities are increasing at an exponential rate.

In this presentation, we will share our process of collective poetic inquiry and our final product, a poem illustrates raw emotional twists and turns; our process of resisting the psychological experience of fragmentation forced upon us by an individualizing, neo-liberal structure (Singh et al., 2024); our movement from individual reactions to collective action; and the necessity of critical hope in our endeavors. We invite attendees to journey with us as we build communal spaces, resist attacks on our communities, and hold hope towards a better, more just future.