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The student contributors to this article include: Shiloh Della Bitta, Sheila Collins, Cedrick DaCosta, Elianna Santos Gil, Moises Lopez, Veronica Pacheco and Sam Sheehan
This article is about not just the invisibility of inequality, but how we can resist erasure as anthropologists and students of anthropology. This article isn’t about what faculty do, what established anthropologists write about, our loss of funding, or even our capacity to do research that is no longer supported. Rather, this piece is about how we can measure inequality when the data we use is gone. This piece is about what our students, who have so much to lose by speaking out, can and do teach us about what our responsibilities are as educators, experts on the study of the human condition, and those working in higher education. This piece is about what we can and must do when it seems as though we have no options. This is the story of how my students taught me what it means to resist erasure. It is a story that we hope you, the reader, will experience as a call to action.
During the spring 2025 semester, I offered an undergraduate course, “Measuring Inequality, Analyzing Injustice,” that Dr. Elizabeth J. Pfeiffer (a medical anthropologist), Dr. Peter Little (an environmental anthropologist), and I (an anthropologist working in queer and trans studies) co-designed. As a course focused on fulfilling our general education requirement of Advanced Quantitative and Scientific Reasoning, the core outcomes of the course are, quite literally, using metrics as a means to define inequality and injustice. The course has always utilized large and well-maintained public data to demonstrate that invisible and erased structural inequality are measurable. Defining concepts, appropriate contextualization, careful coding, and data-informed analysis are established methods used by anthropologists and all social scientists. Our approach utilized national-level data collected and warehoused by NIH, CDC, HHS, NSF, and EPA, as well as Census data.
Within the first few weeks of the course, those data sets started to go missing. They were erased, disaggregated, corrupted, and expunged. It became clear within the first month of the semester that the course, as designed, could no longer function. For the first time in my academic career, I was stumped. Not only had my own capacity to do research based on trans communities hit a wall; I, as a trans person, had been erased.
However, this was not the most troubling aspect of the semester or larger political moment. Every student in that course occupied a position that the government continues to target. Our course had queer and trans folks, immigrants from countries our nation-state demonizes, folks with disabilities and veterans. The data hadn’t just been erased, the course hadn’t just gone sideways, I hadn’t just lost my work and identity: every person in that room had a reason to be afraid. We spent several weeks trying to identify how we could collect that data ourselves. We applied every single method that I and so many social scientists rely on—participant observation, autoethnography, interviews with peers and faculty, and a textual analysis of language used by these agencies and executive orders. The scant data left available by federal agencies could render only one conclusion. Through the magic of invisibility, my students and I discovered that with all primary data sets scrubbed from government websites, inequality and injustice no longer existed.
Across the semester we experienced a never-ending roller coaster of losing data and our rights. The course became impossible to conduct as planned, not just because the data was missing or because the articles we read had lost their traction. We, in that room, had become those missing data points. Just within the first month of that semester, the federal government removed data on LGBT youth and adults, issued an Executive Order that forced the removal of all data or discussion of trans or non-binary people on government websites, removed mental health supports for veterans,revoked or ignored legal protections for immigrants, and took action to prevent any discussion of race or racism in public education in the United States. Every person in that room had reason to fear for their safety, their families, their well-being, and even whether financial aid would still be available to them.
The turning point—the moment that turned the invisible into the visible—was not a result of trying to apply mixed methods to produce data we could analyze. Rather it came after our institution issued a report of what programs they would cut. These programs primarily focused on gender and sexuality, the arts, creative writing, Latin American studies, and language-based majors. It is important to note that Rhode Island College is both a minority-serving institution and a Hispanic-serving institution. To suspend these programs meant to render invisible the very demographics of those enrolled in that course. Whether this was the result of US government investigations or purely fiscal limitations remains unclear. However, the impacts hit and they hit hard. We, the faculty, continued to hit walls as we challenged these cuts. We had been erased as scholars and educators who had dedicated our lives and careers to students whose educations and fields of interest we work endlessly to cultivate and grow.
The day that most students learned their programs had been cut was coincidently the same day that the members of the Office of the Postsecondary Commission (OPC) were meeting on our campus. The OPC is the state-level governing body overseeing public higher education in the state of Rhode Island. While these meetings are open to the public, one must submit in advance a request to be added to the agenda. The faculty at RIC could not get ourselves on the agenda. The students at RIC were not on agenda. We had all been rendered invisible.
The protest was not planned weeks in advance. Rather, the resistance to being erased started with two students in a queer studies course who had learned that day the program that minor is housed in would be phased out. The institution had erased them as students, had erased their field of study, and had erased increasingly rare spaces where they felt safe and heard. Within hours of messaging friends and peers, the protest started with 20 students. The students learned of the OPC meeting, which was held in one of our larger rooms that can accommodate 100. As chance would have it, this meeting was being held in the same hall and at the same time that our course would meet. This became an opportunity not just for the course but for the students and myself, as faculty, to witness first-hand what happens when the invisible refuse erasure. As the meeting began, the halls surrounding that room became packed. The students were repeatedly refused entry. That is, until they decided to let themselves in. At the peak of the protest attendance, a room that fits 100 had hit capacity. Students stood outside of the glass doors on either side of the room and moved to the floor above, where they could look down at the meeting through windows. While we were unable to count the number of those in attendance, they swelled well past 200. Students who had already become targets by the US government, who had been erased, who would miss their shifts at work that evening and the safety that the space of higher education is supposed to provide, had risked it all.
What made this protest so unique and so powerful are the extreme risks taken by students to be visible. We don’t often see protests on our campus, not because students don’t care, but because between school, work, and obligations to family and friends, students rarely have the time, capacity or luxury of attending a protest organized only hours before it occurred and at a time of day that classes are held at or when they would need to be at work or at home.
We far too often overlook what everyone in the room can teach us, because if we are at the front of the room, we know we have a job to do as experts. But in this moment that job must look different. Just as the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic fundamentally changed how we teach and learn, this moment requires we carefully consider what it is we seek to achieve. We can ignore what is happening and cower in fear. We can tread lightly on topics that come with risk. Or we can see this moment as one where academics need to be more than academics. Facing erasure and invisibility at every turn, risking arrest or deportation if too visible, those students took that risk. We all saw inequality in action. The silence that these students are often forced to engage in had been broken. We must be willing to take the same risks. We must be willing to push back against erasure, be it of our students, our colleagues, or even ourselves.
In a course on measuring inequality and injustice, we learned that no matter what was taken from us, we still had the capacity to be seen. We could still measure inequality. We could still witness injustice. What we must do now, not as students but as faculty, is to take action. We must be willing to challenge injustice in our classrooms, meetings, service and publications. If we are tenured faculty, we must work to protect our colleagues that are adjuncts, contingent or untenured. We must hold our administrations accountable and support them in resisting threats of closure. If we are to see our discipline thrive, if we are to see our institutions reverse course and resist government pressure, if we are to have any future of our own as researchers, we must resist. We must be visible. We must follow in the footsteps of those who risk everything just to be heard. We must remember that even if we are the ones employed to impart knowledge to our students, they have the knowledge to teach us how to push back. Let this article be a call to action. If we allow anyone to be erased, expunged, disaggregated, and disappeared, we have failed the purpose of research, the discipline and the goals of higher education. We cannot let that happen.