Current Projects
Ambivalent Democracies: Intersectional Feminist and Queer Defiant Visions
This theoretical transdisciplinary book project examines how anti-racist feminist and queer movements construct, mobilize and reimagine democracy. Rather than reducing democracy to a mode of government, democracy will be conceptualized broader, beyond material politics, informed by ideas and as inherently paradoxical cultural politics. The Cultural Politics of Democracy: Intersectional Feminist and Queer Defiant Visions seeks to examine democracy in its cultural politics from an intersectional perspective. It has been argued that cultural representations delineate spaces, produce relations, and practices as desirable and legitimate or undesirable and illegitimate (Nash 2001, 2009). The book explores case studies of transatlantic anti-racist feminist and queer movements (and resistances against them) to understand how democracy and democratic practices are mobilized and contested. In this, the book seeks to pay reference to the specific positionality of women of colour in democratic configurations as their representations continue to be informed by the racial-colonial binaries of monstrosity/desirability and oppression/danger (Boulila 2019).
The book seeks to explore the tension between democracy as a catalyst for feminist and queer justice and democracy as a means to uphold hegemonic power relations from a decidedly intersectional perspective. In doing so, the book sheds light on ways of imagining democracy otherwise, from anti-racist feminist and queer perspectives, and provides a better understanding of how democracy can be mobilized against inequalities, both in their material and symbolic dimensions
Funded by the 2021 Emma Goldman Award (FLAX Foundation)
Fostering Queer Feminist Intersectional Resistances against Transnational Anti-Gender Politics (RESIST)
RESIST addresses ‘anti-gender’ politics that imperil equality, gender and sexual diversity, and legitimacy of critical knowledge in contemporary Europe. Crucial to our project is to learn about the feminist and queer practices of resistance against ‘anti-gender’ politics, how they function and are theorised in autonomous, grassroots collectives and organisations in our 8 country cases: Ireland, Spain, Belarus, France, Switzerland, Poland, Germany, Greece, and in one transnational case of people living in exile due to ‘anti-gender’ politics.
Funded by EU Horizon Europe, Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research and Innovation (EU Horizon Europe grant no. 101060749)
More on the project website
Selected Completed Projects
Capacity Building for Rainbow Families in Switzerland and Beyond
Through the framework of community-based participatory action research, the project aims to facilitate social and political change for LGBTQ parents and their children in the rural alpine Canton of Valais. The project also develops accessible research methods that allow rainbow family communities to map and understand their situation and needs.
Funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF)
January 2020-May 2022
Advancing Liveable Lives for Lesbians in Europe – Intersectional Challenges and Future Policy-Making
The research project assessed the need to specifically attend to lesbians in European equality and anti-discrimination policies. It did so by identifying the intersectional needs and challenges faced by lesbians in the EU. The subsequent report identifies policy areas, institutions, instruments and strategies that are crucial in addressing the inequalities lesbians encounter. The research report can be found here.
Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth (BMFSFJ)
September 2019-November 2020
Race in Post-racial Europe: An Intersectional Analysis
This monograph project examined the gendered logics of post-racialism in Europe. By looking at race from an intersectional perspective, and in a context where race is politically and epistemically denied, the project aimed to show that including a strong theorisation of race at the centre of intersectionality is far from displaced in Europe, where inequalities are denied through the claim of being beyond them.
The Race in Post-racial Europe proposes race as a relational, performative discursive system through which human difference is governed. The book opens with a theorisation of modernity and its temporal logics as a significant site for European self-conceptualisations. It examines racial denial in ‘antiracist’ traditions alongside resistances to race in public and policy discourse. The book then explores the intersection of postfeminism and post-racialism in Europe as well as the racial underpinnings of liberal cultural politics and the effects of liberalism on antiracism.
September 2016-August 2019
Dancing Salsa in Post-thinking Europe: Gender and Sexuality Discourses Among Salsa Dancers in Switzerland and England
Drawing on unstructured in-depth interviews with heterosexual and lesbian/gay salsa dancers, my PhD thesis explored how gendered and sexualised formations come into being in Swiss and British salsa dance spaces and what effect this has on queer dancers. The thesis further explored the racialised dimension of gendered salsa dance discourses, especially stereotypical understandings of Latinidad.
Funded by the British Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC)
September 2011-February 2016