What can research on LGBTQ+ populations contribute to the studies of belonging? Focusing on the role of ‘place’ Professor Amin Ghaziani investigates belonging in LGBTQ+ communities.
About the programme
In this keynote lecture, Professor Amin Ghaziani will use examples from different case studies to illustrate sociological research on queer communities. The origins of many gay neighbourhoods were quite radical and globally we can still find traces of some landmark events from the 20th century. For example, Stonewall is now often used as a name for organisations campaigning for equality of LGBTQ+ populations. However, over the years many of these early neighbourhoods have become more homogeneous. They are no longer places where all members from LGBTQ+ communities find a sense of belonging.
In many cities such as London and Berlin, this has sparked the rise of pop up club nights, often underground. Next to exploring the aspect of territoriality, Ghaziani will shed light on the rise of new counter narratives. Some people identifying with different sexualities feel more at home in new and different night-time venues, and club nights are no longer organised exclusively in well-known gay streets. Moving away from former centres of urban queer communities, these club nights are re-centering conversations on belonging. Who belongs, and where? How does the conceptualisation of Belonging change when we apply it to different locations?
About the speakers
Amin Ghaziani is Professor of Sociology and Canada Research Chair in Urban Sexualities at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. He is author or editor of 5 books: Imagining Queer Methods (NYU), Sex Cultures (Polity), There Goes the Gayborhood? (Princeton), The Dividends of Dissent (Chicago), and A Decade of HAART (Oxford). His articles have appeared in the top journals of his discipline, including the American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, City & Community, Social Problems, Theory & Society, and Urban Studies. He has received fellowships from the Institute for Advanced Studies at UBC, the London School of Economics, and Princeton Society of Fellows, along with awards from the culture, social movements, and community/urban sections of the American Sociological Association. He is an active public intellectual who has contributed to conversations in the New Yorker, American Prospect, and Time magazine; Salon and Slate; BBC, CBC, and NPR radio stations; the Globe & Mail and the Guardian; USA Today; Los Angeles Times; and the New York Times.
Fenneke Wekker is Head of Academic Affairs at NIAS. Wekker is a Political Sociologist and a playwright. In 2020, she obtained her PhD-degree on her ethnographic study Building Belonging; Affecting Feelings of Home through Community Building Interventions. Her main fields of research are state-supported social interventions, urban sociology, ‘feelings of home and belonging’, and institutional mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion.
Register here
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About the NIAS Conference
This lecture is the second out of three keynote lectures part of the NIAS Conference on Studies of Belonging. In these lectures, presented by Prof. Gloria Wekker, Prof. Amin Ghaziani and Prof. Nadim Rouhana, we explore the different aspects of belonging. For more information about the NIAS Conference, please go to www.niasconference.nl