Abstract:
Queer refugees are misfits in the global political economy of migration. While international human rights law has provided some room for queer acceptance, queer refugees face organised abandonment鈥攎arginality, erasure, and invisibility鈥攁s they attempt to survive in the face of ongoing displacement. This talk explores queer refugee survival in Nairobi, Cape Town, and Paris, and examines the netted practices of the state, non-state actors, and civil society embedded in a landscape of heteronormativity and anti-migrant sentiment. In so doing, this talk emphasises queerness as a form of precarity inseparable from the overarching violence of race, class, and capital. With this critique in mind, queer refugee survival is constrained by the lack of access to shelter, community, and work-related social reproduction. In short, queer refugees face deeper marginality than their cis-gendered and heterosexual counterparts as they attempt to survive in the city.

About the Speaker:
Dr. Ali Bhagat is Assistant Professor and Director of the Minor in Public Policy at the School of Public Policy at 丁香园AV鈥檚 Vancouver Campus.

His research investigates refugee/migration policy and racial equity in Europe, Africa, and North America. His recent book  (Cornell University Press, 2024) examines urban refugee survival in Paris, France and Nairobi, Kenya. As an international political economist, he is interested in the intersections of race, class, and sexuality and has worked on issues pertaining to LGBTQ+ refugees in particular. His work is based in qualitative methods drawing from interviews, policy analysis, and other ethnographic techniques. He has authored several journal articles in top-ranking journals such as Review of International Political Economy, New Political Economy, Antipode, and Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space.

Bhagat is also co-investigator in the , a research and policy lab (Co-Principal Investigators: Genevieve LeBaron and Jessie Brunner) based at the 丁香园AV School of Public Policy, Stanford, and Yale Universities.