‘I’m looking for people who want to do disruption work’: Trans* academics and power discourses in academic conferences

In the United States, the academic discipline of higher education has emerged as a site in which transgender scholars have begun to engage. Transgender scholars have begun to disrupt the normative logics of epistemological trans oppression, forcing those in higher education to contend with us, our work, and the possibilities therein. And yet, the ways some of us have been accepted into the field and scholarly sites (e.g., academic conferences), and have had our work published, has caused us to wonder: are we disruptors or docile subjects? In our paper, we explore the machinations of institutional power as they relate to our developing community within the Association for the Study of Higher Education (ASHE). Situating our manuscript in a public dialogue that occurred at the 2017 ASHE Annual Meeting in the United States, we discuss the limitations and possibilities of leveraging academic conferences as potent(ial) sites of disruption.