Partner Affiliated Event: LGBTQ+ Studies at Risk

"LGBTQ+ Studies at Risk" was co-organized by Gender Wars: East and South research assistant, Talia Kollek.

LGBTQ+ Studies at Risk was an international two-day conference at UCL SSEES connecting queer researchers from different disciplines across the humanities and social sciences. It was designed to assist early-career researchers and PhD students in creating a network of LGBTQ+ scholars working in hostile or authoritarian environments. The conference was run by Olga Doletskaya (UCL, SSEES) and Talia Kollek (Gender Wars: East and South Research Assistant, University of Oxford, REES), both doctoral students researching Russian LGBTQ+ communities.

LGBTQ+ researchers working in hostile or authoritarian settings are often siloed within their own region of study, rarely connecting with scholars studying similar topics in other areas. LGBTQ+ Studies at Risk allowed for knowledge exchange among queer researchers—especially as many face similar obstacles, including homophobia and state repression, along with security and privacy concerns. The conference included workshops on digital security, researcher wellbeing, and ethics and consent. There were panels and roundtables on the study of communities in diaspora, parenting and education, and the decolonization of LGBTQ+ studies. The keynote address drew parallels between the situation in Hong Kong and Russia, asking “How can LGBTQ+ researchers adapt to challenging environments?”

The conference had over thirty attendees and speakers, the vast majority of whom attended in person. This included researchers studying Georgia, Ethiopia, South Africa, Columbia, Poland, Hungary, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Turkey, China, Hong Kong, the Philippines, Taiwan, Latvia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Brazil, Japan, Belarus, and Vietnam.

LGBTQ+ Studies at Risk was made possible with generous funding from IAS Octagon Small Grants Fund, The London Arts & Humanities Partnership, and the British Association for Slavonic and East European Studies.  

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