A Pioneer in LGBTQIA+ Research

Becoming an Antioppressive Scholar

Walls grew up in Arkansas as part of a working-class family. He had worked as a computer operator, and in college he majored in computer science, a profession he picked because he liked math and it seemed like a “safe career path.” However, while in therapy following a bad breakup, Walls found himself evaluating his choices. He decided to do what he really wanted to do, which was social work. He switched majors and eventually earned an MSW from the University of Texas at Austin. Walls accrued more than a decade of social work practice experience, primarily community-based, macro work. He also went on to get an MA and PhD in sociology, both at the University of Notre Dame.

When Walls joined the GSSW faculty in 2005, the school was undergoing a seismic shift under the leadership of then-dean Catherine Alter, transforming its physical plant, growing its enrollment and establishing a reputation as a research powerhouse. Walls was excited about the school’s direction, including the infrastructure to support robust research and a willingness to embrace his research interests.

Walls’ dissertation had focused on homophobia as a form of prejudice, and he developed a modern homophobia scale. There was little literature on the topic at the time. Walls recalls, “I wanted to keep working on that, and I had a strong interest in queer youth and risk. That’s where I started, and as I progressed, I turned the prejudice stuff lose and mostly focused on queer youth.”

In the 1980s, Walls helped to conduct homophobia workshops on college campuses with The Women’s Project, a multiracial network of women tackling racism, sexism, homophobia and economic injustice in Arkansas. Through the mentorship from Women’s Project founder Suzanne Pharr and staff member Kerry Lobel, Walls began to recognize intersectionality and how “oppressive systems work together and function together and reinforce one another.” He brought that lens to his PhD program and later research and teaching. “I got really interested in the idea of privilege, thinking about the flip side of the oppressive coin, thinking about heterosexual privilege, white privilege, etcetera.”

Walls had been teaching GSSW’s Power, Privilege and Oppression course, and in 2007, he received an internal grant to study the topic further. That led him to develop a course on Disrupting Privilege and expand his knowledge of critical theory.

He recalls, “It seemed like qualitative research was doing such a better job at thinking about intersectional, critical and feminist theory. This is when trans students started coming into my life and my work started taking an intersectional focus.”

When he was asked to teach GSSW’s doctoral quantitative methods course, Walls said yes, but only if he could overhaul it first. Walls felt the existing course was “replicating an oppressive approach to quantitative work, which influences so many problematic things.” He then developed the Quantitative Methods from a Critical Perspective course — a two-quarter sequence that positioned mainstream quantitative methods in dialogue with critical theory, queer theory and disability justice, “trying to lay a foundation for a critical quantitative approach.”

Although Walls has retired, he’s finishing a related textbook, “Decolonizing Quantitative Methods: Anti-Oppressive Approaches to Social Work Research,” an edited volume to be published by Cambridge University Press later this year. The book outlines a decolonial, critical approach to quantitative methodology in social work research. Walls says, “For too long we have trained emerging social work scholars in quantitative methods-as-usual that fail to live up to our profession’s goals of liberation and equity. Our hope with this new book is to give scholars the needed tools to enable our work to have an even greater impact.”

University of Minnesota School of Social Work Associate Professor Ginny Ramseyer Winter is co-editing the book with Walls, CarolAnn Daniel, a professor at the Adelphi University School of Social Work, and Michael Spencer, Ballmer Endowed Dean at the University of Washington School of Social Work. Walls had provided Ramseyer Winter with his syllabus and other resources so she could teach the critical quantitative methods course at her own university. She says, “Very few programs teach critical quantitative methods, and we don’t have a textbook for social workers on critical quantitative methods. The gap was really bothering me, so I asked Eugene if he would be interested in working on a book. He jumped in with both feet.”

Ramseyer Winter adds, “Eugene’s class and DU have been at the forefront of this movement to really put social work in a different place regarding how we teach doctoral students different methods. That’s already a big part of Eugene’s legacy. My hope is that the book moves the field forward into a place where that is the standard.”

Walls has authored or co-authored more than 100 publications and research reports, which have been cited more than 4,300 times. He is included on the 2024 Stanford University/Elsevier list of the world’s top 2% of scientists, marking him as one of the world’s most influential social work scholars. But when asked about his research legacy, Walls doesn’t point to his research at all. Rather, he says, his greatest legacy is supporting queer and nonbinary scholars like Holloway in pursuing their research agendas. For the past decade or so, Walls says, “my research has been mostly guided by the interests of my doctoral students. I’m so proud of supporting queer and nonbinary scholars in developing as independent scholars. Their questions are so interesting!”

Walls is also proud of the impact his work has had on the lives of other LGBTQIA+ people. He notes, “Historically, queer research has been seen as not as serious, more peripheral, and trans scholars tend to be more isolated.” To combat that, Walls established the LGBQT/NB Research Team, a national community of scholars who come together to collaborate and support one another.

Some of Walls’ recent work in collaboration with others on the LGBQT/NB Research Team has challenged mainstream literature on conversion therapy and detransitioning. “The way the idea of detransition gets talked about in mainstream media is that someone stopped being trans, but the vast majority of research is not about that at all. It is mostly about transition interruptions where, for example, someone stops taking testosterone because it doesn’t fit with their embodiment goals, but they still identify as trans. Or they stop transitioning because it is dangerous, or because they are being coerced into stopping by family members, a religious leader, or unfortunately a mental health practitioner. As soon as they are in a safer context, they restart their transition. So, my colleagues and I created a conceptional framework of transition interruptions and got really nuanced about the different underlying reasons for transition interruptions. As a researcher you need to know that nuance rather than simply classifying everyone as a ‘detransitioner’ because the research is getting used in really harmful ways. I am so proud of that work even though it is in a controversial area because it flies in the face of problematic work that’s been done. One of the people who read it said, ‘This is the first time I’ve really felt seen.’”

A Beloved Teacher and Mentor

A turning point came two years into Holloway’s doctoral research. They had been doing research into health care access for trans communities, particularly barriers in rural communities, and Holloway was burned out. Walls asked Holloway what they I wanted to do. Hollway recalls, “I wanted to look at health promotion and gender euphoria; I wanted to look at the hope and joy!” It was an entirely new area of research for both of them.

Holloway says, “Eugene’s legacy really shows through his mentorship. He has a deep curiosity. As soon as I shifted my topic to gender euphoria, he had more books on it than I did! He started doing his own research on gender euphoria. I’ve seen this pattern in every student he’s mentored.”

Colorado State University Assistant Professor Brittanie Ash has collaborated with Walls since 2017, when he was her doctoral advisor, and she strives to model his approach to teaching, mentorship and scholarship. She says, “Whether it’s research or teaching, Eugene approaches the work he does with a deep respect for whomever he’s working with and a deep love for what he’s doing. Eugene approaches his job out of love — a love for teaching, a love for research, a love for mentoring LGBTQ+ PhD students. Most students he’s worked with have felt that love and taken that love and said, ‘I want to do that same thing.’ That impact is broad when you think of all the students he worked with and all the students they’re going to work with.”

Walls’ impact hasn’t been limited to doctoral students; he has had an indelible impact on MSW students as well.

The experiential Disrupting Privilege course he developed “challenges students to do a deep dive into their fear and stand alongside and follow marginalized people in their fight. Rather than trying to take a leadership position, how do you take a backseat and really help?”

Whereas Disrupting Privilege is hard content that is emotionally taxing to teach, the Social Work Practice with LGBTQIA Communities course he and Holloway co-developed centers joy and resistance. Western Colorado MSW Program graduate Renee Prince, MSW ’25, LSW, took the course in fall 2024 and says it was an all-time favorite. She says, “To be a clinician in an informed, responsible, joy-filled, vibrant, celebratory way, it seemed essential to have [this] class. It will result in our cohort of clinicians being able to provide better, more informed, more culturally humble care and service to the LGBTQ+ community. We learned essential information, and more importantly, a mindset and awareness — how can we best be collaborators with the people in the room with us.”

Prince hopes to bring skills Walls modeled in class to her own work as a therapist. For instance, she says, “When there’s a group member who has an idea that seems to be in conflict with the group, that group member is doing important work. They’re asking questions that will help us have a more in-depth, full conversation. Eugene is so good at group work in a way not every professor can come close to. We are so lucky we got him.”

Although Merissa Cope, MSW ’23, SWC, never had Walls as a professor, they still benefitted from his knowledge and mentorship as an MSW student. Cope had noticed that kinks, fetishes and non-monogamy were largely missing from the MSW curriculum and wanted to design a course as an independent study. They asked Walls to serve as their advisor for the project. “I was so fortunate he said yes. Being a faculty advisor to an independent study is a lot of time and work,” recalls Cope, who is a therapist at the Cannon Institute, a Denver-based sex therapy practice. Cope’s deliverable was a lesson plan and syllabus, but once the course design was done, Walls encouraged Cope to actually teach the class they created. “This is a class I don’t think is being taught at any social work program in the country. Eugene helped me contextualize the work I was doing and understand it was important. He was always trying to push it to the next step.”

Because Cope was only one year post graduation, Walls signed on as the course’s faculty sponsor, and Cope taught the special topics course for 12 students in spring 2024 — students who are the ultimate beneficiaries of Walls’ generosity, curiosity and wisdom.

What comes next after 20 years on the GSSW faculty, including four years as associate dean for doctoral education and two years as co-associate dean? Beyond playing as much pickleball as possible, Walls doesn’t know — he’ll see where his curiosity leads him.

“Trust the ripple effect,” Prince says. “Eugene has trained all of these social workers, and we are better because of him. He can tag out; we are tagging in.”