International Collaboration – Queer Refugees in Queer Utopias

AAA/CASCA Meeting in Toronto

by Thomas Brorsen Smidt

On 15-19 November, the ICE-QUEEN team participated in the annual meeting of the American Anthropological Association (AAA), and the Canadian Anthropology Society/Societe canadienne d’anthropologie (CASCA) at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre in Toronto, Canada. The theme of the annual meeting was TRANSITIONS.

On the opening day of the conference, the team hosted the session Transition for Queer Refugees in Northern Europe: In-between Inclusion and Exclusion. The session was chaired by Jen K. AlVarez Hughes. Principle investigator Dr Guðbjörg Ottósdóttir opened the session by introducing the ICE-QUEEN research project. This was followed by researcher Linda Sólveigar- og Guðmundsdóttir, who introduced the project’s preliminary findings from the in-depth qualitative interviews with people seeking international protection in Iceland. Dr Árdís Ingvars then discussed their forthcoming article on queer asylum seekers that have been deported to Italy and Greece due to the Dublin regulation. Then Dr Maja Hertoghs spoke about the results from her PhD project in the Netherlands concerning asylum procedures and how queer people seeking international protection in the Netherlands need to give account of themselves as queer individuals. Finally, PI Guðbjörg Ottósdóttir introduced the preliminary findings concerning social service professional perceptions and experiences of working with queer refugees, focusing on narratives of western exceptionalism and meanings given to queer utopia in their accounts.

Comparative analyses and EGSC conference

by Thomas Brorsen Smidt

Members of the Queer Refugee Research Network, or QUEEN, are jointly working on a comparative analysis of the protection of SOGIE asylum seekers across the Nordic region, concerning the countries of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden. Looking at how laws, regulations and practices formulate and execute the right to protection from prosecution based on sexual orientation, gender identity and gender expression. To access relevant information an interview was conducted by Linda Sólveigar with two members of UTL in Iceland, in May of this year. The work on the article is still ongoing, but several members of the group will participate in the 6th European Geographies of Sexualities Conference (EGSC) in Cádiz, 14-16 September 2022. As participants in the roundtable “The ‘exceptional’ Nordic realms? Regulation of sexual and gender borders through legal and institutional approaches to SOGIE asylum claims” where the comparative analyses will be discussed.

QUEEN – The Queer Refugee Research Network

by Thomas Brorsen Smidt

On October 11-12, 2019 the GRÓ GEST programme at the University of Iceland launched a two-day workshop at the Nordic House in Reykjavik with the explicit goal of bringing together experts from all the Scandinavian countries to discuss the prospects of collaborating on research related to SOGIE refugees. At the end of the workshop, different research collaborations across the Nordic region were established, including the official launch of The Queer Refugee Research Network, or QUEEN.

The goal of QUEEN is to strengthen international scholarly communities in a way that will address challenges of SOGIE refugee research at an international level. The workshop was organized by the GRÓ GEST Programme on behalf of the University of Iceland and the University of Oslo, as members of the ReNEW research hub. The workshop was supported by the Nordic Council of Ministers and ReNEW. In 2019, QUEEN received additional funding from ReNEW to carry out a collaborative writing workshop with the goal of pursuing on-going cooperation in the context of a joint publication comparing Nordic policies on queer refugee and asylum. The brunt of the writing process for the planned knowledge output was set to take place at a two-day workshop at the University of Oslo in the first half of 2021 but was postponed to January of 2022 due to COVID19. Scholars from Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden are now currently working on an academic article comparing the legal frameworks around asylum adjudication for SOGIE refugees in the Nordic region.

In 2020, the RIKK received funding through the Icelandic Research Fund for the project Queer Refugees in Queer Utopias: Inclusions and Exclusions. For this project, the QUEEN network was expanded to include several Icelandic scholars but was also extended beyond the Nordic region to the Netherlands in order to carry out comparative research on the two countries that are broadly viewed as exceptionally queer friendly.