Queer Precarities in and Out of Higher Education: Challenging Institutional Structures

Queer Precarities in and out of Higher Education looks at queer scholars pushing against institutional structures, and the queer knowledge that gets pushed out by universities. It provides insight into the work of, in and beyond academia as it is un-done in the contemporary (post)Covid moment, not least by queer academic-activists. This radical un-doing represents cycles of queer precarity, pragmatism and participation both situating and questioning the ‘queer arrival’ of institutionalized programmes and presences (e.g. queer and gender studies degrees, prominent and public feminist academics). In this book, the contributors push back against contemporary educational precarity, mobilizing queer insight and insistence; and push back against confinement of the University, socially and spatially. The collection brings together academic-activist perspectives to extend understandings of experiences of marginalization and inequality in higher education. It also documents the diversity of tactics with which queers negotiate and resist the various, shifting and interconnected forms of precarity and privilege found on the edges of academia. Contributors consider these issues from inside/outside academia and across career course, challenging the ‘queer arrival’ as emanating outward from the university to the community, from the academic to the activist, or from a state of privilege to a place of precarity.

Yvette Taylor is Professor of Education, University of Strathclyde, and Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences.

Matt Brim is Professor of Queer Studies in the English department at College of Staten Island, The City University of New York, USA. He writes about queer class and race relations in the academy, as well as queer literature and culture. His book Poor Queer Studies: Confronting Elitism in the University (2020) reorients the field of queer studies away from exclusionary institutions of higher education and toward working-class colleges, students, theories, and pedagogies. Brim is the author of James Baldwin and the Queer Imagination (2014), as well as an open access online guide for teaching the HIV/AIDS activist documentary film United in Anger: A History of ACT UP (2012).

Churnjeet Mahn is Reader in English at the University of Strathclyde and a fellow of the Young Academy of Scotland (Royal Society of Edinburgh).