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This exploratory qualitative research focuses on the experiences of those who facilitate lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer/questioning (LGBTQ+) social justice educational interventions (SJEIs), such as safe zone, safe space, and ally training. Although persistent in higher education LGBTQ+ SJEIs remain an understudied area for empirical research, especially how facilitators describe the benefits and challenges of this role. Findings reveal how these benefits and challenges are paradoxical in that participants are hopeful for the impact of the work while burdened by the endeavor. Implications illuminate how participants approach engagement with campus communities through SJEIs as a potential opportunity for increasing inclusion efforts and how participants act as tempered radicals within this facilitator role in higher education.

College expansion throughout the twentieth century was accompanied by the growth of a profession centered on supporting student learning and development. Higher Education and Student Affairs (HESA) programs multiplied across the United States to train these professionals with a focus on administration, leadership, and student affairs. As recommended by the Council for the Advancement of Standards in Higher Education and related professional organizations, the more than 280 programs in existence today typically include a course on the history of higher education. For the vast majority of HESA students, this is the only graduate-level history course they will take. For this study, the research team consisted of two faculty members -- one a historian and one a higher education professional -- and two graduate students who collaborated with the intention of deepening student engagement with history through an authentic digital assessment. This article examines the impact of the authentic digital assessment on student engagement, inquiry, research skills, and awareness of audience within the broader context of the history of higher education in the United States.

Using Ahmed's (2012) scholarship on diversity work and institutional life as a conceptual framework, we examine how LGBTQ+ social justice educational intervention (SJEI) facilitators described the challenges of their role. We found LGBTQ+ SJEI facilitators descriptions of their role revealed institutional dynamics that undermine purported support of equity-based work. Institutional realities that facilitators faced were neither intentionally malicious nor hostile, and encapsulated by the descriptor of benign neglect. Our findings expose how LGBTQ+ SJEIs operate as non-performatives treated with benign neglect through unenforceable authority, administrative gaslighting, and resource scarcity.

Using scholarly personal narratives as a research tool, we explored how the director of an LGBTQ+ living-learning program (LLP) created community within the constructs of an otherwise cis- and heteronormative residential environment. We reviewed the first author's reflections about community experiences and analyzed them for opportunities to upend assumptions, practices, and operations for more liberatory futures. Students participating in LLPs tend to have higher levels of engagement and belonging, but those with marginalized identities may benefit even more from this kind of involvement. The first author's personal narratives about serving as an LGBTQ+ LLP program director revealed that many of the residents appreciated the feelings of affinity and safety offered by this residential community, and they were uninterested in engaging in community in many of the expected ways (i.e., program attendance). Our exploration offers liberatory possibilities for queering institutional transformation, with the recognition that campus housing professionals should reconsider their expectations for all LLPs, and higher education institutions must make strong commitments to provide support that resists assumptions about queerness and community. The stability and growth of this LLP requires specific support that allows it to evolve into configurations that reflect the needs of its divergent communities while still being centered in queerness. [Discussion questions prepared by Kaleb Scott.]

This paper explores the experiences of nonbinary and trans (NBT) facilitators of Safe Zone workshops, what we call LGBTQ+ social justice educational interventions (SJEIs). Despite their prevalence in higher education for over 3 decades, there remains a paucity of research about them and those who facilitate them. This research focused on 33 NBT participants, a subpopulation within the larger 87 participants, to explore their preparation for LGBGTQ+ SJEI facilitation and how they use their gender in their facilitation. Using grassroots leadership as our conceptual framework, we raise concerns about what it means for identities to serve as preparation for leadership, and how these leaders give of themselves even to the detriment of themselves.