Sociology » Events

06/11 9am-1pm: CSWG Writing Session

Amy Clarke — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:19:57 GMT

When: 9am - 1pm, Fri, 06 Nov '26

Where: S1.50

Do you have a bit of writing to work on but struggle to find the space and time to properly focus on it? Do you find it easier to focus when you're in a room with other people who are also working on their writing? Then join us for the CSWG writing sessions, a morning when staff and students get together in the same room to work on their writing independently, but in the company of others!

These sessions are open to both staff and students (UG, PGT and PGR). They will run during the Autumn Term, as follows:

Week 5: Friday 6 November, 9 am – 1 pm
Week 7: Friday 20 November, 9 am – 1 pm
Week 9: Friday 4 December, 9 am - 1 pm

Sessions will be held in S1.50, located in the Social Sciences Building. Advance registration is not required - just turn up!

Sessions will be based on the highly successful Sociological Review Writing Retreat model, in which sessions are facilitated and divided into a series of fixed, timed writing slots, with everyone working silently and independently, in the same room at the same time. Details on how the sessions will run are outlined below.

Plans for the Sessions
We will discuss our writing/research goals at the beginning and end of the session, and the facilitator will tell you when to start and when to stop writing. Writing blocks will typically last 30–45 minutes or up to 1 hour, with 10-minute breaks in between. The facilitator will use a timer, so you can focus entirely on your work without watching the clock.

We work to a policy of 'no surveillance', so you’ll be responsible for setting your own writing goals and monitoring your progress. The use of phones and the internet during the writing sessions will be discouraged (unless needed).

How to prepare?
To make the most out of the writing time, we advise the following:

Decide on a writing project (a chapter of your thesis, a journal article or book chapter);
Undertake most of the reading needed for your piece of writing;
Decide on the draft structure of your paper/chapter, including notes, plans, outlines, data, etc.
Bring all you need to spend the time writing - laptop, charger, notes, readings.

If necessary, you may use the sessions for preparatory tasks such as reading articles, provided this does not disturb others who are writing.

20/11 9am-1pm: CSWG Writing Session

Amy Clarke — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:20:47 GMT

When: 9am - 1pm, Fri, 20 Nov '26

Where: S1.50

These sessions are open to both staff and students (UG, PGT and PGR). They will run during the Autumn Term, as follows:

Week 5: Friday 6 November, 9 am – 1 pm
Week 7: Friday 20 November, 9 am – 1 pm
Week 9: Friday 4 December, 9 am - 1 pm

Sessions will be held in S1.50, located in the Social Sciences Building. Advance registration is not required - just turn up!

How to prepare?
To make the most out of the writing time, we advise the following:

Decide on a writing project (a chapter of your thesis, a journal article or book chapter);
Undertake most of the reading needed for your piece of writing;
Decide on the draft structure of your paper/chapter, including notes, plans, outlines, data, etc.
Bring all you need to spend the time writing - laptop, charger, notes, readings.

If necessary, you may use the sessions for preparatory tasks such as reading articles, provided this does not disturb others who are writing.

04/12 9am-1pm: CSWG Writing Session

Amy Clarke — Wed, 21 Oct 2026 15:21:06 GMT

When: 9am - 1pm, Fri, 04 Dec '26

Where: S1.50

These sessions are open to both staff and students (UG, PGT and PGR). They will run during the Autumn Term, as follows:

Week 5: Friday 6 November, 9 am – 1 pm
Week 7: Friday 20 November, 9 am – 1 pm
Week 9: Friday 4 December, 9 am - 1 pm

Sessions will be held in S1.50, located in the Social Sciences Building. Advance registration is not required - just turn up!

How to prepare?
To make the most out of the writing time, we advise the following:

Decide on a writing project (a chapter of your thesis, a journal article or book chapter);
Undertake most of the reading needed for your piece of writing;
Decide on the draft structure of your paper/chapter, including notes, plans, outlines, data, etc.
Bring all you need to spend the time writing - laptop, charger, notes, readings.

If necessary, you may use the sessions for preparatory tasks such as reading articles, provided this does not disturb others who are writing.

18/11 3pm-5pm: FeGS + CSWG Seminar: "Weaponising Safety: The Anti-Trans Backlash and the Carceral Politics of Gender in Britain"

Amy Clarke — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 10:59:16 GMT

When: 3pm - 5pm, Wed, 18 Nov '26

Where: LIB2 (Library)

You are warmly invited to join us for a face-to-face seminar on

Weaponising Safety: The Anti-Trans Backlash and the Carceral Politics of Gender in Britain

featuring Prof Sarah Lamble (Birkbeck)

This will take place as follows:

Wednesday, November 18th
15.00 to 17.00
in LIB2, ��ý Library (to access LIB2, enter the Library building through this door)

Abstract:

What explains the rapid rise of the anti-trans backlash in Britain, and why have disputes about trans rights become so polarised? This talk will trace the weaponisations of safety claims, and the assertion that trans right pose a threat to women and children, as key tactics in the acceleration of the organised anti-trans movement in Britain. Such appeals draw on carceral logics that equate protection with surveillance, policing, exclusion, and punishment, while obscuring the structural conditions that produce material insecurity, violence and harm. Challenging the anti-trans backlash therefore requires more than defending trans people against demonising attacks; it requires a fundamental rethinking of safety politics more broadly and the carceral assumptions that underpin them. The talk will conclude by setting out a more transformative vision of safety, one that is rooted in collective care, socio-economic security and radical solidarity.

Speaker Bio:

Sarah Lamble is Professor of Criminology & Queer Theory at Birkbeck, University of London. Their research focusses on queer/feminist critiques of carceral politics, state violence, and the limits of punitive approaches to addressing harm. Lamble is co-founder of the Bent Bars Project, a letter-writing and solidarity project for LGBTQ+ prisoners in Britain, and Abolitionist Futures, which builds resources and education around alternatives to police, prisons and punishment. Lamble is the author of Unsafe: The carceral roots of the anti-trans backlash (Haymarket Books 2026).

This event is free and open to all, but advance registration is required.

To register for a place, CLICK HERE.

If you have any questions about the event, please email cswg-events@warwick.ac.uk

If you have accessibility requirements or there are any adjustments we can make to support your full participation, you can let us know through the booking page above.

This event is being organised by the Feminism, Gender and Sexuality Research Cluster and the Centre for the Study of Women and Gender.

12/11 3pm-5pm: CSWG Graduate Seminar: "Gendered Institutions: Power, Policy and Feminist Transformation"

Amy Clarke — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:37:59 GMT

When: 3pm - 5pm, Thu, 12 Nov '26

Where: Online via Teams

Click on this link to join the seminar at 15:00 (GMT).

Şefika Özer

Nottingham Trent University

Evolving Perspectives of Muslim Feminists Regarding Gender, State and Religion in Turkey

The Muslim women’s rights movement in Turkey began in the 1980s and 1990s, especially after the state banned the wearing of the Islamic headscarf at universities. This was part of a renewed secular agenda following a government policy change. However, the Muslim women in the movement never identified themselves as feminists. Since 2015, a shift occurred as a new feminist movement emerged among Muslim women in Turkey, highlighted by the founding of the first Muslim feminist association in 2018. This is an important development because feminism has always been historically associated with secularism and secular people as an ideology and a movement in Turkey. This paper aims to explore the evolution of secular perspectives among Muslim feminists in Turkey, examining the similarities and differences in their journeys. Additionally, the study aims to investigate how these feminists situate themselves in relation to other women’s movements in Turkey and the social, historical and political contexts they are embedded in. This study adopts a qualitative research design, utilising the two qualitative research methods: in-depth interviews and participant observation. Interviews with Muslim feminists are conducted to explore their unique journeys in reaching their current ideological position regarding feminism, secularism and religion. Also, data is gathered during active participation in public meetings of Muslim feminist organisations in Turkey. In addition to the speeches during the meetings, the interaction between the organisation's members is also explored to understand how they resist the patriarchal structures in society as a community.

Sofiya Volvakova

University College Dublin

Left Behind: Gendered Disparities in School Exclusions across England and Northern Ireland

A growing number of school exclusions such as suspensions and expulsions in the United Kingdom (UK) have been the focus of much public debate and sociological discussion in recent years. Furthermore, an increasing body of literature reports on disproportionality within disciplinary decisions, highlighting that punitive measures affect the most vulnerable and marginalised students first. However, few studies in the context of the UK have taken a comparative perspective when investigating disproportionality within a growing number of school exclusion decisions. Using cross-national publicly available official statistics and data from Freedom of Information Requests (FOI) from the Department of Education (England) and Department for Education (Northern Ireland), this paper tracks the evolution of school exclusions over time and investigates whether disproportionality still holds true when comparing a country with a high number of exclusions (England) and a low number of exclusions (Northern Ireland). The findings reveal a notable rise in the number of school exclusion following the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, alongside persistent disproportionality regarding the exclusion of boys, both historically and at present times. The paper concludes that more robust monitoring and deeper qualitative inquiries are urgently needed across both national contexts.

Meike Schneiders

London School of Economics (LSE)

A Perfect Match- Combining Care and Justice for Transformative Feminist Policy

After 40 years of feminist policies, they still have relatively little impact. In this paper, I argue for this to be the case because neoliberal feminism, which is dominant in politics, is unable to fulfill the criteria of a transformative feminist policy. To unleash its potential for change, I claim that supplementation of current moral reasoning processes focusing on justice with Care Ethics is needed. Justice and Care need to be combined to compensate for their respective weaknesses. To enable caring and meaningful caring relationships in society I detect three barriers that need to be removed initiated by the state: profit in the care economy, gender stereotypes in everyday life, and assumed gender neutrality in policy making. This problem analysis is supported by proposals for concrete measures to be taken by the state.

Dhrupti Singh

Aston University

Beyond Gender? Extending Feminist Institutionalism to Institutions Child Sexual Abuse

Feminist theory has provided important insights into the gendered operation of institutions, particularly in explaining women’s experiences of sexual harassment, discrimination, and silencing. This paper argues that feminist institutionalism (FI) can be extended to examine institutional child sexual abuse (CSA), an area that remains comparatively underdeveloped within feminist institutional analysis. Drawing on cases of alleged CSA associated with British political institutions, the study examines how institutional power, gendered norms, and practices of silencing shape both experiences of abuse and institutional responses. FI conceptualises institutions as constituted through formal rules and informal norms that are gendered and embedded within everyday institutional practices (Guido, Walsh and Banaszak, 2023; Kenny and Mackay, 2009). This perspective is valuable for examining how constructions of masculinity, authority, credibility, and vulnerability influence which allegations are recognised, suppressed, or marginalised (Mackay, Kenny and Chappell, 2010). By bringing children more centrally into feminist institutional analysis, the paper explores how power operates across age as well as gender, and how institutional cultures may enable abuse and subsequent silencing. It ultimately considers how feminist theory can be expanded to better account for the institutional dynamics surrounding CSA.

16/12 3pm-5pm: CSWG Graduate Seminar: "Gendered Violence: Naming Harm, Negotiating Justice, Imagining Resistance"

Amy Clarke — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:39:57 GMT

When: 3pm - 5pm, Wed, 16 Dec '26

Where: Online via Teams

Click on this link to join the seminar on Dec 16, at 15:00 (GMT).

Darcie Thomas

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"Her Sufferings were so Great and Intolerable": Historicising Domestic Abuse through a Feminist Lens

If the primary function of the law is to respond to social problems, domestic abuse ought to be considered a recent phenomenon. Under UK law, coercive control was only defined and criminalised in 2015 under the Serious Crime Act, and the first domestic abuse act came into being in 2021. However, just because domestic abuse was not codified in law, does not mean such behaviour was not occurring, and the history of domestic abuse demands further investigation. Focusing on the eighteenth-century, my seminar examines how domestic abuse was not an unfortunate consequence of English marriage law, rather, the conditions required for its prevalence were embedded into the law’s very essence. To demonstrate this, we will examine proto-feminist and legal theorist Sarah Chapone’s treatise The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives (1735). We will consider the ways in which Chapone depicts marital cruelty, documenting patterns of behaviour that could be acknowledged as domestic abuse today. In so doing, we will debate the value of bringing modern domestic abuse research into historical narratives, enabling us to think more broadly about the strengths and challenges of using interdisciplinary research for the advancement of feminist scholarship.

Franica Camilleri

University of Malta

Voices Unheard: Survivors' Experiences of Navigating Family Court in Domestic Violence Cases

This presentation draws on a review of the literature to examine survivors' experiences of navigating family court in cases of domestic violence. While much of the existing discourse on justice responses to domestic violence centres on the criminal justice system, family court remains an under-examined site where survivors often continue to encounter their abuser through custody and access proceedings long after a relationship has ended. The literature points to family court as a space where survivors can experience further trauma, compounded by a lack of trauma-informed awareness among some professionals and a system not designed with survivors' safety and wellbeing at its centre. This presentation argues for the need for trauma-informed approaches within family court, and situates this argument within a broader doctoral project that ultimately aims to centre survivors' own voices and experiences, rather than institutional or professional perspectives, in understanding how the justice system responds to domestic violence. In doing so, it seeks to shift the conversation about court reform back to the people it should serve: survivors themselves, and what justice means from their perspective. This will be of interest to those working in gender studies, socio-legal studies, family law, psychology, and social policy.

Ellie Buxton

Loughborough University

Engaging Men in the Conversation: How Should we Respond to Misogyny in the UK?

This paper evaluates the impact of Law 2114 of 2021 in Colombia, which expanded paternity leave, introduced shared parental leave, and created flexible part-time schemes to redistribute caregiving responsibilities between men and women. Using microdata from the Colombian Household Survey (GEIH) for 2019–2023 and a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach, we estimate the law’s effects on five labor outcomes: pension contributions, labor income, hours worked, inactivity, and self-employment. The analysis is disaggregated by gender, marital status, and sector to capture heterogeneous responses.Findings reveal significant effects among specific subgroups. Fertile women experienced lower inactivity and more hours worked, particularly in stable sectors such as education, health, and public administration, where pension contributions also rose. Married fertile women, eligible for shared leave, showed further declines in inactivity. For fertile men, overall effects were limited, yet in non-pandemic-affected sectors pension contributions and self-employment increased significantly. These results suggest that while aggregate impacts remain modest, the reform fostered measurable labor adjustments where institutional and household conditions favored co-responsibility. We conclude that expanding paternity leave and enabling shared, flexible schemes are important steps, but insufficient to transform gendered labor and care dynamics in a highly informal labor market. More ambitious reforms, structural incentives, and cultural change are required for effective co-responsibility.

Millie Guy

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Flexible Patriarchy? How did Secondary School Girls' Exercise Agency in a Context of Rape Culture?

Research on violence against women and girls has increasingly focused on the harmful sexual behaviours (HSB) girls experience within schools, identified as key sites of gendered violence. However, current research underexplores how girls themselves navigate HSB within a context of rape culture in UK secondary schools. The study used creative, qualitative methods with women aged 18–23 to explore what forms of HSB they experienced in secondary school and how they exercised agency in response. Girls’ complicit agency was most prevalent, as participants largely felt unable to challenge rape culture norms. Resistant agency was present but remained constrained, as its sustainability was dependent on collective performance. Most significantly, some girls negotiated a hybrid form of agency that was both resistant and complicit, avoiding social repercussions while simultaneously disapproving of HSB. These findings show that girls’ agency, although meaningful, remains structurally constrained, complicating binary understandings of agency as either resistant to or complicit with patriarchal structures. The study proposes the concept of flexible patriarchy to capture how such structures accommodate rather than simply suppress resistant agency. This research offers insight for future research and interventions grounded in girls’ existing and attainable forms of agency rather than idealised models of resistance.

17/02 3pm-5pm: CSWG Graduate Seminar: "Gendered Labour, Time and Social Reproduction"

Amy Clarke — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:41:16 GMT

When: 3pm - 5pm, Wed, 17 Feb '27

Where: Online via Teams

Click on this link to join the seminar on Feb 17 at 15:00 (GMT).

Telma Marisa Ojeda Velez
University of Iceland

Perpetuating Harm: Institutional Complicity and the Experiences of Foreign Women in Icelandic Academia

Nordic higher education institutions publicly commit to equality and inclusion, yet internationalization has reshaped academic labour markets, leaving foreign women exposed to precarious contracts and limited institutional protection. This paper examines how foreign women in Icelandic academia experience employment-based violence (EBV) as personal violence enabled and sustained by structural conditions. European research shows such violence is widespread and structurally embedded. In Iceland, research has examined workplace harassment and feminist activism in academia, yet has largely excluded non-Icelandic speakers. The study employs a longitudinal qualitative design, drawing on narrative interviews with seven foreign women working in Icelandic academia (2022–2023), with five returning for follow-up interviews in 2025, analysed using inductive thematic analysis. As a foreign woman working in Icelandic academia, I share participants' subject position, and this proximity has informed reflexivity throughout the study. The analysis draws on structural violence theory and an account of institutional complaint, showing how unaddressed complaints sustain structural violence beneath a facade of equality commitments. Findings reveal that personal and structural violence are intertwined and feed on each other, neither existing without the other: individual acts are enabled by structural conditions such as precarious contracts and absent redress, while their repeated, unaddressed occurrence entrenches structural harm. Institutions consistently fail to intervene, normalising violence and undermining equality commitments, calling for accountability beyond performative frameworks.

Laia Nualart Moratalla
Autonomous University of Barcelona

The Ambivalent Role of Reproductive Work Among Unemployed Young Women: Effects on Sociability, Social Networks and the Labour-Market Re-entry

Unemployment has long been recognised as generating consequences that extend beyond the loss of income, including increased social isolation and the disruption of everyday social relations (Jahoda et al., 1933/1971; Gallie et al., 2003; Gallie and Paugam, 2004). Although these relational consequences are unevenly distributed across social groups, little attention has been paid to how they are shaped by intersecting inequalities. This paper argues that this gap stems from unemployment research being largely modelled on the experiences of adult men and from an employment-centred understanding of work that overlooks other types of work, such as reproductive work. Drawing on situated intersectionality (Yuval-Davis, 2015) and feminist approaches to work, particularly the Total Social Organisation of Labour (Glucksmann, 1995), the paper examines how reproductive work shapes the relational consequences of unemployment. Based on 32 biographical interviews with unemployed young mothers in Barcelona, Spain, the findings reveal an ambivalent role of reproductive work. While intensive reproductive work restructures sociability around family, neighbourhood and childcare spaces, creating new forms of social support and access to employment-related information, it also weakens employment-related ties and can constrain labour market re-entry through caring responsibilities. The paper challenges employment-centred understandings of unemployment and highlights the value of bringing situated intersectionality into dialogue with feminist approaches to work.

Mariami Ochkhikidze

Otto-von-Guericke University of Magdeburg

Invisible Reproduction Across Borders: the Emotional and Cultural Labour of Georgian Migrant Women in Care Work

The globalisation of the market economy has increased demand for migrant women from developing countries to fill low-paid care and service jobs in wealthier societies, contributing to the feminisation of migration. Georgian migrant women are part of this global trend; however, they not only organise care responsibilities across borders but also navigate strong cultural expectations around motherhood, caregiving, and family responsibility. Therefore, this research examines how Georgian migrant women’s experiences of emotional and cultural labour reveal invisible forms of social reproduction that sustain families across borders. The study draws on feminist social reproduction theory, Hochschild’s conceptualisation of emotional labour, and Bourdieu’s concepts of capital and habitus. It is based on six semi-structured expert interviews with Georgian migrant women employed primarily in care-related occupations in Europe and Turkey. Using qualitative content analysis, the study combines deductive categories derived from theory with inductively generated themes emerging from the interviews. The findings show that migration does not remove women’s reproductive responsibilities but transforms them across borders. Women continue to perform emotional, cultural, and economic labour through emotional restraint, maintaining family relationships, transmitting values, and supporting their families financially. Cultural reproduction extends beyond traditions and rituals to include dispositions such as sacrifice, resilience, and devotion, which are crucial to Georgian motherhood and womanhood. The thesis contributes to research on migration and social reproduction by highlighting the emotional and cultural dimensions of transnational labour and how these forms of labour remain largely invisible and undervalued.

Sladjana Jeremic

University of Belgrade

The intensification of Time through Emotional Labor in Women's Remote Work

This conference paper explores how different forms of emotional labor contribute to time intensification for women, using the example of women’s remote work in the European semi-periphery of Serbia. Benjamin Snyder’s contention that time density and intensity are more appropriate concepts for measuring time flow in contemporary capitalism than quantity is examined in relation to different aspects of women’s lives, such as domestic and virtual paid work. Analysis of interviews with 25 millennial women from Serbia, along with the researcher’s autoethnographic reflection on her own experience of remote work, indicates that time intensification is connected to the emotional effort women employ while juggling different activities throughout their workday. This emotional effort manifests in the pronounced perfectionism, conscientiousness, and care for others associated with the role of a 'good' girl, which, as part of the gendered emotional response to growing social insecurity, becomes reinforced and exploited by capital.

24/03 3pm-5pm: CSWG Graduate Seminar: "Intimate and Contested Worlds: Sexuality, Belonging, Representation and Technology"

Amy Clarke — Tue, 27 Oct 2026 11:42:24 GMT

When: 3pm - 5pm, Wed, 24 Mar '27

Where: Online via Teams

Click on this link to join the seminar.

Isabella Taylor
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Your Digital Dream Girl: How AI Girlfriends Enforce Gendered Expectations of Beauty and Emotional Labour

Zoi Arvanitidou’s article ‘Coded Femininity’ and Ellen Atlanta’s Pixel Flesh explores how women are compelled to digitally alter their bodies, where biases are encoded within AI algorithms reproduce the images of slender, conventionally attractive women it has been trained on. The AI girlfriend takes this to the extreme. A woman unburdened by her body, she can be reshaped, edited at the will of her user. ‘Outsourcing Love’ recognises that AI companions repeatedly take on the appearance of youthful, beautiful women, reporting that this may have a positive effect on the self-esteem of men interacting with beautiful fem-bots, the impact it can have on their ability to form meaningful connections with real women, and the objectification it encourages, is concerning. Many chatbots also promise emotional and sexual fulfilment, locked behind a paywall that entices users to spend on subscriptions and cosmetics in return for perceived affection. Reducing women to purchasable objects further encourages objectification, despite no real woman being involved. The chatbot acts as a simulacrum created to please, with no desires of her own- aside from the ones you pick for her. When the AI girlfriend reflects the ‘perfect woman’ this further contributes to pressures women face.

Kit Pyne-Jaeger

Columbia University

The Perverse Past: Lee Edelman, Vernon Lee, and Anti-Reproductive Archival Fictions

This presentation takes up the supernatural fiction of Vernon Lee and the queer negativity of Lee Edelman, namesakes a century apart, to map a sexually transgressive conceit of archival and historical engagement in Lee’s work. I argue that Lee envisions archival objects as sites for a practice of speculative historiography in which individualized affective and aesthetic response constitutes an alternative narrative space that “bulges” (Lee’s own term) into evidentiary reality. Reading Lee via Edelman’s formulation of the queer death drive, I suggest that this narrative space is one of erotic perversity, queer fatality, and anti-reproductive allure: dense with imaginative and queer potential, it also threatens to estrange the creative historian from self and tangible present. In this space, Lee’s archival methodology is articulated through a series of ghosts, phantoms of the (un)historical past who figure the sexual non-normativity and temporal inversion she associates with speculative history-making. From a female serial murderer who enchants a historian through letters to the voice of an Italian castrato that begins to possess a composer, Lee’s complexly gendered ghosts illustrate what Edelman terms the “inarticulable surplus that dismantles the subject,” a queerness in opposition to futurity that emerges from a passionate excess of archival feeling.

Kianna Hinds

London School of Economics (LSE)

Dominating Images: Framing Black Lesbian Identities Across Global Cinema

Film serves as a viable site of analysis for sexuality, functioning as a vehicle to analyse the normalised and disavowed sexual behaviours and identities in the social world. Building on Patricia Hill Collins’s (1991) theory of controlling Images, this paper develops a theoretical typology, Dominating Images, to conceptualise how transnational media frame and construct Black lesbian identities. I argue that despite contemporary liberatory portrayals, global cinema reproduces systemic violence by confining Black lesbian representations to three primary Dominating Images: the perpetual lesbian victim, marginal high femme, and aggressive stud. Using Black feminist discourse analysis and social constructionist theory, this paper dissects these tropes across films from the UK, Jamaica, Amsterdam and South Africa. Through close textual readings of Zanele Muholi & Peter Goldsmid’s Difficult Love (2010), Micah Fink’s The Abominable Crime (2011), and Campbell X’s Stud Life (2012), the analysis shows how intersecting social identities of race, gender, and sexuality influence Black lesbian cinematic images. This paper examines how both mainstream and independent cinema often deny black lesbians authentic, whole representations, offering a critical framework for decoding the visual politics of race, gender and sexuality in contemporary film.

Jiayu Shi

University of Strathclyde

Making Scotland Home: Queer Belonging among Chinese Postgraduate Students

This paper examines how queer Chinese postgraduate students come to imagine Scotland as a possible home. Drawing on qualitative interviews with LGBTQ+ students who completed their undergraduate education in mainland China before moving to Scotland for postgraduate study, it explores how belonging develops through ordinary experiences of recognition, intimacy, safety and everyday life. Rather than treating migration as a straightforward movement from repression to freedom, the paper shows how the possibility of staying is produced unevenly. Participants described becoming attached to Scotland through mundane routines, friendships, intimate relationships and a reduced need to manage or conceal their queer lives. Yet these attachments remained conditional. Immigration status, employment prospects, class resources and obligations to family in China continued to shape whether a future in Scotland could be imagined or sustained. I argue that queer homemaking is best understood as an ongoing and relational process rather than a settled sense of belonging. “Home” emerges through the accumulation of ordinary practices that make particular forms of queer life more liveable, while remaining constrained by transnational and structural inequalities.