Richard S. Price, Associate Professor, Weber State University

Today, I’m a busy and happy associate professor. I research how and why queer literature is suppressed in modern America. I helped co-create the first queer studies program in Utah. I spend time advocating for queer youth in a state that doesn’t particularly like them. I have found a purpose that helps join both my personal and professional identities. Four years ago, however, none of this was true.

In the spring of 2018, I did it. I achieved tenure. I entered that summer excited by this fact. After all, I had landed a teaching-focused job that I loved (on most days) and that allowed me to do whatever research I wanted. It’s a relatively low stress environment that worked for what I liked to do. I settled into my kitchen that May to start working on what I intended to be a law review article. For five weeks I plugged away at it and hit about 55 pages (remember, in the law review world the more words the better).

And then it hit me. I simply didn’t care about the paper. It was fine. I knew I could get it published and that at least a few people would read it. But I didn’t care. I didn’t see the point anymore. That was the last day I ever looked at it. But the problem was broader as I didn’t find anything I had been doing stimulating. It all seemed so abstract—like I was trying to perform the image of what a political scientist was supposed to do. I finally accepted something that had been eating at the back of my mind for a while: I was exhausted by my entire research trajectory, and I didn’t know what to do.

So I did nothing. I don’t mean this in the euphemistic way that many of us joke about on Twitter—doing “nothing” while actually prepping classes or coding research materials. I just shut down professionally and went into a deep, depressive funk. The very thought of research sent me into a tailspin, so it was easier to avoid it altogether. And then one day my partner made a fateful suggestion that I check out young adult (YA) books. After all, I had recently enjoyed the film Love, Simon and figured I could try out the novel. I was hooked.

It’s fair to say that for the next four months I did little else than read YA novels. I won’t try to get into the therapeutic nature of it all, but some element of the genre was just right for what I needed. I was especially drawn to the vast subgenre of queer YA. In the past decade, the publishing world has seen a massive increase in titles about LGBTQ teens living their lives—books often written by LGBTQ adults. These books were a revelation because it gave me a vision of a world I wish I’d had as a teen.

I knew I was queer in high school, but having grown up in the mid-1990s in a school and society dedicated to straightness, I also learned the lesson that queerness was unacceptable. So I boxed it all up and tried to pretend to be straight, leading to a lot of internal discomfort. Queer YA not only gave me a vision of an alternate teen existence but also language I never had for aspects of my queerness: being nonbinary. This revelation went a long way to overcoming that depression. I gradually began to wear my queerness on my sleeve. While I have little doubt this annoys and has pushed away some students (and colleagues, but good riddance to those folks), another population of students expresses a bit of joy at seeing me in front of a class. Nothing is better than introducing myself with pronouns and seeing some student smile shyly because I’m probably the first nonbinary professor/teacher they’ve ever met. It has also led me to push even more queer content into my teaching schedule. I love teaching—one shouldn’t take a teaching focused job if you don’t—but teaching LGBTQ content lets me provide students the material I wish I would have had a lot earlier.

Another revelation was that I could turn my YA interest into research. I knew, thanks to my partner’s librarian training, that books are often challenged in schools and libraries among those seeking to have them removed, restricted, or relocated. This struck me as interesting, and I started firing off public records requests to dozens, then hundreds of institutions. I discovered pretty quickly that queer-inclusive materials are a particular target for book banning and censorship. I became fascinated in understanding why these books are challenged and what danger challengers see in them exactly.

This fascination with book challenges provided a rich vein of research that allowed me to explore queer inclusion within a framework influenced at the outer boundaries by aspects of constitutional doctrine—you can find my first published work on this here. As I did this, with the unfortunate delays caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, I also began to think about the LGBTQ educational activism that helped correct some aspects of the school system that left me traumatized and unhappy. It also gave me a real sense of purpose. I was studying, participating in ways to make our public sphere better for queer kids. For some outdated notions of scholarship, this violates norms of neutrality that makes me, at least partly, an “activist,” and I’m fine with that (I reject the idea of neutrality anyway, but that is a rant for another space).

I’d love to say that I have some generalizable point in here. I guess if anything it is maybe that if your research is not bringing anything to you personally—and I know pre-tenure this is more difficult—drop it. Life is too short to churn out things that you don’t care about just to get a line on your CV. My work has already paid off in various ways, though sometimes in sad ways. When I began researching book bans at the end of 2018, it felt more historical in nature as challenges were becoming less common. Then, in 2021, things exploded with conservatives trying to purge hundreds of books depicting LGBTQ lives, experiences of people of color, and anything “divisive” from schools and libraries.

Suddenly my work, which had primarily been of interest to only a subsection of librarians and free speech advocates, had me receiving calls from newspapers around the country, radio, and podcast hosts. I’ve also been asked to speak to various groups of current and future teachers about how to navigate this controversy. I also write up some of my thoughts for public consumption on a moderately successful blog, Adventures in Censorship, that occasionally offers support to the folks fighting these censorship efforts. The end result, four years after my depressive breakdown, is that I’m busier than I’ve ever been but doing work that I find valuable personally and trying to make the world a better place so that today’s queer teen experience is much better than mine.

Rebecca Hamlin, Associate Professor, Department of Political Science and Legal Studies Program, University of Massachusetts Amherst

About fifteen years ago, I was a young political-scientist-in-training with strong interests in law and courts and migration. Many different people advised me to pick one of those interests and make it my primary field so that I wouldn’t “fall between stools” and cause confusion about whether I was really a law and courtier or a migration scholar. When I responded that I wanted to do both equally, some well-meaning mentors suggested that wouldn’t work because law was not central to the study of migration, and migration was not central to the study of law. At that time, there was no Migration and Citizenship Section of APSA, so I found myself with one option: trying to be an active member of the Law and Courts section despite having been told I was on the periphery of that community.

At first, I felt adrift in a sea of mostly white men who study the U.S. Supreme Court. After going to some panels and attending the APSA business meeting and reception, I felt out of place. Looking at the traffic on the listserv, I felt really out of place. When I told people I studied asylum adjudication, few seemed particularly interested. I secretly worried that my passion for the study of migration somehow made me soft, or without rigor, because I wasn’t just interested in law and courts for the sake of studying those things. I was deeply motivated by the human toll that law and courts take on people who try to navigate them in order to protect themselves. I now know that most people in the Law and Courts Section are motivated by some kind of passion and human concern (even white men who study the Supreme Court!). At the time, however, my insecurities drowned out my ability to see past what felt like aggressive gate-keeping behavior.

I remember one senior scholar dismissively informing me that the Supreme Court had never made a significant immigration decision because that was a niche area of law. I didn’t have the confidence to tell him that a) he was wrong, the Supreme Court had recently made some highly significant immigration related decisions and seemed to be making more each year, b) I was actually studying administrative courts both in the US and elsewhere, and c) sometimes the Supreme Court makes really important immigration policy when it chooses not to take a case. Instead, I just questioned whether I should keep trying with APSA or re-orient myself totally towards the Law and Society world, which felt like it was much more accepting of the type of work I did.

Thankfully, I didn’t give up. And, through going to conferences, I eventually met amazing scholars like Anna Law and Susan Sterett who gave me advice, mentorship, and support of the frank and unvarnished variety – my favorite kind! They showed me that you can study law, courts, and migration in a rigorous and impressive way that has heart. Simply having a few people like them express interest in my work and act like it belonged in the section made all the difference in the world.

Let me be very clear: I know we have a long way to go to be a diverse and inclusive section. It is still disproportionately male and shockingly white. Just because I now (post tenure) feel more comfortable in the section does not mean that I think its problems are solved. However, the section has also changed dramatically in the time I have been a member in ways that give me great hope. As a general matter, several successive batches of section leadership have worked hard to understand climate issues via a member survey, to end the toxicity of the listserv by changing its format, and to take a stand against bullying and harassing behavior which has occurred far too frequently over the years. These efforts are bound to diversify the section since we know that a hostile climate is more likely to drive away women, people of color, LGBTQIA+ members, and those of us who study law and courts beyond Capitol Hill.

I’m also hopeful about the ways in which the tent of Law and Courts has been expanding. Just to focus on my particular area of interest as one exciting example of change, this summer the section hosted a well-attended Brown Bag event showcasing new research on law and migration. And there is a panel at the upcoming APSA meeting with the title “The Role of Courts in Migration and Asylum.” My younger self would have killed for such things, and it is so validating to see them finally happening.

So in the hopes that someone reading this is in a similar situation to the one I was in fifteen years ago: Hello and welcome! If you think you study law and courts, you do! You belong. If you would like to get involved in running the section in some capacity, please don’t be shy. Reach out to section leadership. The section has only changed because the people in charge of it worked to actively change it. And if you have ideas, we want to hear them. I thought I wasn’t ‘qualified’ to serve on the Executive Council of the section when I got nominated because I wasn’t a central figure in it. Then, I ended up really enjoying learning about the inner workings of the section. I can honestly say now that it finally feels like a community to me.