Mapping a movement

On a sunny day in Bloomsbury, Professor Phillip Ayoub is fighting jet lag, whilst we ask him to stand on a wall in the office garden, having been back in the country for under 24 hours. However, he takes the direction in his stride.

Raised in the southwest of Washington State, Ayoub initially started his undergraduate studies at the University of Washington in pre-med. But a class taught by Christine Ingebritsen, a political scientist who explores how the Nordic nations have responded to contemporary challenges in Europe, changed that.

“I loved that class, and enjoyed it much more than my chemistry classes and decided to switch”, says Ayoub. “Then I got my degree in international studies, political science, and carried on.”

Following this, his studies took him to a master's degree at the University of North Carolina, and then a PhD at Cornell University in government and political science.

That pivotal decision has shaped a career focused on sexuality, gender, and social movements. Now, as co-editor of the European Journal of Politics & Gender, Ayoub's research examines why LGBTQ+ rights advance in some countries whilst stagnating in others. However, this specialisation wasn't part of his original plan.

“When I applied to graduate school, I wasn't sure about applying to work on LGBTQ+ politics because I hadn't read much around that kind of work in political science. There were very few papers, if any at all, and certainly none on any syllabi that I'd ever seen, or course outlines I'd ever taken.”

 Yet the 2005 ban on the Parada Równości (Warsaw’s Equality Parade, the largest pride march in Central and Eastern Europe) changed things.

“There were a lot of organising efforts in other countries, including in Berlin where I was based at the time, where people were getting on buses to go march in Poland for rights there.” This raised fundamental questions about political behaviour for Ayoub.

“We were studying how people are rational actors and political behaviour is quite rational, but then I thought, ‘why are people marching for rights in another country where, if they win them, they wouldn't even have access to them?’ It taught me about the kind of solidarity, emotion, and love ethic that is behind social movement activism.”

This observation became central to Ayoub's research, which challenges purely domestic explanations for LGBTQ+ rights advancement.

"I'm curious about why those changes travel to some places and not to others," he explains. "A lot of the older work focused more on domestic explanations—if you were this rich or if you're this secular, then you could have LGBT rights. But the whole focus of my research says there's something international going on here too, and surprising cases also change."

The evidence is compelling: marriage equality spread across multiple countries within similar timeframes, suggesting transnational influences beyond domestic readiness.

"That is not just because they all met these domestic criteria, although domestic politics still matter a lot, but there's something international going on."

However, international influence cuts both ways.

"You can't really study LGBT rights without understanding the backlash to it," Ayoub notes. "A lot of that backlash used to be more contained in domestic spaces, but it's increasingly become more international as well, using international courts or global summits."

But that has spurred his research on, as the final strand of his work explores how LGBTQ+ movements can effectively resist that kind of backlash.

“I think backlash towards LGBT rights is often a litmus test to understanding change in the world in either direction. If you can get societies and countries to be inclusive of LGBT people, you learn a lot about how to change attitudes and ideas, and how to push back against exclusionary nationalist or populist narratives. If we can show change there, then we can probably find tools which work for other causes as well.”

What are these tools?

“Social movements are about telling stories, and how to tell stories in an effective way. In different countries, there's not one model that works everywhere. You must develop resonant frames that link to the local context in a powerful way.”

In response to populist nationalism, many movements have adopted more grounded approaches.

 "Maybe a little less about universal human rights and a little bit more about these rooted mechanisms like how LGBTQ+ people always existed," he notes.

Although a Europeanist at heart, here Ayoub’s work has a global perspective.  Working with Dr Adam Harris at UCL, Ayoub has studied how Zimbabwean activists use cave paintings depicting queer desire to counter narratives of Western imposition.

"That frame is very effective for activists to say, 'Well, it's not just an imposition from the West or of this decade, it is indeed that queer people were here among us in Zimbabwe a long time ago.'"

The broad changes seen in both the rise and backlash to LGBTQ rights over the course of Ayoub's career has paralleled broader changes in academic recognition of his specialisation.

“When I started my PhD, the top political science journals had not published at all on LGBTQ topics. Jennifer Piscopo recently did a study that showed that, in the last seven years, the top five political science journals have only published .06% of all research items which addressed any dimension of LGBTQ politics.”

"That is a big change but nonetheless, there's a lot of work left to do," Ayoub reflects.

At UCL, he feels very privileged to work alongside another colleague on LGBTQ politics, with the Institute of the Americas recently hiring a third—a concentration he describes as "almost unimaginable" elsewhere.

This shift partly reflects student demand, which Ayoub sees directly as Co-Chair of the Department of Political Science’s Equality, Diversity & Inclusion committee, alongside the UCL Policy Lab’s new academic co-director, Professor Alex Hartman.

“When we survey our students or when we ask them what they bring to class, what they're interested in, nearly a third of them either identify as LGBTQ, or are very interested in these politics. It's harder for institutions now to dismiss LGBTQ politics as just this frivolous niche topic."

Students have witnessed unprecedented policy changes from marriage equality to conversion therapy bans, making it "just harder to ignore that this space does not include them."

"We really want our students to know that they are seen and their presence here is seen and felt and also cherished."

This commitment to change is also seen in Ayoub’s policy work, outside of academia. He has contributed to LGBTQ inclusive foreign policy guidelines for the German government and worked with the US State Department's envoy for LGBTQ+ rights under the Biden administration—an office that has since been disbanded following Trump’s inauguration.

The importance of academics in policy work is one he really believes in.

“Academics are often also committed to the goals of the movement but we have an additional and different role. We have systematic objective research goals around very mundane questions, such as why did this framing work, why did this one not, and that can be useful to inform strategies. A lot of the time, policymakers won’t have time to analyse the bird's-eye patterns that we have in academia with good methodological tools.”

This is not to dismiss the work of those making change. Ayoub speaks quite frankly about how academics should work collaboratively with grassroots activism.

"Academics really need to listen to the people working on the ground and campaigning. Sometimes the mistake in academia is to swoop in, collect some data and say something sweeping about it without having the contextual knowledge."

As we draw our conversation a close, I think about the change he has seen over his career. Despite previous and recent challenges, he remains hopeful.

"Even if you're not interested in LGBTQ people, you should be interested at least in understanding the mechanisms of change that exist socially and politically.”

"They're tremendous, so it's hard to dismiss them as not impactful for research, no matter what you want to study at the end of the day."

From that first transformative political science class to his current role shaping international discourse on LGBTQ rights, Ayoub's journey illustrates how academic curiosity can evolve into powerful tools for social change—even when fighting jet lag on a wall in Bloomsbury.