News from Members

The Gender and Sexuality in Migration Research - GenSeM IMISCOE Standing Committee is accepting panel proposals for the 2027 IMISCOE Annual Conference in two thematic lines:

 

Panel 1 Queering Class: Capital, Mobility and the Making of Queer Migrant Lives

Panel 2 Narrating Precarity, Aspiration, and Belonging: Art-Based and Participatory Methods in Research on Sexuality, Migration, and Class

 Read the detailed calls below:

 

Panel I: Queering Class: Capital, Mobility and the Making of Queer Migrant Lives
Proposers: Sarah Scuzzarello & Carlo Handy Charles
Abstract:
Migration scholarship has long attended to how class resources shape mobility, settlement, and solidarity between queer communities, and, separately, to how sexuality shapes migration trajectories and belonging. Less examined is how these two axes intersect: how economic, social, and cultural capital open or foreclose specific migration and settlement paths for queer migrants, and how queerness itself is mediated by and reshapes class position across the migration process.

 

These questions speak directly to the concerns of United for Human Rights and Global Equity. In a global context of tightening border regimes and selective mobility policies, class capital increasingly determines which queer migrants can access safe and legal routes, claim protection, and be recognised as rights-bearing subjects, and which are relegated to precarity, deportability, or immobility. Attending to the interplay of sexuality and class thus exposes both the promise and the limits of rights frameworks that formally include sexual minorities while remaining stratified by socio-economic and racialised hierarchies. It also asks what solidarity across class, gender, and sexuality divides requires in practice, within and between queer migrant communities.

 

This panel invites papers that explore the interplay of sexuality, migration, and class capital from decisions to migrate through settlement, labour market incorporation, housing, and community-building. It considers what this intersection reveals about the uneven distribution of rights, recognition, and belonging among queer migrants and their communities.

We welcome papers addressing (but not limited to):
• How class capital (economic, cultural, social) shapes queer migrants’ access to mobility, legal status, or settlement pathways
• The role of class in navigating “queer-friendly” destination myths versus lived realities
• The role of class in enabling or blocking solidarity among native-born and migrant queer communities
• Intersections of class, sexuality and other axes (race, legal status, disability) in shaping migration outcomes

 

Please note that the panel will be in-person only, unless exceptional circumstances require otherwise. Please reach out to Sarah and Carlo as panel organisers if you have questions.

 

Submission
Please submit a proposal with: title, abstract (length: 250 words), and include the names, affiliations and contact details. 

 

Submissions to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Deadline: 20 September 2026, 5 pm BST

 

 

Proposers: Carlo Handy Charles & Sarah Scuzzarello
Abstract:
Researching the interplay of sexuality, migration, and class poses distinctive methodological challenges. Queer migrants’ experiences are often marked by stigma, legal vulnerability, and well-founded mistrust of institutions, and the classed and sexual dimensions of these experiences — shame, desire, aspiration, respectability, survival — frequently escape conventional interviews and surveys. This panel examines how art-based and participatory methods can surface these dynamics, foregrounding participants’ own modes of narrating precarity, aspiration, and belonging rather than the categories researchers impose upon them.

 

These methodological questions are also political ones, and they speak directly to the concerns of United for Human Rights and Global Equity. If the conference asks under what conditions people are recognised as rights-bearing subjects, methods that redistribute epistemic authority — positioning queer migrants as co-producers of knowledge rather than objects of study — constitute practices of recognition in their own right. They also respond to the conference’s call to centre the perspectives of communities directly affected by migration and inequality, while raising hard questions about power, authorship, safety, and extraction in the research encounter itself.

 

We welcome papers addressing (but not limited to):
• Methodological reflections on using art-based or participatory approaches with queer migrant populations, including ethical, epistemic, or access challenges specific to this group
• Co-production, authorship, and compensation: negotiating power in participatory research with queer migrants
• Navigating anonymity, safety, and representation when working with visual, performative, or narrative materials
• Participatory and creative methods across borders, including digital and transnational adaptations

 

Please note that the panel will be in-person only, unless exceptional circumstances require otherwise. Please reach out to Sarah and Carlo as panel organisers if you have questions.

 

Submission
Please submit a proposal with: title, abstract (length: 250 words), and include the names, 
affiliations and contact details. 
Submissions to This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. and This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
Deadline: 20 September 2026, 5 pm BS