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The right to asylum on grounds of sexuality and/or gender-based persecution is frequently seen as synonymous with the right to "exit" one's oppressive religious community. This article aims to critique this assumption through a focus on LGBTQ+ asylum claimants, refugees and support providers everyday negotiations with and between faith, religion, sexuality and gender identity in the UK. Drawing on critical scholarship on religion, gender, sexuality, difference, and asylum, as well as empirical research with asylum claimants and secular and religious support organizations in the UK, this article shows how LGBTQ+ refugees and asylum claimants respond to experiences of marginalization through processes of "transformative accommodation" between faith traditions and liberal LGBTQ+ rights. Such accommodations highlight the instability of assumptions that view LGBTQ+ rights in conflict with faith and religious belief, in turn contesting the basis on which racialized, secular and gendered differences that pervade contexts of LGBTQ+ asylum are maintained. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on our experiences of carrying out PhD research on migration during the COVID-19 pandemic. We are all involved with the University College London Migration Research Unit (MRU), and our PhD research explores the lived experiences of migrants and people affected by migration. This is the first of two articles in this issue of Migration and Society addressing the implications of COVID-19 on migration research from the perspective of postgraduate researchers. In this article, we firstly reflect on how "crises," including the COVID-19 pandemic, inevitably shape contexts of migration research. We then share how COVID-19 has shaped our relationship to "the field" and our formal research institutions. Finally, we share how we have adapted our methodologies in response to COVID-19 and, considering the complex ethical and practical challenges posed by this context, reflect on what it means to make methodological "adaptations" in times of overlapping crises. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Th is article argues that Northern responses to, and recognition of, LGBTQ refugees bind queer organizations in Lebanon and Turkey, which support such refugees, in a state of contradiction. This contradiction is defined both by the failure of Northern LGBTQ rights discourses to account for Southern ways of being queer, but also by the categorical imperative of hospitality, which asks that the “right” refugee appears in line with the moral, political, raced, and gendered assumptions of Northern host states. In recognizing this imperative, this article observes how queer organizations in Lebanon and Turkey navigate this contradiction by simultaneously “coaching” their beneficiaries on how to appear “credible” in line with Northern assumptions about sexual difference, while working to accommodate the alterity of those they support. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines creative writing (CW) as a place-based methodology for doing and analysing fieldwork. Drawing insights from CW scholarship and workshops as part of a collaborative project, we contribute new empirically-informed insights from peer researchers about the significance of leveraging emotional connections, detailed attention to lived experiences, and the researcher's experiences in executing and reporting fieldwork. While attending to tensions between ‘academic’ and ‘creative’ writing, we examine how adopting different and alternative writing approaches can express diverse complexities of the field research process. We contribute to an understanding of CW as a dialectical catalyst, serving as a mode for reflecting on the relationships between the researcher and the researched within the field as well as a mode for analysing and disseminating fieldwork findings. By doing so, our study presents opportunities and limitations of CW as a critical methodology for generating situated knowledges about the field and for reimagining fieldwork. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we engage in a discursive analysis and affective reading of written and recorded responses to the suicide of Sarah Hegazi, an Egyptian queer feminist communist who took her own life in exile in Canada in the summer of 2020. In the aftermath of Hegazi’s suicide, queer Arabs across the Middle East and North Africa, as well their diaspora, publicly mourned her death in an unprecedented way through an abundance of social media posts, blogs, articles, Twitter and Instagram hashtags, and vigils. Some mourned her as a friend and comrade, but most did not know Hegazi personally. In what follows, we explore what it was about Hegazi’s life and death that inspired such a response from queer Arabs and what this collective mourning was productive of. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]