My dissertation, “Waiting in Transit: The Sexuality of (Im)Mobility and Iranian LGBTQ Refugees in Turkey,” demonstrates the need to understand migration not through movement but through waiting and immobility in the contemporary context of closed borders. Supported by a Wenner-Gren Dissertation Fieldwork Grant, it draws on six months of preliminary research (2014- 2017) and two years of ethnographic fieldwork (2017-2019) in Turkey with Iranian LGBTQ refugees awaiting resettlement to the United States and Canada. 

As North American countries have cut their refugee quotas and tightened their asylum policies since 2015, the prospects for Iranian refugee resettlement have grown increasingly dim. Even applicants who have completed necessary asylum procedures and have been formally eligible for resettlement for years are still stranded in Turkey. My ethnography investigates this critical time period in which “temporary transit” has turned into a condition of “indefinite waiting.” Drawing on participant observation, archival research, interviews, and multi-media production in three Turkish towns, it explores how Iranian refugees cope with this precarious and uncertain form of waiting, while negotiating their various positionings as ‘Muslim,’ ‘queer’ and ‘refugee’ with multiple nation-states, international asylum authorities, national and diasporic NGOs, and local townspeople. Rather than treating waiting merely as a governmental tool that aims to control and demobilize refugees, my ethnography demonstrates that waiting becomes an “active time-space” in which refugees refashion their identities, establish queer kin structures, and cultivate novel forms of care, support, and solidarity, while also feeling intense competition with one another to gain access to resettlement. 

I have published my research in peer-reviewed journals and edited volumes. “Lesbian Refugees in Transit” examines how Iranian lesbian refugees navigate trans/national asylum authorities’ conflicting demands on their bodies, identities, and narratives. A co-authored article, “Toward a New Asylum Regime in Turkey?”, explores Turkey’s changing asylum regime in the wake of mass displacement from Syria. “Unsafe Present, Uncertain Future” (in Queer and Trans Migrations) focuses on rising trends in detention and deportation of queer refugees in Turkey. With the support of a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship, I am currently turning one of my dissertation chapters into another article titled, “Sexual Regimes of Value.” In this manuscript, I analyze how Iranian LGBTQ refugees have responded to the ‘Muslim travel ban’ by mobilizing a “racialized sexual vulnerability” to establish themselves as more ‘deserving’ than Syrian refugees.  

I am committed to multimodal, collaborative, and social justice-oriented approaches to knowledge production. During my doctoral dissertation research, I initiated an engaged community project in collaboration with Iranian LGBTQ refugees and Pink Life QueerFest (Turkey’s first queer film festival organized by Pink Life LGBTQ Association). We collectively organized film screenings, solidarity meetings, and queer cultural events that have established bridges between Iranian LGBTQ refugees and Turkey’s queer and trans communities. These community engagements have promoted LGBTQ refugees’ active participation in cultural and artistic life, while also producing and disseminating knowledge about various problems (labor exploitation, lack of access to medical care, sexual harassment, discrimination etc.) that refugees face as they wait in Turkey. This year-long collaborative project received an Engaged Cornell award.