A Reflection on Engaged Scholarship

Abstract

While the policy distractions outlined in this collection manifest in myriad ways—and our authors examine them through a wide range of lenses and analytic tools—we were struck as an editorial team by the commonalities they share. What is clear throughout these articles is that scholars, most centrally, raise the ubiquitous power of policy distraction as it relates to ignoring systems and structures that serve to maintain normativity in many forms. Throughout, scholars instead point to policy distractions that locate both problems—and solutions—in individual actors (e.g., students, educators), symbolic gestures, and taken-for-granted procedures and practices that are rooted in white supremacy, cis-heteronormativy, anti-blackness, and patriarchy, to name a few. In this final article we, as an editorial team, offer insights about how we see the voices in the Issue in conversation, and, in the spirit of curious collaboration and engaged scholarship, we invite you to think along with us.