Abstract
ABSTRACT In this article, we discuss the narratives of struggle, resistance, and counter-resistance over the rights of the LGBT+ community at several Polish universities, which remain unnamed in order to protect our informants. In particular, we look at the discourses of LGBT+ groups struggling to establish or maintain organizations of various forms (from students’ study circles to union-like institutions) within the context of internal university structure, Polish academic culture and current political developments in the country. This research draws on semi-structured in-depth interviews we conducted in the spring and summer of 2020. In our analyses of the interview material, we apply a multidisciplinary methodological framework combining CDA and narrative inquiry in order to examine linguistic phenomena participating in constructing a particular version of reality through text in talk. Such research design enables us to offer a case study of the difficulties and obstacles faced by LGBT+ activists in the Polish academia the way they understand them, and of the resistance strategies they employ in this particular context. Our research shows a wide range of resistance strategies employed by the LGBT+ community members that can be classified according to the scale of discriminatory practices they form a response to (systemic/individual discrimination) and the type of the response itself (group/individual response). On the basis of the discussed examples, our article offers an interagentive matrix of strategies of addressing LGBT+ issues emerging within the Polish academic context.
Highlights
We discuss the narratives of struggle, resistance, and counterresistance over the rights of the LGBT+ community at several Polish universities, which remain unnamed in order to protect our informants
This work forms part of a larger research project on the discourses around LGBT+ issues in Polish academia, a project that is both unprecedented – academic discourses have rarely figured as the object of critical research, especially in Poland – and urgently necessary, due to the current anti-LGBT+ turn taken by the Polish government, parts of the media and civil society
As the present special issue focuses on resistance, here we zoom in on the perspectives of LGBT+ groups struggling to establish or maintain organizations representing their interests at universities, offering them a platform to tell their story of resistance and resilience in the form of semistructured in-depth interviews we conducted in the spring and summer of 2020
Summary
We discuss the narratives of struggle, resistance, and counterresistance over the rights of the LGBT+ community at several Polish universities, which remain unnamed in order to protect our informants. As the present special issue focuses on resistance, here we zoom in on the perspectives of LGBT+ groups struggling to establish or maintain organizations representing their (research) interests at universities, offering them a platform to tell their story of resistance and resilience in the form of semistructured in-depth interviews we conducted in the spring and summer of 2020. Such research design enables us to offer a case study of the difficulties and obstacles faced by LGBT+ activists in Polish academia the way they understand them, and of the resistance strategies they employ in this particular context. We hope that the article will have a practical value in offering illustrations and suggestions of how to resist discriminatory practices at universities and other institutions
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