Panel Discussion on "Rethinking Resistance Politics in Troubling Times: Transnational Queer Solidarity During COVID-19"

Date: 

Wednesday, October 7, 2020, 12:00pm to 2:00pm

Location: 

online

This webinar is co-sposored by the Comparative Inequality and Inclusion Cluster, the Institute of Social Sciences, Humboldt University of Berlin, and is part of the Worldwide Week at Harvard 2020 programming.

You must register in advance to attend this webinar.

Chairs:

  • Michèle Lamont, Robert I. Goldman Professor of European Studies; Professor of Sociology and of African and African American Studies; Director, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University.
  • Gökçe Yurdakul, Georg Simmel Professor of Diversity and Social Conflict; Director, Institute of Social Sciences, Humboldt University of Berlin.

Abtract: The COVID-19 pandemic has posed unprecedented challenges to human rights around the world and marked a period of significant backward steps concerning social justice and LGBTQ advocacy. Many right-wing authoritarian governments have utilized the pandemic as a pretext to demonize their perceived enemies, including immigrants, Black and other racialized communities, and LGBTQ people. Recently, Polish President Andrzej Duda accused the country’s LGBTQ community of being “even more destructive” than communism.

Turkey’s most senior Muslim cleric accused homosexuality of “...bringing illnesses,” and warned the community to protect themselves from “such evil.” Hungary’s recently passed legislation banning legal recognition of transgender and intersex people and the Trump administration’s attempt to remove the nondiscrimination protections for LGBTQ people in health care are two other worrying backward steps concerning LGBTQ rights and social justice.

Against this backdrop, political ethnography stands as a tool for intellectual inquiry on resistance actions and as a method to ask, "what is happening?" By bringing together a critical group of scholars who have contributed to the scholarship on LGBTQ rights and social movements, we are hoping to think together on the issues of activism, resistance actions, and transnational solidarity in “troubling times.”

Participants:

  • Sa’ed Atshan, Visiting Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Visiting Scholar in Middle Eastern Studies, University of California, Berkeley; Assistant Professor of Peace and Conflict Studies, Swarthmore College.
  • Nicole Doerr, Associate Professor of Sociology; Director, Copenhagen Centre on Political Mobilisation and Social Movement Studies, University of Copenhagen.
  • George Paul Meiu, John and Ruth Hazel Associate Professor of the Social Sciences, Department of Anthropology and Department of African and African American Studies, Harvard University.
  • Jason Ferguson, PhD Candidate, Department of Sociology, University of California, Berkeley.
  • Tunay Altay, PhD Candidate in Social Science, Humboldt University of Berlin