• How does where you are LGBTQI matter, whether within the Caribbean or outside of it?

 

• How are LGBTQI people taking up space and place across the region?

 

• What are the implications of leaving the place, as scholars, as asylum-seekers, as legal or illegal, long-term or temporary migrants, as the children of migrants, for example? Of returning to live or visit? Of the ways in which we live transterritorially?

 

• Who has imagined or is imagining the queer Caribbean, and how? How do we understand dominant narratives of the Caribbean as “unlivable” for LGBTQI people? For whom is the region livable, and how? How do these narratives shape identity?

 

• Where does the power to define the LGBTQI Caribbean reside? In law? In cultural imagination? In our “leadership” classes? At the grassroots? In Global North media? In Global South movements?

 

• Does boundary-crossing within the Caribbean have an impact on being LGBTQI? What are these boundaries? How are they created and by whom?

 

• How are LGBTQI engagements  (academic, political, activist, artistic, economic, travel, discursive, etc) across Caribbean boundaries (South-South, North-South, intraregional, diaspora-to-Caribbean) navigated? What geopolitics and hegemonies are at play?
   

• How is place and residence in particular determined or affected by markers of identity and/or social status (i.e. race/colour, class, gender, migrant status, family, health, ability, etc.)?

 

• How is Caribbeanness experienced by LGBTQI people in the Caribbean’s diaspora? How do we identify, organise, play?

 

• Are there challenges associated with being in place? (i.e., “grounded” in place, or “stuck in place”?) 

 

• Are there challenges associated with movement? (i.e., having the privilege to move, but also facing difficulties) 

 

• How do LGBTQI communities/individuals deal with forced or coerced movement or migration?  

 

• How has globalisation enabled and imperilled local LGBTQI movements in the Caribbean? Has it opened up ideas, optimism, solidarity and access to resources? Has it robbed us of autonomy and self-determination or trapped us in imposed ideas of Caribbean homophobia and Global North prescriptions for liberation? Has it emboldened global Religious Right movements to evangelise and recruit here?

 

• How do international development and its institutions engage with the Caribbean as a particular place? How is LGBTQI life imagined and engaged with and in global development practice?

 

• How are LGBTQI Caribbean citizens included (and how do we include ourselves) in the projects of building and governing our postcolonial nations, or engaged with power and participation in those nations of which we are colonies or outposts, or in which we find ourselves as migrants? How do we use involvement in domestic or transnational politics, parties, unions, international and civic/neighbourhood associations to shape the places in which we live?

 

• How have visions of Caribbean sovereignty engaged with LGBTQI and other sexual freedoms and gender justice? How are Caribbean LGBTQI politics and hopes for justice grounded in the power of other places to make change here, or on concepts of autonomy and nationalism? 

 

• How do climate crises and political violence shape the sense of the Caribbean as a place to live?

 

• How do differently abled queer Caribbean people envisage and engage their lives in the region?

 

• How do indigenous Caribbean LGBTQI people negotiate their identity in this regional space? 

 

• Other questions that engage geographic, political and imaginary place and Caribbean LGBTQI individuals and communities.

 

In keeping with our commitment to extending Beyond Homophobia’s remit beyond the academy, we emphasise that these and other questions can be answered in a variety of ways–scholarly research and theorisation engaging any academic discipline(s), artistic representations, applied research, activist reports–or a combination of any of these. Scholars and students (institutional and community-based), artists, activists, artivists, lawyers and judicial officers, policy makers, analysts and advocates, administrators, service providers and other interested persons are welcome.