Katz Colloquia: TJ Billard, Northwestern University

Please join us for February's Katz Colloquia presented by TJ Billard

About the Event:

Transgender rights have emerged as an important topic of everyday conversation across the country in recent years and become, in many ways, the flashpoint du jour of the American culture wars. During the first Trump administration in particular, transgender people were thrust onto the center stage of US politics. Faced with unrelenting hostility and an increasingly complicated media system, transgender activists crafted new communication strategies to fight for their equality, stall attempts to undermine their rights, and win the support of large swathes of the public. In this talk, TJ Billard offers an insider’s view into transgender activism during the first two years of the first Trump administration. Drawing on extensive on-the-ground observation at the National Center for Transgender Equality, Billard shows how these activists developed an unlikely blend of online and offline strategies to saturate a diverse ecology of national news outlets, local and community media outlets across the country, and both public and private conversations across multiple social media platforms with voices in support of their cause. Moreover, these activists navigated the complex flows of information and ideas among these different domains of the communication system as they worked to shape the national conversation on transgender rights. As Billard argues, this movement occurred at a very particular time in the development of the media system, with “new” media shaping the movement in important ways that are both generalizable to other social movements and unique to transgender activism. Facing a second Trump administration that promises further battles over transgender rights, Billard provides key insights into the new business-as-usual of mediated politics and valuable lessons for more effective activism.

About the Speaker:

TJ Billard (They/Them) is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication and, by courtesy, the Department of Sociology at Northwestern University. They are the founder and Executive Director of the Center for Applied Transgender Studies—the leading academic organization dedicated to scholarship on the social, cultural, and political conditions of transgender life—and Editor-in-Chief of the Center’s flagship journal, the Bulletin of Applied Transgender Studies. Billard is the author of Voices for Transgender Equality: Making Change in the Networked Public Sphere (Oxford University Press, 2024) and co-editor (with Silvio Waisbord) of Public Scholarship in Communication Studies (University of Illinois Press, 2024).

-lunch will be served for attendees-