This panel will look at LGBT+ heritage in academic institutions, queer methodologies in social scientific inquiry, and trans perspectives on abolition. By bringing together diverse perspectives from various disciplines, we will be discussing the vital place of gender and sexuality in our understanding of academic institutions, the social sciences and some of the most pressing social problems we face today.
Speakers:
Dr Andrew Delatolla is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in Middle Eastern Studies in the School of Languages, Cultures and Societies at the University of Leeds and a Visiting Research Fellow at the Middle East Centre at the London School of Economics and Political Science. His research focuses on issues of race, gender, and sexuality in relation to statehood and state formation. His recent publications include Civilization and the Making of the State in Lebanon and Syria (Palgrave, 2021) and Sexuality as a Standard of Civilization (ISQ, 2020).
Marquis Bey (they/them, or any pronoun) is Assistant Professor of African American Studies at Northwestern. Their work focuses on blackness and fugitivity, transness, and black feminist theory. Bey is particularly concerned with modes of subjectivity that index otherwise ways of being, utilizing blackness and transness—as fugitive, extra-ontological postures—as names for such otherwise subjectivities. These two analytics (rather than endowments of the epidermis or specific bodily morphologies) are the axes around which Bey thinks about subjectivity formation and deformation, abolition, and political work. They are the author of Anarcho-Blackness: Notes Toward a Black Anarchism (AK Press, 2020).
Megan Todd is Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Central Lancashire. She has conducted a range of sexualities research projects, including an analysis of LGBT+ domestic abuse service users in Lancashire and online hate directed at sexualised and marginalised bodies. Her research focuses on sexualities, gender and violence; she has recently published on issues relating to intimate partner violence, and homophobic and misogynist abuse online. She is currently developing work on universities’ management of their LGBT+ heritage. She is author of Sexualities & Society (SAGE Publishing, 2020).
Moderated by Lina Ashour