Virtual: Unsettling Borders 2020 Conference: Queer Refugees

Queer Refugees and Queering Refugee Studies

This panel places queer refugee experiences and queer refugee studies at the forefront of larger discussions of political asylum, global or transnational perceptions of queerness, and overlapping systems of governance. Rather than treating queer refugees as exceptional or marginal to refugee studies, the panel will explore how queerness is central to the formation of refugee subjects, border regimes, and state technologies.

Panel

Elif Sarı, Cornell University

Sima Shaksari, University of Minnesota

Fadi Saleh, University of Göttingen

Begüm Başdaş, Humboldt University of Berlin

Suad Jabr, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill

Unsettling Borders 2020 Conference

This virtual conference explores how Middle Eastern refugee and immigrant experiences provide insights into the production of difference, boundaries, and borders by unsettling established understandings of identity, statehood, and territory in and on the edges of the European Union. In the context of a “fortress Europe” and growing xenophobia and anti-Muslim racism, it will address questions about who refugees and immigrants are and how they position themselves (or find themselves positioned) within systems of power operating at multiple scales and across a variety of spaces. This conference will center embodied Middle Eastern refugee and immigrant experiences to understand and theorize subjects, political spaces, and technologies of governance.

The conference includes a series of panel discussions and a roundtable:

Panel 1: Queer Refugees/Queering Refugee Studies (October 9, 2020)

Panel 2: Midnight Traveler: Uncertain Journeys to and through EU (October 16, 2020)

Panel 3: Racialization of Refugees in the EU (October 23, 2020)

Panel 4: Refugees and the “Crisis” of States: Rethinking Border Regimes and State Technologies/Mechanisms in the EU (October 30, 2020)

Roundtable: Learning, Teaching, and Community-Building with Refugees (November 6, 2020)

Registration and More Information

Find more detailed information about the conference.

Registration for this event is required.