In these daunting times, we invite participants to question implied wholes; to disrupt narratives while celebrating addenda, palimpsests; to ask, once again, why are queer lives made dispensable, unlivable.
See you in Villa Salviati to turn our fragmented selves into sources of transformation 🦾💥

We'll host scholars, activists, artists, and practitioners in Florence to come together, think, and act starting from fragments as sources and inspirations; fragmenting as an instance of deconstruction and radical imagination; fragmentation as a posture to think through reality and practice change.

This is why I cannot see my scholarly role complete without political engagement: be it within my institution, fighting for
#grantequality, or outside, engaging, in recent times in particular, with movements supporting the liberation of #Palestine.

I am curious to hear your thoughts on this!

I also reflected on the responsibilities that this privilege bears too. I do not believe that academia should aim for axiological neutrality: the knowledge we produce is irreducibly political, and so are the infrastructures, resources, and processes we build on to produce it.

I also had the opportunity to reflect on my experience at the @eui-law.bsky.social. I am very aware of the great privilege I benefit from by spending my time here as a researcher and by witnessing, daily, how knowledge is (or should at least) materially produced: in collaboration and in solidarity.

An example? When it comes to migration and asylum law, a (critical) queer legal scholar would rather fight for the abolition of borders than advocate for a multiplication of the existing categories populating a fundamentally unjust, violent, and racist border management system.

I argue that it is not enough to do research "about" LGBT people in order to be a queer scholar. Queer legal scholarship is about reflecting on our positioning, reassessing our epistemology and methodology, embracing the radical implications of critique, and taking a bold political stance.

During the conversation Marilea and I had, I shared my thoughts on what it means to take a queer and critical approach to migration and asylum law, and, more broadly, what it means to be queer and critical while doing (legal) research.

I am curious and excited to hear what you think about this!
In the meantime, a heartfelt thank you to all the people I encountered in these two years who were patient and kind enough to dedicate some of their time to discussing these topics with me: I owe you inspiration and motivation!

This grim conclusion, and the cogent call it extends to scholars inviting their critical engagement with questions of power within the law, still inspires my research, continuing now with my PhD project developing a #queer critique of EU law.

It is in this framework, then, that SOGIESC asylum can be understood as a new weapon in the arsenal of racist border politics: LGBTIQ+ rights discourses turn #homonationalist to justify, yet again, why certain people can be recklessly excluded.

Reading classic themes of refugee law such as #discretion and #credibility through this lens, I show that the law of international protection cannot do without politics: its very functioning depends on othering processes.

By reviewing case law and scholarship in international refugee law, and particularly focusing on European asylum and migration law, I claim that the case of #SOGIESC asylum actually provides a tool to deconstruct the very foundation of refugehood: the binary between forced and voluntary movements.

At the same time, a new minority has obtained recognition in the international refugee law forum: asylum seekers claiming protection from persecution on the ground of their sexual orientation and gender identity. I basically ask: is someone paying the price of this evolution?

In this article, I ask the unsettling question of the politics of #asylum for #LGBTIQ+ people. Recent decades have witnessed an increasing tightening and violent governance of #borders supported by uncensored and often unrecognised racist, dehumanising discourses.

I started working on it as an LLM student at @uvalawschool.bsky.social and I submitted it as a PhD Researcher at the @eui-eu.bsky.social. It is for me a great satisfaction to see how dedication and patience, nurtured by passionate academic discussions, can really turn into public paper.

Considering how EU values played a central role in these "feminist" cases and how they're increasingly called for by EU institutions themselves, see the pending Commission v Hungary case, we think it's high time we took the critique of the legal politics of values seriously.

While this jurisprudential turn was mainly welcomed as good feminist news, we suggest that the way we gain wins for women and other oppressed groups is still dependent on problematic othering dynamics.