Queer Digital Forensics as Methodology for Documenting Queer Culture at Higher Education Institutions

Queer subjectivities have always been under attack, but with a tipping point for trans inclusion seemingly occurring in 2014 (Steinmetz, 2014), in the close to 10 years since that time, we have seen that visibility is indeed a trap (Edenborg, 2020). As such, in the preceding few years, we have witnessed a resurgence of attacks on the humanity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, asexual, and two-spirit (LGBTQIA2S+) people in the form of a new trans moral panic. This article proposes a methodological approach to escape the memory hole that presumes that queer peoples were never here. By leveraging the Internet Archive’s tool, the Wayback Machine, we purposefully sample several higher education institutions to explore how the living documents of internet presence have altered over the years.

First, we delve into building an understanding of the climate of inclusion and belonging in institutions of higher education (IHE) for LGBTQIA2S+ people (students, staff, and faculty), moving into the role of archives in preserving histories and memories before building out what we call queer digital forensics. Queer digital forensics is a methodological approach that leans into queerness, or that which is unstable in its production and alteration—engaging with the recursive folds generated through web-based technology, which is continuously altering. These alterations sometimes orient toward a change in the aesthetic or functional design (for instance, moving from HTML4 to HTML5) or to reflect a name change or change in services. Sometimes these changes are rooted in a backlash against the presumably political nature of support systems for marginalized peoples in IHEs. Despite this presumption of left-leaning politics assumed by IHEs, Ferguson (2012) argues that the revolutionary potentiality of these spaces, as seen in the student movements of the 1960s and 1970s that helped to create these spaces (Beemyn, 2003; Patton, 2010), has since been “absorbed by universities such that the institution remained largely unchanged by for an additional veneer of diversity” (Smithers & Eaton, 2019, p. 2) thus becoming functional non-performatives (Ahmed, 2006a, 2012). This performative approach to inclusion allows these cultural centers to function as mere window dressing (Marine & Nicolazzo, 2014), sanitized and tidied up from their original radical purpose, queer liberation. This project aims to craft a new methodology to uncover the changes through history using sub-institutional documents (Weiser et al., 2018) through an iterative approach we call queer digital forensics.

This literature offers an overview of the historical relationship between queerness and IHEs. Additionally, the review explores the relationship between archives, historiography, and queer communities highlighting emergent issues within digital media. Following these two contexts, the literature turns toward the historical utilization of digital forensics, which follows with a reflection of the potentialities provided by a queer intervention within digital forensics methods.

The cultural climate of IHEs remains a well-documented yet fraught conversation. Beemyn (2003) uncovered the narratives of early movements of queer activism in university contexts that illustrate that university-based queer activism sought influence from broader queer activist movements. Many of these activists found community with such organizations as the Gay Liberation Front, the Mattachine Society, and the Daughters of Bilitis. However, much of the documented queer history in a U.S. context overemphasized urban gay experiences. However, engagement with these organizations helped to found the first LGBT Center on a college campus at the University of Michigan in 1971 (Spectrum Center, n.d.). Moreover, a braided group of community and college activists often worked in tandem in order to craft change (Beemyn, 2003). For instance, by following the work of the Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (Miller & Raj, 2020), queer activists have long fought for recognition and equity within IHEs.

While IHEs routinely engage in campus climate surveys, most only reaffirm that these institutions remain exclusionary to marginalized groups (Ahmed, 2006b; Griffin, 2016; Harper, 2015). Coley and Das (2020) found that 62% of 4-year not-for-profit universities had an LGBTQ student group. The presence of support groups is vital as LGBTQIA2S+ student support groups remain vital to LGBTQIA2S+ students’ belonging (Parker, 2021; Vaccaro & Newman, 2017).

Coley and Das (2020) found a higher preponderance of LGBTQIA2S+ student support groups in favorable political contexts. Likewise, our past work explores tensions concerning being queer and/or trans while advocating for queer and/or trans people in a higher education context (Weiser et al., 2018) in two contexts (Stasicky et al., under review). Moreover, Lange et al. (2019) explored the state of research on LGBTQIA2S+ individuals within higher education and discovered that since Renn’s (2010) work, more recent scholarship continues to evolve and illuminate “new perspectives on queer and trans experiences in higher education” and that “institutions continue to reify normative systems that impact queer and trans individuals” (p. 523). Moreover, Garvey et al. (2017) examined the perceptions of climate for LGBTQIA2S+ students from 1944 to 2003 and found by engaging with this work that generational progress and improved perceptions of campus climate for LGBTQ students (p. 813) are evident.

Duran et al. (2022) tracked the longitudinal rise of the LGBT Higher Education Practitioner noting:

While the climate for LGBTQIA2S+ individuals within higher education has certainly improved (Garvey et al., 2017), a resurgent rise of attacks on queer peoples illustrates that visibility is a trap (Edenborg, 2020) despite being close to the 10th anniversary of the so-called trans tipping point (Steinmetz, 2014). As such, it is essential to document the current climate for queer people within higher education and the institutional discourses concerning our community to keep fighting for intersectional liberatory justice for queer people in IHEs.

Reflecting on work within the government archives of South Africa, Verne Harris (2002) discusses what he terms the “archival sliver,” or the reality that archives hold only, at best, a minuscule representation of a broader historical story. Using South African government archives as a case study, Harris argues that institutional archives through intentional destruction and unintentional negligence lose records. Institutions exist as non-neutral agents in the production of archival knowledge and, often, lose histories of non-normative identities through erasure and ignorance. Queer persons are one of these communities.

Following the intellectual arguments of queer historians like Michel Foucault (1978) and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1990), Melissa Adler (2017) observes relationships between knowledge organization and the categorization of queer bodies by co-locating archival representations of queer bodies with attempts to regulate and control those bodies within normative frameworks. For Adler, queerness’s earliest emergences within archives occurred voyeuristically through the abnormal and the over-medicalized. While such an archival gaze produces undeniable acts of violence and erasure upon queer bodies, such sites also produce moments of complication and resistance. Jules Gill-Peterson (2018), for example, asserts that historical medical records of gender dysphoric children undergoing surgical interventions open up a broader canon of transgender history. Additionally, Heather Love (2009) suggests queer archives to be inherently bound up within affective ideas of loss. While there are undoubtedly tangible examples of both systematic destruction (Bauer, 2017) and accidental erasure (Baggett et al., 2021) across queer archival contexts, queer archives have also become sites of potentiality rather than absence.

In particular, Cait McKinney (2020) argues for reconsidering the archival sites where we read and identify queerness. By identifying the communication-based labor of queerness as a site of potentiality, McKinney argues that objects like the index cards of lesbian support hotlines produce radical historiographies. Producing queer archives requires an intentional reading against the grain to reframe the historical contexts within which objects emerge. Examples of reimagining the documents and location of queer archives include looking to YouTube for digital histories of queer media activism (Wagner, 2019), and revisiting early internet communication platforms to expand AIDS history (Brewster & Ruberg, 2020). Further, Lucas Hilderbrand (2006) identifies the role of formats and objects in making haptic queer history, often at the expense of digital sustainability (Wagner, 2019). In turn, reevaluating preexisting historical records and their myriad iterations offers new, and vital, histories of queerness. Surfacing these histories requires deploying innovative methods of telling queer history. Among these new tools are queer digital forensics.

This research offers an application of queer digital forensics as it pertains to the publicly available data on four university websites. As we will show, these websites represent a broad array of geographic, populational, and ideological variations within IHEs and thus allow us to examine the intricacies behind inclusive, pro-queer universities, as well as resolutely anti-queer spaces. The research offers a novel approach to digital document analysis that takes into account the multifaceted nature of websites, especially university websites with their multiple, intersecting layers. We believe that this research offers both theoretical and practical approaches to qualitative, digital analysis relevant to individuals within digital ethnography, as well as higher education studies. Travis Wagner, a white, gender queer, queer person with a doctorate, approaches this work from their broader work within queer archives and digital curation and is interested in the ways that queerness surfaces both intentionally and accidentally within digitally mediated spaces. Gavin Weiser is a white, queer of gender and sexuality, scholar located within the field of higher education and student affairs while coming to this work from an interdisciplinary orientation and is interested in how we can work toward the liberatory potentialities of education understood broadly.

Digital forensics represents tools and technologies associated with “the preservation, validation, identification, analysis, interpretation, documentation, and presentation” of digital objects and their “source,” often with the intention of contextualizing primarily digital events (Årnes, 2017, p. 4). While initially associated with cybersecurity and digital crime contexts, the utilization of digital forensics encompasses digital object navigation in a technologically interconnected world. Given that archival documents are increasingly themselves born-digital, the methodologies of digital forensics help make concrete born-digital approaches to document analysis (Rogers, 2019). Indeed, like document analysis (Bowen, 2009), digital forensics allows researchers to examine digital objects as evolving, iterative documents rich with hidden informational palimpsests (Hulle, 2021). While we concede that the openness of such processes invariably aids in flourishing misinformation, we equally believe that their utilization and deployment offer counter-discursive extensions for critical document analysis (Wilson-Kovacs et al., 2022). The innovative utilization of digital forensics, for example, allows for explorations of epistemic knowledge values around biomedical labor practices (Hodges, 2021), while helping to confront misnomers about algorithmic neutrality enacted through AI-generated videos that reproduce and extend sexist and misogynistic video content (e.g., deepfake pornography) (Wagner & Blewer, 2019). We extend the potentials of digital forensics by deploying the methodology that enumerates and analyzes queer potentialities within the digital records in both support of and opposition to queerness.

By queering digital forensics, one can surface queer embodiment and its presence in innovative and affirming ways. For example, Mar Hicks (2019) reframes the prehistory of computational code and language to call attention to attempts by programmers to normativize identity through erasing transgender identities from data records. Others extend Hicks’s observations across digital documents and contexts, noting both the way data records conflate and essentialize queer identities as well as deploy human-built algorithms to reify a cisnormativity (Donnelly et al., 2022; Scheuerman et al., 2019). Queering digital forensics affords the possibility of identifying how digital platforms also reinforce what digital objects become visible within a platform, often through queer-exclusionary content moderation (Haimson & Hoffmann, 2016; Thach et al., 2022).

While these examples certainly extend a more considerable social understanding of normative ideology’s erasure of queer embodiments, limiting the scope of digital forensics to identifying erasure can result in reproducing the very same misperceptions of queer embodiment within the archival record, wherein lack and absence become presumed realities. To queer the idea of digital forensics, we argue, means to locate moments where queer resilience persists despite its potential erasure or absence. Queer digital curation raises questions of production, and reorientations toward hidden labor provide an ideal framework for how to queer digital curation by asking not only how things were erased or altered but equally what happens to our relationship to digital objects when we rediscover queerness within its past folds and iterations. Considering this conceptualization, we now consider the project’s theoretical underpinnings.

As noted, our work argues that the production of knowledge, history, and its institutional representation all exist to reify and prioritize normative power structures. As such, while we follow along constructivist paradigms arguing for one’s reality being deeply rooted in lived experience, we contend with the actualities that broader social structures and discourses produce different degrees of mobility and visibility for those lived experiences (Ben-Ari & Enosh, 2019; Lincoln & Guba, 2013). For example, both heteronormativity and cisnormativity disproportionately impact queer communities, given that social spaces, structures, and technologies were designed for and center the needs of cisgender, heterosexual individuals (Serano, 2016; Warner, 1993). In turn, various sociotechnical systems impact and effectively produce different worldviews for queer populations (Spade, 2015; Weiser & Wagner, 2017). In turn, we maintain, like Sara Ahmed’s (2006b) own understandings of the sedimentary nature of queerness within spaces, that queerness as a presence is often tangibly within a space, even if somehow simultaneously invisible. Equally, we follow the theorizing by Jack Halberstam (2011) by noting that failure consistently emerges against normativity, thus becoming a facet of queerness, which belies the repetition and constant insistence by queer communities to be acknowledged despite erasure. So, while constructivist approaches might require understanding the production of digital objects as individually realized, digital objects, specifically the ones we explore within our queered approach to digital forensics, also routinely work to dilute the meaning-making of queer communities and, in turn, we examine how such queer representations construct within themselves unique queer potentialities.

To conduct our digital forensic analysis of higher education web pages focused on queer inclusion, we utilized the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, which takes iterative snapshots of webpages, allowing an individual to browse past versions of a website and chronicle aesthetic design changes and alterations to the information provided on those pages (Bowyer, 2021). While still requiring proper standards of practices and protocols of use, the Wayback Machine nonetheless offers insight into shifts in web-based culture (Maemura et al., 2018). While methodological approaches still require nuance, by providing tangible examples of websites’ previous iterations, one can help to identify how biases emerge within national web archives (Hegarty, 2022) while also providing evidence for ideological changes around the valuing of queer identities during the administration change of U.S. politicians (Weiser et al., 2020). More quantitative applications of the Wayback Machine within educational research utilize the tool to explore economic topics such as funding shifts within land grant universities (Moore & Burns, 2020). Our article, however, explores the Wayback Machine’s function as a tool for queer digital forensics and thus takes a more purposeful (Suri, 2011) sampling approach rather than randomized webpages, allowing us to contextualize and historicize shifts in queer representation within higher education websites.

As of Renn’s 2010 analysis, there exist at least 260 LGBT Centers in the United States on a university campus (Consortium of Higher Education LGBT Resource Professionals, 2023). Following previous scholarship, we define an LGBT center as having at least a part-time (20 hours/week) professional primarily responsible for providing services to an LGBT community. Using this data set, we have several institutions to examine. We also made use of the Campus Pride Index (CPI), which offers IHEs a “national standard for improving the quality of life for LGBTQIA2 S and ally people” while “assist[ing]” in increasing such quality (Campus Pride, 2023). Utilizing the Campus Pride Index follows the precedent of scholars utilizing the CPI as a benchmarking tool to understand the climate for LGBTQIA2S+ students (Garvey, Rankin, et al., 2017; Joseph, 2022).

We used this tool to identify some of the highest-rated and lowest-rated institutions to demarcate some differences between these groups. As such, we focused on a random sample of schools from the CPI “Worst List.” Of the 193 institutions on this list, only two lacked religious affiliation—Hillsdale College and Palm Beach Atlantic. Hillsdale College’s presence reflects its much-adored place within the eyes of the contemporary conservative movement (Green, 2023). All of the institutions on the Worst List have either current or historical ties to a religious denomination. As such, we here focused on both a religious institution that has a high rating (Virginia Wesleyan University), a historically religious institution on the Worst List (Hillsdale), as well as two secular schools, one with a high CPI rating (University of Michigan) as well as a secular institution with a low CPI rating (Oklahoma City University). The aim is to gather an intentionally broad, yet purposeful selection of IHEs.

Like many vaguely religious, conservative affiliated universities, Hillsdale College contains minimal reference to topics of queer identities. Searches on Hillsdale’s page for the term “transgender,” for example, yield few results, and those that emerge include troubling articles on topics such as “Gender Ideology Run Amok” and the alleged impact of expanding cultural understandings around gender as being one of many factors resulting in “Our Increasingly Unrecognizable Civilization.” Both linked to keynote speeches given at Hillsdale, suggesting that such negation of transgender identity helps further embolden the university’s ranking by the Campus Pride Index. Indeed, queerness as an embodied identity is only ever implicit within Hillsdale’s college website, often used as an image for articles. For example, the image in the article mentioned above on gender ideology includes a picture of a child cut off from the shoulders up carrying a transgender flag and running across a field photoshopped to match the pride flag (see Figure 1).

While it might be surprising to see any iconography related to queer children within Hillsdale’s website, the contextualization afforded by queered digital forensics asks us to consider the digital objects related to other elements within the digital ecosystem. For example, aside from the alleged “amokness” of gender ideology, the story is placed alongside stories of civil and political design, thus placing the disembodied child within a threatened future vis-à-vis Lee Edelman’s (2004) framing of “the Ponzi scheme of reproductive futurism” wherein the child serves as a figure who always exists in the future and is thus the object of a threat of current political choices, especially those related to advances in queer inclusion (p. 16). Indeed, the language evoked by the “Gender Ideology Run Amok” article alleges that the rise of transgender representation would “turn our children against themselves” and thus “bring America to its knees.” Explicit in this statement is a conflation of queer children with the ruin of America, utilizing the implicit need for their future protection as a means with which to protect them and, in turn, protect America.

Yet, in order for the Hillsdale digital objects to evoke concern for the threat of transgender children in the future, the article necessitated the utilization of a child associated with queer iconography. By downloading the image file associated with the article, one finds the image labeled “mercedes-mehling-KLKskEi777M-unsplash-627x376,” likely a title associated with the image metadata from the original artist’s photograph. Indeed, when visiting Mercedes Mehling’s website, one can learn that the image is part of Mehling’s “Pride 2019” collection of photographs, which are displayed prominently next to images of protests for reproductive autonomy, likely centering Mehling’s politics against those of Hillsdale and, further, suggesting an unauthorized use of the photograph in Hillsdale’s promotion (see Figure 2).

No apparent rights or credits are given to Mehling’s work, nor is it clear if Mehling permitted the use of the image.¹ However, this representation suggests that the Hillside website administrator likely engaged in some variation of a Google Image search for “transgender child” and pulled this image for inclusion within the website. The implications of this utilization are complicated beyond mere questions of copyright infringement, as the circulation of the image here is undeniably one rooted in transphobic sentiments. However, deploying the image within their article increases rather than decreases the opportunity for the image to emerge within a Google search, thus exposing and increasing the potentialities of queer embodiment in web searches. By further reverse image searching Mehling’s photograph, it becomes apparent that it is utilized frequently in mostly pro-queer articles regarding youth and gender identity (see Figure 3).

While it is impossible to know the design approaches of Hillsdale’s website administrator, it is plausible that the image was gathered from one of these many websites in an attempt to respond directly to their articles. More simply, to evoke the image and ideas of transgender youth potentially destroying America, Hillsdale had to seek out and use digital objects supportive of and valuing queer embodiment. Wherein a traditional approach to digital content analysis, even informed by queer theory, might rightly read Hillsdale’s website as a diatribe against affirming transgender youth, without the tools of digital forensics, understanding the distribution of pro-queer media within this discourse might have remained underexamined. Conversely, a traditional digital-forensics-based approach would have provided a tool for tracking the movement of an image and its original locations as a seemingly neutral process. However, by queering digital forensics, one can understand the potentialities of queer growth and resilience, latent within the seemingly viral spread of a particular image of an unknown, queer-adjacent child.

While it is essential to contextualize the above analysis within a broader set of digital forensics tools, none of these use the aforementioned Wayback Machine to look at the evolution of queer identity within a university website. The inability to surface explicit discussion of queer identity on campus likely reflects Hillsdale’s imagined version of their university as void of queer people entirely. Denoting any space for diverse student support on Hillsdale’s campus seems impossible, as screen grabs from 2023 and 2017 (via the Wayback Machine) show no center or support system for students of diverse identities, queer or otherwise (see Figure 4).

Virginia Wesleyan University (VWU) is a small private university in coastal Virginia that enrolls just over 1,600 students annually. The school has historical connections with the United Methodist Church but is currently non-sectarian, like Hillsdale College. Despite these similarities, these two schools are quite different when engaging in a queer digital forensic analysis. Searching VWU’s website for such terms as “transgender,” for instance, revealed several significant points of data, including a result for their faculty handbook, which includes a five-page “Policy on Transgender Students and Employees,” which adds gender identity to their non-discrimination policy and engages with the National Center for Transgender Equality to craft their definition of transgender. Their policy also includes language on transgender student-athletes, drawing upon the language outlined by the NCAA for transgender student-athletes.

Despite not having an LGBT center or even a multicultural center—when searching for information from The Lighthouse—which appears to be VWU’s academic success center, it shares resources for historically marginalized communities related to studying abroad, which includes LGBTQIA2S+ students. Of the 20 resources proffered here, three are other institutions of higher education, and only one of these links shows up as a 404 error—something that commonly happens with resource lists on institutional websites (Wagner & Crowley, 2020). However, these resources are mainly about navigating barriers common to being part of the LGBTQIA2S+ community rather than celebrating this diverse community; this is likewise a common issue when dominant cultures write about non-dominant identities and experiences. Only three captures of this site exist on the Wayback Machine, and little has changed besides new resources titled The Dos and Don’ts of Being an LGBTQ+ Ally During Study Abroad and 10 Tips for Being BIPOC Abroad. These additions beg the question if these are added for the sake of functional non-performatives (Ahmed, 2006a, 2012) to bring about only a veneer of diversity rather than radical inclusion (Smithers & Eaton, 2019).

It does not appear that VWU has a dedicated LGBT student center. However, its site has several resources, including a dedicated webpage for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (see Figure 5). Included on this is a page on Trans* Policy as well as a Google form individuals can complete for Preferred Name/Pronoun, which VWU began doing in the spring of 2020. Despite this, VWU cannot accommodate name changes on student ID cards because these are considered legal documents (see Figure 6). This rationale is one often proffered by institutions of higher education not to have chosen² names on student ID cards. This site, in particular, was captured by the Wayback Machine 28 times between June 2021 and April 2023. The largest difference between (see Figure 7) and the historical version from June 2021 is the removal of a tab titled “Gender and Sexuality Equity,” which used to direct to the Office of Gender and Sexuality Equity; based on contemporary research on their website, however, it seems such links no longer exist on the VWU campus. This absence is noteworthy as the only current reference to the Office of Gender and Sexuality Equity on their campus comes from this DEI website on their list of accomplishments in which the site boasts that in 2020, the Women’s Resource Center was “redefined” as the Office of Gender and Sexuality Equity in order to “better reflect its current mission and campus need,” yet this office despite the campus need seems to no longer exist on their internet presence.

Examples such as this refiguring provide necessary reminders of the evidentiary value of documents to counter exclusionary institutional discourse, particularly around the visible and explicit support of queer populations (Braquet, 2021) so that the reality of these services is not lost to time (Harris, 2002). The center’s Twitter and Facebook sites have not been updated since 2020 and 2022, respectively. The lone staff member of the Historical Office of Gender and Sexuality Equity was a faculty member who no longer lists their affiliation with the office on their current faculty profile. One can only understand that this office once existed at VWU by combing this set of digital objects.

Moreover, VWU’s self-reported profile through the CPI indicates that they have a resource center or office with responsibilities for LGBTQIA2S+ students and a paid staff person with responsibilities for LGBTQIA2S+ students. Based on this queer method, they may have at one point had these services, but they no longer exist. It is in part for these reasons of support that VWU scores as a 5/5 on the CPI—but this calls into question the validity of their rating if the center they were counting on for this rating has been disbanded.

Oklahoma City University (OCU) has a 2.5 Campus Pride Index score. When starting our work by once again searching for transgender, we are presented with many resources for trans people—notably within residence life, Title IX, and counseling services. These, again, mostly reify the struggles trans communities may face rather than uplifting or celebrating trans people. Further, other results focus on learning about trans people—which is an orientation about trans people rather than for trans people. In comparison, many resources are provided here as well. It is of note as well that while there are resources provided, as we shared earlier, pointing to externally hosted resources provides for an opportunity in which these resources become out of date or become dead links—which ironically is something that can be solved through the use of tools such as the Wayback Machine. Equally, this displacement of resources reflects practices persistent across even the most inclusive of higher education spaces, which assume their inclusion of queer populations is fully facilitated through the presence of gender-inclusive bathrooms and gender-affirming signage. These maneuvers rely on rhetorical maneuvers of inclusion, which help to detract criticisms from more-structural failings of queer populations, most prominently concerning inconsistent access to sustainable informational resources, as identified above (Wagner & Crowley, 2020).

However, a more thorough exploration of Oklahoma City University’s website reveals a careful consideration of how to frame not only queer inclusion but also the intersections of identity, which warrant nuanced discussions of inclusivity. For example, the oldest iteration of OCU’s Diversity & Inclusion Career Resources offered mostly legal guidance on navigating employment as a queer person. Undeniably progressive and thoughtful for a webpage from 2015, the lists nonetheless overemphasized queerness as a singular identity, which makes a shift toward more layered intersectionality-focused information a telling sign of queer inclusion within contemporary OCU digital information spaces. Figure 8 illuminates this by providing multiple drop-down menus for hiring information.

Delving deeper into OCU’s engagement with queer populations surfaces explicit acknowledgments of the presence of transgender and non-binary populations, included within their 2013–14 campus climate survey, which included respondents from transgender students. While the document acknowledges that the represented transgender respondents consist of two participants, other reports would elude these numbers as mere others. The report acknowledges where and how transgender students face challenges within the university, especially around harassment (Office of Institutional Research at Oklahoma City University, 2014). Whereas other institutional reports might treat such a small sample size as irrelevant and “other” the presence of its queer populations, OCU seems to take, in earnest, its failings around queer inclusion and appears intent on rectifying this work. While the document may read as dated relative to other institutions examined within the context of this queer digital forensics project, as well as concerning other digital objects relational to OCU’s queer inclusion work, by exploring the metadata associated with the 2014 report, one can find the documents creator to be Kelly Meredith, who served as the director for OCU’s Office of Institutional Research. Meredith eventually sought out political office within the state of Oklahoma. While Meredith’s campaign page is now defunct, the Wayback Machine reveals that she aimed to use her position to replicate the work she had done at OCU across the state, which suggests the possibility of centering queer populations in the future of Oklahoma (see Figure 9).

The case of a potential queer advocate outgrowing their work at OCU reveals perhaps a more complex rendering of the university’s less-than-ideal Campus Pride Index rating, suggesting then that there is both a presence of queer persons and an earnest attempt to acknowledge their presence on campus. Pairing this with the nuanced and tangibly evolving resources for queer students seeking employment reveals staff-based, at the very least, attempts to make for a queer-affirming campus. Further searches across OCU’s site reveal faculty, events, and courses led by and focusing on queer topics, suggesting further alignment for queer support, which reveals perhaps a limitation of the CPI rating, which might overtly rely on explicit statements of queer identity in things like mission statements. Unlike Hillsdale, however, OCU does not explicitly speak against queer populations in its mission and ethics statements, instead leaning on concepts such as having open hearts to all within the community without explicitly including queerness as an affirmed identity. OCU, as a Methodist institution, faces a conflict and oft-contested stance of queer inclusion, which affirms and supports LGBTQIA2S+ parishioners and clergy but fails to affirm that queer embodiment aligns with Methodist teachings and principles (Udis-Kessler, 2012). In this way, OCU is not excluding queer individuals from campus life or its mission statement explicitly inviting queer inclusion. However, the documents surfaced through this queer digital forensic work reveal radical machinations by queer-affirming staff and faculty to find alternative spaces and locations to affirm and center queerness through various legally bound information resources and innovative uses of data-driven reports. Each example offers a potentiality to queerness and demands outsiders of seemingly anti-queer spaces to reconsider the resilient and innovative ways that queerness thrives within such moments (Gray, 2009).

When beginning our search on the University of Michigan website (which has a CPI score of 5/5) as we did for other institutions, we were awash in information based on services, research, and news articles related to the search term transgender. When first searching, the first nine results (of 10 on the first page) are related to health care and direct to various sites originating from their medical school, signifying the ongoing medicalization of trans identities. This trend continues onto the next page of results with further medicalized information. The first nonmedical link to survey data that arises is information on gender-inclusive housing. What is intriguing about these results is that the University of Michigan has the oldest and one of the most established LGBT centers in the Spectrum Center. Only by searching LGBT rather than transgender do we get results for nonmedical or non-policy-oriented information; here, the second result is the Spectrum Center, but instead, the top link is the Spectrum Center’s listing of Local & National Resources, whereas the second result is their home page.

The Spectrum Center, as we stated earlier, came about through student activism and was founded in 1971. For this reason, it is unsurprising that the Spectrum Center has many captures (746) dating back to April 2008. This capture is a radically different site than the current iteration, reflecting the era in which the site was initially published. Through this combing, however, the top link on the site from April 2008 denotes that the Spectrum Center is a new name for the center. Digging through the published history of the Spectrum Center, we can understand that this center has had several names throughout history, but the linked press release on the archived site is no longer available, as this itself was not archived through the Wayback Machine. The center was recently named the Office of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Affairs. Before renaming the Spectrum Center in 2008, there existed a minimal web presence for the former iterations of this center. There is, however, a robust archival collection stemming from the former iterations hosted by the University of Michigan Bentley Historical Library.

Given the robust nature of queer inclusion at the University of Michigan, a queer digital forensics methodology allows one to explore the evolution of resource provision to queer populations at the University of Michigan. By utilizing the relatively small window of time in which the Spectrum Center has existed, one can highlight evolutions in the perceived role of the Spectrum Center in queer support. Between 2019 and 2023, the educational resources page grew from merely having information about pronouns to multiple informational resources and a more expansive umbrella of identities that might fall under queer identities (see Figure 10).

While the Spectrum Center is undoubtedly a critical factor in the University of Michigan’s high ranking on the Campus Pride Index, utilizing queer digital forensics helps reveal that this work is an iterative process and that even their vital resources took time to evolve and adapt. As many inclusion-oriented campuses do, their center started with the provision of pronoun-based information. This evolution suggests that part of visible queer inclusion, even at premier institutions, remains an evolving and additive practice at odds with the still-in-flux understanding of contemporary queer inclusion (Marine & Nicolazzo, 2014). Equally, the evolution of Spectrum’s educational resources reflects the challenges of affirming, making visible, and contending with administrators’ desires to measure and quantify queerness within capitalist-driven universities, meaning that making tangible identity-based resources can help to ensure their use and, in turn, their structural support from administrators (Mundy, 2018).

Queer digital forensics helps to recontextualize the seemingly context-void nature of websites; by delving into the iterative nature of websites and their related digital objects, one can reframe and reorient one’s relationship to information. In the case of the websites we analyzed, commonly held beliefs about queer inclusivity were affirmed and challenged. While the absence of queer inclusion on sites like Hillsdale remained wholly unsurprising, the utilization of queer-affirming content to bolster their anti-queer sentiments reveals complex rhizomes of digital object utilization. Queer digital forensics allows us to engage with queer inclusive digital objects with a combination of rich criticism and necessary grace when examining an inherently unstable information medium. While each example sheds light on unique challenges to the digital archival record, two prominent themes emerged from our findings. First, we identify the importance of queer digital forensics in helping to explore the distribution of queer rhetorics and inclusive practices beyond the digital walls of a university. Second, the methodological necessities of queer digital forensics allow for counter-discursive opportunities that invite reexamination and revaluation around quantitative grade-based evaluations of higher education institutions regarding their queer-inclusive endeavors.

Queer digital forensics helps make clear that the suggested practices of queer inclusion and, equally, queer exclusion as an ideological stance often contradict and belie the digital footprints of queerness within a website. In the analysis of the Hillsdale and Oklahoma City University websites, queer inclusion occurred within oppositional spaces. Hillsdale offered rigid and unwavering criticisms of queer identities, utilizing their presence within the United States as a signal of moral decay. Oklahoma City University, alternatively, provided modest, albeit intersectional, resources for queer members of the university, backed by explicit naming of those identities and the needs of students identifying under the umbrella of queerness. However, in tracing the presence of tangible queer acknowledgment within Oklahoma City University, we noted a decreased presence of explicit discussions of queerness within the university’s digital objects. Without the tools and techniques of queer digital forensics, one might quite appropriately read the university as shifting away from queer inclusion altogether. This is also reflective of the backlash to trans inclusion that began in response to the so-called trans tipping point. The lack of new productions of queer information indeed remains alarming. However, by tracing the distribution and curation of university reports, we can discover that one of the university’s fiercest queer advocates departed the university to advocate for broader political issues. Ideally, a person would quickly fill in this advocacy role. However, such a shift has yet to occur, though individuals in student-services-oriented positions often leave their roles unfilled for extended lengths of time, with their duties divided among their former colleagues.

By following the movement of a queer-inclusive advocate through document metadata and their utilization of websites to advocate for a political campaign, one can see the potential impacts of queer inclusion in spaces we historically associate with queer exclusion. While Oklahoma City is certainly not a rural space in any capacity, the state of Oklahoma is certainly imagined as far less inclusive, requiring, as Jack Halberstam (2005) instructs us, to rethink our metronormative assumptions about where queerness emerges within regions of the United States and how much of our presumptions around the normative experience of queerness insist on locational terms. Equally, the movement of Kelly Meredith from the university to a career in politics evidences the value of having fierce advocates within higher education who, whether or not they identify as queer, utilize their roles within the institution to center and insist on the acknowledgment of queerness in their work (Weiser et al., 2018).

Alternatively, the same navigation of the spread of a digital object allows one to identify the complex ways that queer-affirming content provides a point of reference for the anti-queer sentiment. While often happening in response to an attempt by a university to make visible queer support and, in turn, rendering queer individuals as hypervisible objects of scrutiny, Hillsdale appropriates external queer imagery to make queerness a site of visible concern. Unlike Oklahoma City University, a glance at their website evidence transphobia and paranoia around queer childhood. Nevertheless, by tracing the digital objects present within their anti-queer content, one discovers a curious reliance on utilizing and distributing queer-affirming imagery to produce their content. By deploying an image with an uncertain status regarding intellectual property, Hillsdale, perhaps unknowingly, extended imagery of trans youth thriving within the United States. As noted, by directly conversing with the website designer for Hillsdale, it is possible to know their motives behind using an image from a pro-queer photographer, and we can ascertain how they obtained it. However, in all likelihood, the person searched for a “transgender child” and pulled a relatively popular image from the internet.

As an inverse to Oklahoma City University, where the lack of contemporary queer-inclusive content reflects the departure of queer-supportive staff, the surfacing of images for anti-queer propaganda relies on the potential exploitation (and perhaps proliferation) of pro-queer art. More simply, Hillsdale could not produce its figure of a queer child because its institution resolutely denies the realities experienced by queer youth. However, to make this stance possible, it nonetheless needed to acknowledge and make visible the very thing it was attempting to reject and, in doing so, help expand rather than limit queer visibility. Indeed, this particular attempt at delegitimization-turned-distribution provides an essential reminder about the counter-discursive potentialities of queer digital forensics

Queer digital forensics offers a way of understanding how institutions manifest and contextualize queerness beyond mere enumeration. The Campus Pride Index (CPI) is invaluable for helping queer students, staff, and faculty decide where best to experience support and affirmation. However, as noted previously, the CPI is a tool in which higher education institutions self-report their efforts at inclusion. These data may quickly fall out of date, as illustrated in Virginia Wesleyan University, which has a 5 according to the CPI and accounts for having a staff member paid to work on LGBTQIA2S+ inclusion and belonging. However, their contemporary website tells a different story. Only through using queer digital forensics can we discover who this individual once was and that VWU still employs them, but as a faculty member who no longer has this role. As such, there are limitations to using the CPI, but one can also assume that any institution that willingly completes this optional survey, while not perfect, at least gives a modicum of lip service to equity and belonging to the LGBTQIA2S+ community.

Moreover, queer digital forensics helps illuminate that good queer inclusion is an evolving practice. Even high-ranking institutions such as the University of Michigan alter and adapt their resources in response to the still-evolving experiences and needs of queer communities. The presence, for example, of language around LGBTQIA2S+ represents a relatively new way, at the time of writing this article, of including the broad spectrum of queer identities into a collective term, and even though the Spectrum Center is innovative, their inclusion of this term was relatively recent. Though the University of Michigan could hardly be said to be failing in their queer inclusion, the high ranking on the Campus Pride Index suggests unwavering success on the part of the university. However, queer digital forensics helps illuminate the iterative nature of queer inclusion and the value of repetition in design vis-à-vis Jack Halberstam’s (2011) notion of queer failure. Wherein the stand-alone Campus Pride Index offers a reference point for individuals and institutions hoping to replicate more queer-inclusive practices, queer digital forensics affords one the opportunity to understand the intricate inner workings of producing queer-affirming digital objects and how a high-ranking website often takes multiple forms before a final version emerges. Moreover, queer digital forensics aids us in understanding how these sub-institutional documents alter and shift over time.

When these alterations are combined into the larger culture, we can infer how they connect with larger cultural shifts, such as the recent trans moral panic that has consumed Western culture. Given the precarity of this work at public institutions, particularly in some states that are actively passing bills to remove anything related to cultural identity, this is instructive of how these institutions are or are being forced to respond. Indeed, queer digital forensics helps scope what can seem like an insurmountable redesign of digital spaces by clarifying that queer digital inclusion often happens through additive methods rather than wholesale reconstruction.

While we have attempted to explore a still-emergent methodological approach within queer digital forensics, we do so with an acknowledgment of the limitations of such work. First, our emphasis on queerness as a site of study within this digital forensics work runs the risk of overlooking and devaluing the importance of other lived experiences as they emerged within the websites we analyzed. While we did our best to surface intersectional concerns within such websites, a more exhaustive exploration of other identities within such sites remains critical. Additionally, our use of a well-established metric for campus-based queer inclusion invariably excluded smaller IHEs and those without the means to ensure visibility within such indexes. As such, both radically queer inclusive and anti-queer IHEs alike may remain unaccounted for in such analysis. Finally, while this offers an approach to queer digital forensics, a more exhaustive approach to queer digital forensics, might study IHE websites not only retroactive, but proactively to track longitudinal changes over a longer course of time, marking only responses to past events, but as a way to track how IHEs response to queer relevant issues in real time.

Attacks on queer communities persist, and the current resurfacing of such sentiments threatens the well-being of LGBTQIA2S+ individuals. Higher education institutions play an invaluable role in the provision of inclusive and sustainable access to support for these communities both during heightened moments of anti-queer sentiment and during moments of relative ease. This article deployed the groundbreaking methodological approach of queer digital forensics to counter and contextualize moments of erasure and intense visibility for queerness within higher educational online spaces. We utilized the Wayback Machine, digital object analysis, and basic web scraping to examine four higher education institutions and their relational framing of queerness over time. The utilization of queer digital forensics unearthed valuable information that otherwise would have been lost to the murkiness of the virtual palimpsests that is the creation of institutional digital objects.

This research highlights the importance of participatory and accessible collective memory for queer communities. While archives can sometimes silence marginalized voices, they can also serve as platforms for our existence beyond mere subtext. This project reframes the climate(s) of inclusion and belonging in higher education institutions for LGBTQIA2S+ individuals and delves into digital archives' roles in preserving histories and memories. Ultimately, as a concept, queer digital forensics provides a novel methodology that embraces the inherent instability and fluidity of queerness in digital reality. Queer digital forensics as a practice critically asks how and why queerness is not present within a digital space while equally interrogating the when and why of visible queerness within the digital hallways of higher education.