We wish we could say that legal and cultural advances in the United States had lessened the need for critical qualitative scholarship focused on lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) people. Unfortunately, such studies are as urgent—possibly more so—as ever. As of August 2023, the American Civil Liberties Union (2023) was tracking 492 bills across the United States that were written specifically to limit or deny rights of LGBTQ populations. Many proponents of these heinous bills, laws, and policies justify them using a contrived moral panic about transgender people (Pepin-Neff & Cohen, 2021). Simultaneously, and not coincidentally, conservative attacks have intensified on scholarship and curricula on white supremacy, patriarchy, heteronormativity, and other forms of oppression also in recent years. Most notably, critical race theory (CRT), although often misrepresented by its opponents, has come under fire (López et al., 2021). But such attacks do not distinguish CRT from other theories; all critical theories are in threat of censorship. As one example, Florida governor Ron DeSantis connected an African American history course to queer theory in an attempt to justify rejecting the course (Skoneki, 2023). Social science scholarship, especially critical and socially just qualitative research, has been under fire at least since the Reagan administration (Densin & Giardina, 2006, 2019; Solovey, 2020). The increasing threat of authoritarianism and white nationalism only bolsters already-existing threats (Giroux, 2020). We respect and commend all who persist as queer people, queer scholars, queer students, and those doing critical, socially just research with queer people, whether they are queer or not, in the face of, and despite, these considerable challenges.

As researchers continue to pursue knowledge in hopes of paving the way to a better tomorrow, we must continuously revisit our scholarship in order to search for new critical methods to work with LGBTQ participants, critical LGBTQ and queer theories, onto-epistemologies, and ethical commitments. Additionally, researchers often create partial, limited, superficial, and oppressive portraits of LGBTQ people (Halberstam, 2005). With this in mind, we issued a call for submissions from scholars engaged in critical qualitative research with queer populations that offered a departure from extant literature. We used queer as a capacious term that could encompass any assemblage of sexual and gender identities, practices, desires, fantasies, and bodies. Most of the articles in this issue feature educational researchers and studies. Our call was open to scholars of any discipline, but as educational studies researchers ourselves, we seemed to attract others in our sphere. We hope this does not discourage those in other fields from engaging with these contributions. We see them as having capacious applicability beyond the field of education. Thus, we are proud to present in this special issue, six articles that detail methodological considerations for conducting research alongside LGBTQ participants to create a more livable life for all queer people.

In what we believe is a significant, and will be an influential, methodological contribution, Quortne R. Hutchings’s “For Me, Us, Our Community: A Kiki Methodology of Black Queer Storytelling” is a celebration of Black queer life, community, worldmaking, language, stories, and media. Hutchings centers Black queer life as research methodology and method, introducing a podcast format to represent findings with Black queer participants. Just as Black queer people exert their agency daily in defiance of oppressive systems of white supremacist heteronormativity and “dominant Black hetero-discourses,” kiki methodology defies these norms in academic scholarship production. The podcast format facilitates kiking among Black queer researchers, participants, and readers, opening up possibilities for Black queer-centered scholarship in multiple disciplines.

Speaking back to critiques that general qualitative inquiry is insufficiently rigorous, Chase Catalano and Maria-Victoria Perez assert to the contrary that the methodological permeability of the approach is decidedly queer. In “Making a Case for General Qualitative Descriptive: Revealing Cisgender and Heterosexual Fragilities,” Catalano and Perez demonstrate how general qualitative inquiry enabled them to see the complexities faced by facilitators of LGBTQ+ social justice interventions (SJEIs), an underresearched practice in higher education. These scholars embraced general qualitative inquiry, enabling a “conceptual nimbleness” that revealed the importance of LGBTQ+ SJEIs as well as how these interventions may leave in place, or even reinforce, cis- and hetero-normative institutional culture. A general descriptive approach also enabled the authors to see the benefits and dangers to LGBTQ+ facilitators who conduct these programs.

Using the queer potential of ethnodrama, Matthew Yanko and Henry Lee illustrate the possibilities the method has for subverting heteronormative culture in elementary education. They fuse ethnodrama with queer theory and pedagogy to envision a curriculum that breaks binaries and normative gender relations. Their contribution is particularly, and unfortunately, highly relevant to the current historical moment where trans, gay, and lesbian curricula, teachers, and students are under intense conservative political attack and erasure.

In “The Ship of Theseus: Unsilencing and Methodological Considerations When Working With Trans Populations,” Gretchen Cook and Stella Bublitz recount their experiences as researcher and participant within a larger study. Cook, a heterosexual woman, and Bublitz, an asexual participant who identifies both as trans-femme and as having a non-binary gender identity, detail the lessons each learned throughout the inquiry process. While scholars have long debated the value of insider- and outsider-influenced perspectives within extant research, Cook and Bublitz provide a thoughtful and critical reflection on how their identities impacted their work.

In the fifth contribution to this special issue, Travis L. Wagner and S. Gavin Weiser describe their revolutionary process to generate and analyze data through queer digital forensics. With this method, the authors foraged through archival Internet footage to gain an understanding of how institutions of higher education have documented and represented university life for queer populations on campus. Wagner and Weisner remind readers that queer people have always been here, yet representation of LGBTQ+ people on the internet can be a double-edged sword.

Finally, we conclude this special issue with methodological reflections from our previous research. In “Creating Queer Epistemologies and Embodied Knowledge Through Narrative and Arts-Based Research,” we (J. Michael Denton and Leia K. Cain) describe and synthesize our separate experiences blending narrative and arts-based research design principles to explore holistic, nuanced understandings of the lives of queer people. Not only can blending these methods allow researchers to access deeper layers of meaning alongside queer participants, but storytelling and artmaking are both culturally and historically cemented into queer history and culture.

So goodbye yellow brick road
Where the dogs of society howl
You can’t plant me in your penthouse
I’m going back to my plough
    -Elton John, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”

Throughout the process of co-editing this special issue, we continually found ourselves returning to two of the most commonly associated works that feature the yellow brick road, The Wizard of Oz, beloved by many other queer people, and the song by Elton John, a flamboyant queer singer and AIDS philanthropist. In both the film and the song, the yellow brick road holds out a promise of something better in urban areas. But in both, the yellow brick road fails to deliver. It is a false hope—our protagonists feel used and return to the pastoral roots that they initially desired to escape. We, and it seems our contributors, also want to depart from the false promise of scholarly norms, traditions, concepts, methods, and approaches that do not serve queer people. So where to then?

Oh I’ve finally decided my future lies
Beyond the yellow brick road.
    -Elton John, “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”

The pastoral return in those works can be interpreted as an embrace of tradition and the normative. That would not seem to be a return interesting to the scholars in this issue. But these scholars do go “back” in various ways. We may go so far as to say they queer their (re)turns. Catalano and Perez return to the dismissed or discarded approach of general qualitative descriptive to find new purpose and use in it. Hutchings goes “back” to Black queer life, worldmaking, and communities. Wagner and Weiser literally go back in time for data. Cook and Bublitz go “back” to Cook’s previous research in which Bublitz served as a participant. Yanko and Lee perhaps go “back” less, though their scholarship may be better thought of as enacting a different future that may also be seen as going “back” to the world as it should have always been—to the dreams and hopes of our youth. Finally, we, (Denton and Cain) go “back” by rooting our rationale for combining methods in past queer, feminist, and art activism. We invite other scholars to say “so long” to oppressive scholarship roads.

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