Feminist and Queer Interventions for Justice, Autonomy, and Sovereignty: LSE Gender Studies Fellows in conversation

This panel brings together three LSE Fellows in Gender Studies to engage in a critical conversation about feminist and queer struggles for autonomy, belonging, and border crossings, drawing on interdisciplinary and multi-scalar approaches.

By weaving together the lived experiences of queer Kurds in Northern Kurdistan, migrant women navigating European metropoles, and global movements for feminist and planetary justice, the panel will explore how these seemingly disparate experiences are deeply interconnected. Through examining the intersections of displacement, identity, and resistance, the LSE Gender Studies fellows will highlight how local and global processes shape the struggles for justice, sovereignty, and self-determination across diverse geographies. The discussion aims to illuminate how decolonial, feminist, and queer perspectives not only disrupt existing power structures but also envision new forms of solidarity and transformation in the face of structural violence and planetary crisis.

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Meet our chair and speakers

Rohit K Dasgupta is Associate Professor of Gender & Sexuality at the Department of Gender Studies. Prior to his current role he was Senior Lecturer at the University of Glasgow where he is currently Honorary Senior Research Fellow. He has previously held teaching and research posts at Loughborough University, University of Southampton, University of Sussex, University of West London and University of the Arts London. He has also held visiting fellowships at the University of Pennsylvania and Fordham University in New York. He has experience in policy making and political strategy for a number of years as elected councillor in the London Borough of Newham in the areas of Equalities, Social Justice and Culture. Using ethnographic and creative methodologies he has explored the relationship between sexuality, class and belonging in contemporary India which led to his first monograph Digital Queer Cultures in India: Politics, Intimacies & Belonging (Routledge, 2017) and the subsequent books Queering Digital India: Activisms, Identities, Subjectivities (Edinburgh University Press, 2018); Social Media, Sexuality & Sexual Health Advocacy in Kolkata, India (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Friendship as Social Justice Activism (Seagull/University of Chicago Press, 2018), which received an Honourable Mention by Pen America. He currently edits two book series - Ethnographic Innovations, South Asian Perspectives (with Niharika Banerjea & Paul Boyce) for Routledge and South Asian Screens (with Sangita Gopal) for Bloomsbury. 

Emrah Karakuş is an LSE fellow in Gender and Human rights and his interdisciplinary research lies at the intersection of cultural anthropology, critical security studies, and gender and sexuality studies, with a focus on the modern Middle East. His work on affective politics, queer intimacy and migration, and political violence, explore new forms of politics and power forged by intimate negotiations around the value of life, labor, and desire, contributing to contemporary debates in queer of color critique, postcolonial scholarship, and transnational feminism. He is currently working on his book project, Queer Debt: Affective Politics of Security and Intimacy in Kurdish Turkey, which draws on 18 months of Wenner-Gren Foundation-funded fieldwork, exploring how the Kurdish notions of debt (bedel), right, and repayment are taken up, adapted, and deployed by queer and trans Kurds as they stake claims to a livelihood. Before joining LSE Gender Studies, Karakuş was a postdoctoral fellow at the Crown Center for Middle East Studies at Brandeis University. He earned his Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology from the University of Arizona, with minors in Gender and Women’s Studies and Geography. As a Jean Monnet Scholar, he completed his MSc in Security Studies at University College London after obtaining his BA in International Relations from Istanbul Kültür University. Additionally, Karakuş was an Erasmus exchange student at Malmö University, where he pursued studies in Peace and Conflict Studies and International Migration.

Zeynep Kilicoglu is a dedicated feminist scholar whose passion lies in researching migration and forced displacement. Her work revolves around unraveling the way humanitarian organizations in Western Europe, particularly in the UK and France, construct the identities and subjectivities of women refugees and asylum-seekers. She is particularly interested in analyzing how these entities ascribe specific meanings to women's empowerment within their daily operations, with a keen focus on the opportunities provided for refugee women to amplify their authorship, visibility, and political agency. She closely collaborates with activist networks, engaging with refugee and asylum-seeking women from diverse backgrounds. Her epistemological approach involves employing ethnographic methods to co-create academic knowledge in partnership with marginalized communities. She is deeply committed to promoting inclusivity and ensuring active community engagement throughout her research processes.She completed her bachelor’s degree in International Relations at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey (2014) and her master’s degree in Environmental Politics and Development at London School of Economics and Political Science in London, UK (2015). She obtained her PhD degree in International Relations from Florida International University in Miami, Florida (2022), in which she specialized in Feminist International Relations Theory. Before taking on her current role at the London School of Economics, she served as a Tutor in International Security Studies at Swansea University, Wales.

Gloria Novović works at the intersections of feminist political ecology, critical development and policy studies. Her work explores multilateral efforts to redesign the architecture of international cooperation. She is completing a book manuscript on the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, which she presents as a stillborn project of remaking global governance. Concurrently, she is advancing a project on feminist planetary solidarity, which proposes an ontological turn towards more radical feminist decolonial paradigms of development in which the human is cast in the broader world ecology of power. She is tracing the continuities of historical and contemporary feminist projects of (re)constructing global architecture for coalitional solidarity we need to address our shared planetary crises. Prior to joining LSE, she was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Ottawa’s School of International Development and Global Studies. Her work also draws on her well-rounded practitioner experience, encompassing roles at the Canadian Council for International Cooperation, the United Nations’ World Food Programme, and Serbian civil society. She serves on the executive committee of the Canadian Association for Studies of International Development (CASID) and engages with multilateral and civil society actors in the sector. Her work has been supported by the International Development Research Centre (IDRC), the Ontario Trillium Foundation, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), and the University of Guelph.