Upcoming Events

MAY 2026

Back to the Backlash: Understanding LGBTQ Moral Panic Agenda-Setting in 2026 

Chris Pepin-Neff, PhD (they/them), is an Associate Professor of Public Policy at the University of Sydney. Before 15 years in academia, they spent 15 years in LGBTQ+ politics in the U.S. as the first lobbyist for the repeal of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” Executive Director of the trans and queer youth center Outright Vermont, as well as being pen pals with Gore Vidal and mentored by Dr. Frank Kameny.    

May 28th 2026 4-5pm (UK time) 

Registration link: 

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfs4QCdI1JMC6tIP5N-xHb8mrvUyX8mbaPrViz22fQ6kjjXHg/viewform 

Abstract

What exactly is going on with the velocity and success of anti-LGBTQ+ politics? This talk re-interprets LGBTQ+ public policy in 2026 by examining the way the policy process is motivated by the attention of social reactions toward LGBTQ+ issues, not the underlying issues themselves (Pepin-Neff, 2025). This talk will highlight key aspects of “tolerable inequality” from my 2025 book “Tolerable Inequality: Understanding LGBTQ+ Public Policy,” where I highlight how the policy process has not appreciated or responded to the value of inequality to incumbent actors and the ways this value is leveraged through narratives and structures to privilege non-existent issues as a means of maintaining power. This talk will focus on U.S. examples within a framework that identifies systems of attention, expectation, and identity to look at recent examples like the Utah anti-trans laws against trans sports athletes in states with two trans student athletes. This research also highlights the shift in policy dynamics that has led to the rise of moral panic agenda-setting in the policy process internationally, especially anti-trans and anti-gender moral panics in the U.K., U.S. and around the world.

The book, Tolerable Inequality is available open access via: https://www.routledge.com/Tolerable-Inequality-Understanding-Public-Policy-and-LGBTQ-Politics/Pepin-Neff/p/book/9781032786568  

JUNE 2026

‘I Sucked a lot of Dicks to Get this Place!’ Homemaking and Care Practices among East African LGBTQ Refugees

Dr John Marnell is a postdoctoral fellow at the African Centre for Migration and Society. He is the author of Seeking Sanctuary: Stories of Sexuality, Faith and Migration (Wits University Press, 2021) and a co-editor of two collections: East Africa Queer and Trans Displacements (Bloomsbury Academic, 2026) and Queer and Trans African Mobilities: Migration, Asylum and Diaspora (Zed Books, 2022).

June 25th 2026 4-5pm (UK time)

Registration link: https://forms.gle/ep6NKwYjXGVJqPNo8 

Abstract

Research on queer and trans dis/emplacement is dominated by studies of discrimination, exclusion and related forms of marginalisation. While such work is vital for advancing protections for LGBTQ refugees, its overreliance on vulnerability as an analytic frame risks obscuring crucial affective, embodied and spatial dynamics. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in Cape Town and Johannesburg, this chapter reconceptualises queer and trans dis/emplacement as ongoing, interlinked processes that unfold across multiple scales. It employs two interrelated optics – homemaking and care – to examine how LGBTQ refugees sustain life and find meaning amid systemic neglect, legal insecurity and social prejudice. The analysis highlights the ambivalent role of diasporic networks, which can both enable and constrain access to housing, resources and support. It further demonstrates how improvised care practices and alternative kinship formations generate contingent, situated forms of belonging. By foregrounding the interplay of sexuality, gender, nationality, documentation status and other demographic factors, the paper challenges homogenising portrayals of LGBTQ refugees and calls for greater attention to differentiated, context-specific experiences.

This paper draws on research published in the open-access collection East African Queer and Trans Displacements, which can be downloaded here.