Critical Hope and Resistance through Collective Poetic Inquiry

In early 2025, the US federal government made sweeping and targeted attacks that affect queer, trans, nonbinary, and gender expansive (QT and TGE) communities across the United States with the most harmful attacks directed at TGE youth and adults and those situated at marginalized sociostructural intersections. As scholars in an academic social work program who sit at the intersections of marginalized sociostructural locations, are allies/accomplices to QT/TGE communities, and/or engage in scholarship that promotes equity for QT communities, we have felt the impacts of these attacks daily since day one of the current administration. Together, in the face of these daunting obstacles, we have not faltered and have recommitted ourselves to building community and identifying strategies for resistance. It is with this spirit of critical hope and determination that we engaged in a process of collective poetic inquiry to process, share, and illuminate how the first ninety days of the administration has affected us personally, professionally, and communally. We center our own experiences as queer, trans, and nonbinary people; allies/accomplices; white, BIPOC, and Latina communities; parents; tenured, pre-tenure, and non-tenure track faculty; graduate students; US citizens and immigrants; disabled, neurodivergent, mad, and non-disabled individuals; scholars who engage in QT research; social workers, community organizers, and activists; and as a community committed to promoting intersectional social justice—always, and, in particular, during this time when attacks on marginalized communities are increasing at an exponential rate. This work illustrates raw emotional twists and turns; our process of resisting the psychological experience of fragmentation forced upon us by an individualizing, neoliberal structure; our movement from individual reactions to collective action; and the necessity of critical hope in our endeavors. We invite readers to journey with us as we build communal spaces, resist attacks on our communities, and hold hope towards a better, more just future

Community organizing · Expansive · Feminism · Government (linguistics · Queer · Resistance (ecology · Scholarship · Situated · Social capital · Transgender · Critical Race Theory in Education · Feminist Theory and Gender Studies · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism