Yvette Taylor

This research note explores methodological dimensions of conducting queer research in rural Scotland. Drawing on long-term engagement with LGBTQ+ communities in the Highlands, I reflect on the complexities of fieldwork, particularly around presence, participation, and absence. In organising a Queer Social Justice workshop, I interrogate the epistemic weight of the ‘non-event’ and question models of success in field-based research. My reflections are grounded in an ongoing interrogation of my own positionality as a queer, urban-based academic whose movement through Scottish geographies and institutions continually shapes what I can know and how I am known. I explore the productive potential of failure, absence, and improvisation in queer research and how these moments can offer meaningful sociological insight. In doing so, the piece contributes to key debates in qualitative and feminist-queer methodologies about how reflexivity, affect, and non-events can constitute sociological knowledge. The piece calls for a renewed attention to the politics of location, queer rurality, and the methodological potential of failure, silence, and the unplanned.

ExtractYvette Taylor Matt Brim Churnjeet Mahn Queers have been failed in institutional life, including via unemployment, impermanence, and misrecognition, and their experiences of precarity are plural and intersectional, extending in and out of the university. “Precarity” alludes to states of flux, insecurity, and uncertainty, and in pluralizing this term, the collection recognizes patterns within these states. Patterns of precarity include: the successful Queer and Gender Studies degree, only ever available to certain queers, shut down by conservative right-wing backlash; the funding for the LGBTQ+ outreach program cut in the wake of hetero-activism; the queer student “Dreamers” caught in shifting anti-immigrant winds; the temporary premises for the community workshop closed as part of a continued austerity drive; and the not-for-profit venue regenerated and made into exclusive apartments. There is a long history of queers not getting into and getting pushed out of social and educational institutions (Bérubé 2011; Haritaworn 2011; Taylor...

Family is widely regarded as a cornerstone of student support. When family support exist as an essential form of social capital making, rupture of family ties places students in a disadvantageous position. This paper focuses on estranged students’ accounts of their experiences of higher education, highlighting how capital dynamics shape their academic trajectories. Based on interviews with 21 estranged students, our research uncovers different dimensions of estranged students’ struggles and successes as they move through academia. This paper explores the social imagination that surrounds the university student, or ‘student experience’, as resting upon family support. The authors propose that widening participation policies and practices need to be more attuned to the realities that mark estranged students’ experiences, as they are not only impacted by the scarcity of either economic or social capital, but also by the instability of interrelated capitals that contribute to precarious and volatile experiences.