JMCE Summer Research Award Profile
Queer Refugees & EU Migration Policy
Suad Jabr is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Geography and Environment at UNC Chapel Hill. I hold an MA in Geography and BA in Women & Gender Studies and Geography also from UNC Chapel Hill. We asked them a few questions about their summer research, supported by a JMCE Summer Research Award from the UNC-CH Center for European Studies, a Jean Monnet Center of Excellence, to better understand how this experience was vital to guiding their long-term research within the EU.
Q: What is your primary research focus?
My research primarily focuses on how queer refugees and forced migrants navigate global systems of asylum and immigration. The exploratory summer research I conducted thanks to the JMCE Research Award was a comparative analysis of the treatment, acceptance, and exclusion of LGBTQ Middle Eastern asylum seekers and refugees in three EU countries: Greece, Germany, and Finland. This focus included a particular attention to how representatives at different queer migrant organizations in these key states were interpreting and responding to the EU five-year LGBTIQ Equality Strategy as well as popular and political attitudes towards LGBTQ migrants in their distinct but related contexts.
Q: What are you working on now?
This project greatly influenced my MA work where I traced how queer Middle Eastern refugees interact, reinforce, or challenge narratives of queer progress and Middle Eastern backwardness in Western States. In this work, I developed a critical queer feminist lens to examine how these narratives develop and circulate in places such as Europe, the United States, and Canada in relevant legal cases, popular news articles, and memoirs. I carry this lens with me into my now developing dissertation work which focuses on queer refugee life during and after resettlement in the US South. My current project situates the region of the US South as multiscalar–local, national, global–and connected to other geographies of LGBTQ immigration.
Q: How has the JMCE Research Award enriched your research on the EU?
The JMCE EU Summer Research Award helped me develop a robust theoretical framing for my graduate research. The past decade has ushered in an ever increasing number of displaced people worldwide, and EU and other Western states play a critical role in this ongoing global migration. The research I conducted due to this award gave me crucial insight into newly emerging immigration policy changes that are meant to be supportive rather than restrictive of LGBTQ migrants– a notable shift from past decades of national and international policies that were outright exclusionary to LGBTQ migrants. However, these policy goals and their intended impact on the ground are not always clear-cut for LGBTQ refugees and forced migrants who often walk precarious legal, political, and social tightropes as they migrate and build lives in resettlement. This nuanced theme that emerged during my JMCE summer research continues to enrich my doctoral work.
Methodologically, the funding I received from the JMCE to conduct research in three EU states offered me a critical testing ground for conducting comparative analysis. The semi-structured interviews I conducted with international interlocutors gave me invaluable methods training as a graduate student as well as relevant global connections as I continue my graduate work. Through these research interactions, I learned to recognize the EU context as both unique and also highly connected to processes of migration in other places. Conducting JMCE-supported research on the EU has opened a rich intellectual and methodological path forward for me as I embark on my dissertation research.
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