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.