Incorporating LGBTQ+ Social Movement Archives into Social Work Pedagogy: Inviting Students to See Themselves As Historical Actors

Background & Purpose: In recent years, LGBTQ people across the United States have experienced unrelenting attacks on their rights and freedoms. Currently, the ACLU is tracking over 500 anti-LGBTQ bills introduced in state legislatures across the country, with over half of this legislation targeting young people and adolescents. In this historic and unprecedented moment, LGBTQ social movement archives are an invaluable, if underutilized, pedagogical tool. This paper shares insights on our efforts, as social work scholars and educators in collaboration with archivists, historians, and social movement leaders, to incorporate archival artifacts into our pedagogical practice, not only to teach students about LGBTQ history, but also to invite them to see themselves as historical actors, to make historical artifacts, and to contribute to intergenerational LGBTQ social movements.

Methods: This paper presents findings from interdisciplinary educational collaborations between social work professors, university archivists, historians, and LGBTQ community leaders. Over the course of two years, this collaborative team curated three exhibitions of historical artifacts – including artwork, photographs, zines, and other ephemera – on local and national LGBTQ history and university activism. We also organized three panel discussions with local activists and community leaders on LGBTQ movement history. Each of these events was connected to a school-wide engaged reading series on three scholarly books on this history of LGBTQ social movements and their intersections with social work practice. Finally, two of these book reading series culminated in arts workshops inviting students, faculty, and staff to create their own artwork in conversation with these artifacts. Throughout this process, our interdisciplinary collaborative team reflected on the pedagogical value of these archival exhibitions, public forums, and workshops, and analyzed these reflections using an iterative and inductive approach informed by grounded theory.

Results: Our collaboration found that pedagogical programming incorporating LGBTQ social movement archives not only fostered relationships between students, faculty, staff, and community leaders, but also invited young people to explore the importance and challenges of intersectional social justice movements and to see themselves as active contributors to these movements, even in the face of profound anti-LGBTQ backlash. We found particular value in engaging local university history, including models of social work student-led activism, by featuring social movement leaders and archival materials emerging from our own School of Social Welfare. In doing so, we curated archival materials and panel discussions to make the intersections between social work and social movement history visible and accessible to our students.

Conclusion & Implications: In elevating the activism, art, and legacy of social movement leaders who were once similarly situated to our students, we invited students to consider their own potential contributions to social movements, to see themselves as future social movement leaders, and to explore how their own social movement work might generate valuable historical artifacts. These collaborations, and students’ responses to them, also highlighted the dearth of attention within social work scholarship and curricula to social movement history and its intersections with social work.