Displaced From, Displaced Within: Queer and Trans Lives Across East Africa

Over the past decade, East Africa has become shorthand for state-sponsored homophobia and transphobia: draconian legislation, recurring moral panics, and crackdowns that have pushed growing numbers of LGBTQI+ people to leave their homes. But the region cannot be reduced to a place people flee. Its countries are also host states and transit points, producing and receiving displaced people at once, and displacement often happens within borders as much as across them.

Since the project that became East African Queer and Trans Displacements (Bloomsbury, 2026) began, the ground has shifted again: aid architectures have contracted, asylum systems have hardened, and sexual and gender rights are questioned in some contexts. This panel asks participants (editors and authors) to look forward: where do they now situate their findings, in current conditions and in relation to one another? What still holds, and what needs rethinking? And what becomes visible when we look from East Africa rather than at it?

Expect short reflections from each speaker followed by open discussion on the intellectual, political and personal stakes of this work.

Speakers

John Marnell, University of the Witwatersrand

B Camminga, University of Bristol

Stella Nyanzi, Ruhr Universität Bochum

Mwangi Mwaura, University of Oxford

Gabriel du Plessix, University of Warwick

The book is available open access on Bloomsbury Collections. All welcome.

PLEASE NOTE - registered attendees will receive a Zoom link one hour before the event.

Description supplied by the event organiser.