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Trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) people who make refugee claims in Canada negotiate a complex nexus of identity, belonging, and citizenship. Drawing on insights from TGNC refugees, immigration lawyers, and frontline workers, in this paper we examine the ways the state controls the trans body through the refugee claims process and in the process of integration into life in Canada, while also highlighting trans refugee methods of survival and resistance. What emerges is an understanding of the ways that refugees navigate the tension between gender, sexuality, and homecoming as both intimately felt and geopolitically managed. We convey TGNC refugee narratives to demonstrate how they both confirm and expand upon the existing literature on Canadian LGBTQ+ refugees. TGNC refugees' experiences at the Immigration and Refugee Board confirm insights from existing LGBTQ+ refugee studies. However, TGNC refugees' day‐to‐day lives differ significantly from LGB refugee lives as recounted in the literature. In TGNC refugees' attempts to access gender‐affirming documentation, healthcare, housing, and income, they confront distinct systems of transgender exceptionalism, border imperialism, and racial and heteropatriarchal capitalism that limit their access to basic necessities and impact how they build home both conceptually and materially. Key Messages: Refugee narratives elicited at the Immigration and Refugee Board follow a logic of "transgender exceptionalism" and often diverge from the complexity of Trans and gender nonconforming (TGNC) refugee experiences.TGNC refugees experience barriers to accessing housing, healthcare, adequate documentation, and employment due to histories and systems of oppression.These narratives demonstrate that the trans refugee homemaking process is implicated in nationalism, but also shows the needs to push against this limiting frame. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This symposium extends debates over Neil Brenner's and Christian Schmid's planetary urbanization framework as 'a new epistemology of the urban'. The contributors find much that is provocative and productive in the planetary urbanization approach as it has been advanced thus far. They also have concerns about the ways in which this approach has the potential to limit the bounds of urban theory (intentionally or not). Thus the collection extends existing engagements (most notably via a 2018 special issue of the journal Society and Space) with planetary urbanization by scholars working in minor theoretical registers as an effort to offer positive critique in the context of elaborated alternatives. The intent of the collection is, in short, to offer reflections on urban scholarship in the 'urban age' that resist some planetary urbanization theorists' call to pin down urban theory and instead might leave it open to 'radical alterity'. The introduction, four research articles and one commentary that make up the symposium cover such topics as urban migrant labor, the multiple temporalities of urban development, caste and urban ecology, the politics of knowledge production, and theorizing as cosmopolitan practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the politics of mobility for a group of rural inhabitants attempting to diversify their livelihoods in an especially prescribed environment, namely ethnic minority street vendors living and working in upland socialist Vietnam. These Hmong, Yao and Giáy individuals face a political environment where access and trade rights shift on a near-daily basis because of the impulses of state officials, and where ethnicity is central to determining who gets to be mobile and how. We analyse three groups of itinerant vendors-those vending on the streets of an upland tourist town, the mobile minority wholesalers who supply them and other traders, and vendors who trek with Western tourists-to reveal the nature of this trade environment, while also highlighting the ways in which ethnic minority vendors negotiate, work around and contest vending restrictions in numerous innovative ways. We find that this focus on the micro-geographies and everyday politics of mobility is essential to understanding how rural Global South livelihoods are fashioned and diversified, in this case revealing specific relationships and negotiations regarding resource access, ethnicity, state authority and livelihood strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars are now well attuned to the geographies of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) tolerance and intolerance across the world's countries. Yet, the ways in which the global and national dimensions of LGBT politics are tied to the world's cities have received limited attention; a particularly important omission since we have witnessed the stunning development whereby sexual difference is increasingly marshaled as a symbol of progress and modernity for the purposes of fostering national and urban competitiveness in various contexts. To frame the remaining papers in this symposium, this introductory article puts work on sexuality and the city into conversation with debates on global urbanism. It thus provides a framework for understanding the worlding of queerness that focuses on the relationships between globalization, urbanization and sexual politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two meanings of ‘domestic’, as both residential dwelling and national territory, collide unusually forcefully in Singapore since its Housing Development Board (HDB) provides most housing in this city-state. While many scholars have interrogated the boundaries between homely/unhomely and foreign/domestic in Singapore by examining gender, ethnic/racial and class politics of HDB, in this paper I argue for the analytical usefulness of considering Singapore housing and citizenship as heteronormative; and, more broadly, for the value of a queer theoretical approach in advancing critical geographies of home. Combining archival research with contemporary observation, I examine discourses of respectable domesticity and proper family across Singapore’s colonial and postcolonial periods in order to understand not just the exclusion of gays and lesbians, but also the ‘queering’ of a range of figures such as the single mother, the migrant worker, the unfilial child, and many others. Since the production of this range of non-heteronormative others is produced by a much more complex set of cultural logics than a focus on the deployment of a sexual binary can capture, the queer theoretical approach I argue for understands heteronormativity not as a universal policing of a heterosexual–homosexual binary, but as the geographically and historically specific coincidence of race, class, gender, nationality and sexual norms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]