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.