Established by FAC member and past director, Professor Eithne Luibhéid, the UA Institute for LGBT Studies' Queer Migration Network (QMN) is an interdisciplinary research initiative that critically examines how migration processes fuel the production, contestation and remaking of sexual and gender norms, cultures, communities, and politics that articulate hierarchies of race, class, and geopolitics. QMN builds from the Institute's proximity to the U.S./Mexico border; our location within transnational and transborder circuits and cultures; and multiple migrant, refugee, queer, trans, racial justice, and resistant communities. In addition to its interdisciplinary research emphasis, the QMN initiative includes conferences, publications, scholarly presentations, outreach, and curricular development with faculty, visiting scholars, and graduate students.
For a sample of QMN affiliated scholarship, projects, and conferences, see below:
Queer and Trans Migrations: Dynamics of Illegalization, Detention, and Deportation, edited by Eithne Luibhéid and Karma Chávez.
Centering the experiences of LGBTQ migrants and communities resisting
More than a quarter of a million LGBTQ-identified migrants in the United States lack documentation and constantly risk detention and deportation. LGBTQ migrants around the world endure similarly precarious situations. Eithne Luibhéid and Karma R. Chávez’s edited collection provides a first-of-its-kind look at LGBTQ migrants and communities. The academics, activists, and artists in the volume center illegalization, detention, and deportation in national and transnational contexts, and examine how migrants and allies negotiate, resist, refuse, and critique these processes. The works contribute to the fields of gender and sexuality studies, critical race and ethnic studies, borders and migration studies, and decolonial studies.
Bridging voices and works from inside and outside of the academy, and international in scope, Queer and Trans Migrations illuminates new perspectives in the field of queer and trans migration studies.
Contributors: Andrew J. Brown, Julio Capó, Jr., Anna Carastathis, Jack Cáraves, Karma R. Chávez, Ryan Conrad, Elif, Katherine Fobear, Monisha Das Gupta, Jamila Hammami, Edward Ou Jin Lee, Leece Lee-Oliver, Eithne Luibhéid, Hana Masri, Yasmin Nair, Bamby Salcedo, Fadi Saleh, Rafael Ramirez Solórzano, José Guadalupe Herrera Soto, Myrto Tsilimpounidi, Suyapa Portillo Villeda, Sasha Wijeyeratne, Ruben Zecena
TENDER R/AGE :: RABIA TIERNA ~an outcry of collective outrage
The irreducibility of the cries of terrorized and traumatized children in the face of state violence has moved me to reflect on my own childhood and to create the call for TENDER R/AGE :: RABIA TIERNA ~ an outcry of collective outrage. It is a project inspired by Audre Lorde who reminds us that our silence will not protect us. It began as a crowdsourcing call to friends to send in photos of themselves as children. Like many project participants, I lived a cage-free childhood. As a child I knew caging people was wrong. I knew it then. I know it now. The project is conceived of as a collective outcry and is informed by a feminist coalitional politics. Its coalitional impetus coalesces around its collective cry for no cages.
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No Bans, No Walls, No Detention Cells: A UA Graduate Student Conference on Migration
A UA Graduate Student Conference on Migration
8:30 am - 6:00 pm
Kiva Room in the Student Union
Free and Open to the Public
Friday, April 13th, 2018
University of Arizona, Tucson
https://gqmc.arizona.edu
Livestream of the keynote: https://gqmc.arizona.edu/live-stream
Situated 70 miles from the U.S. Mexico border and in close proximity to the Eloy and Florence detention centers, Tucson is highly politicized and often subject to racist policies and legislation directed towards its migrant populations. Tucson also has a vibrant history of innovative resistance by local queer migrant-led organizations. These political circumstances and creative interventions prompt us to enter into critical dialogues about international migration across graduate programs at the University of Arizona.
The Queer Migration Network (QMN) is hosting a graduate student conference titled “No Bans, No Walls, No Detention Cells: A UA Graduate Student Conference on Migration.” The conference will be held at the University of Arizona on Friday, April 13th, 2018. Conference attendance is free and open to the campus and the general public. This conference brings together graduate students from across UA departments and disciplines to share immigration research. Panels and a keynote speaker will center scholarship that explores how sexuality, gender, race, class, religion, geopolitics and other hierarchies comprise sites for struggle and possible transformation of current immigration systems.
This conference aims to challenge the everyday violence of border militarization, travel bans, expanding detention, and larger power structures affecting the most marginalized amongst our communities. Generous funding for this conference has been provided by the Institute for LGBT Studies, the Confluence Center for Creative Inquiry, the Mary Bernard Aguirre Professorship, and the UA Department of Gender and Women’s Studies.
Keynote Presentation:
Sharita Gruberg
Associate Director
LGBT Research and Communications Project
Center for American Progress
Mass Deportations and the Incarceration Imperative: How Immigration Enforcement Endangers LBBTQ Immigrants