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- Convenors:
-
Thomas Herzmark
(University of Göttingen)
Gitanjali Joshua (University of Hyderabad)
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- Formats:
- Panel
Short Abstract
Beyond the impasse of essentialised identities, compelling narratives are crucial to minorities’ access to cultural, political and legal recognition. This panel analyses entangled cultural scripts of marginality that can empower, even as they limit horizons of actors whose identity is politicised.
Long Abstract
Within the context of secular democracies’ failure to create more equitable worlds, amidst the turn towards authoritarian populism, how do anthropologists analyse the demands on minorities to inhabit and perform identities? Across the polarised settings of indigenous politics, gender justice, identity-based activism, and political discourse online, crafting compelling narratives of marginalised subjectivity remains critical to gaining visibility, traction, and leveraging power. Coherent, relatable, and accessible narratives for emancipation and entitlement are especially influential in a media-tised world where attention itself is highly commoditised.
This panel investigates how minorities narrativise their identity in overdetermined spaces of cultural, political and legal recognition. We welcome accounts of the tensions in identity politics from ethnography, studies of bureaucratic and legal registers of marginality, and anthropologically-informed creative writing. To be marginalised is to necessarily contest a dominant narrative, whether through rejection or conformity. To be marginalised is to have an identity. To inhabit identity categories strategically is thus to participate in a narrative of marginality. But does articulating marginalisation - in order to secure rights - always entrench and further polarise identity categories?
How do anthropologists narrate the ways minorities navigate polarising accounts of their identities? What happens to identities, and to pathways to access rights, when a narrative ossifies, and when the terms through which marginality is made visible become rigid and fixed? How do state framings of identity and marginality reciprocally reproduce and interact with articulations made elsewhere? How do categories of social policies, affirmative action, and protective discrimination fuel politics of resentment and difference? How does the necessity to play into established cultural scripts of marginality empower or limit the horizons of actors whose identity is already politicised? And, how can anthropologists engage constructively with the resurgence of identity politics in the face of growing authoritarianism?
Accepted papers
Session 1Paper short abstract
This paper examines how autistic migrants navigate contested narratives of neurodiversity, diagnosis, and self-identification. Drawing on the concept of the borderdweller, it explores how multiplicity enables movement beyond strategic essentialism without abandoning identity-based claims to rights.
Paper long abstract
The neurodiversity movement has successfully shifted autism from a medical pathology into the domain of social identity. However, this shift reveals a critical tension central to this panel: while "strategic essentialism" (Spivak, 1988) remains necessary for accessing resources and legal recognition (Ellis, 2023), it risks replicating the very binaries—neurodivergent versus neurotypical—that the movement seeks to dismantle. This paper investigates how autistic migrants navigate these overdetermined spaces, trapped between the liberating potential of self-identification and the rigid gatekeeping of medical diagnosis (Russell, 2020). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the decolonial frameworks of Anzaldúa and Lugones, I expand the concept of the "Borderdweller" to navigate the impasse of essentialised identities. Unlike static narratives of marginality, the Borderdweller embodies "multiplicity", resisting fixed identity while acknowledging the strategic necessity of political categorization. I integrate this with Walker’s (2021) "neuroqueering", which rejects the pathologization of difference in favour of fluidity and nonconformity. This analysis challenges the ossification of identity politics, arguing that current iterations often conflate "oneness" (solidarity) with "sameness" (homogeneity). By reclaiming the original, intersectional ethos of the Combahee River Collective, I ask: What comes after strategic essentialism? How can the figure of the Borderdweller help us move toward a "politics of identity" (Runswick-Cole, 2014) that secures rights without enforcing new borders of exclusion? This paper ultimately explores how marginalized actors can inhabit identity categories strategically without limiting their horizons to state-defined scripts, offering a pathway to recognize commonality within the context of difference.
Paper short abstract
This paper investigates how Black African women in South Korea construct narratives of “Africanness” and “Koreanness” in response to gendered racism. Framed as strategic essentialism, these everyday politics enable belonging while risking the re-essentialisation of fixed racialized identities.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how Black African women living as graduate students in South Korea navigate their racialized and gendered marginal position through identity constructions. Drawing on ethnographic research, it investigates how Black African women construct “Koreanness” to describe Koreans as reserved and emotionally unavailable toward them, while constituting “Africanness” as its opposite - expressive and sociable. This paper argues that these polarized identity constructions operate as strategic essentialism (Spivak 1988), through which women respond to gendered racism in Korea.
The analysis shows how silent racializing gazes and distancing pressure women to filter visible markers of Africanness and Blackness, such as natural hair and clothing. In the Korean context, where the ethnofiction of the nation as a culturally homogeneous society persists, Black African women are pressured to interpret exclusion as stemming from “cultural difference” rather than structural racism, shaping how “Koreanness” and “Africanness” are articulated.
Within these constraints, women construct narratives of “Africanness” that emphasize cultural expressiveness. While such constructions enable belonging and visibility, they are deeply ambivalent. They risk re-essentialising both African and Korean cultures as fixed, and may further reduce African cultures to music, and bodily expressiveness.
This paper contributes to the panel by expanding identity politics beyond organized political resistance to include everyday negotiations of racialized and gendered identity under conditions of limited political and legal recourse. It demonstrates how attempts to contest marginality can simultaneously reproduce fixed identity categories, and shows how framing these ambivalent constructions through strategic essentialism enables a more nuanced anthropological analysis.
Paper short abstract
This presentation brings a framework of (in)visibility centre stage to discuss how Black residents of a multi-ethnic urban locale in northwest England use “Africans” as a political and moral tool to achieve visibility; and thus, recognition as respectable citizens in local socio-political contexts.
Paper long abstract
This presentation examines how a group of Black British traders negotiate visibility in Grandville, a pseudonym I use for a multi-ethnic, economically deprived urban area in the North-West of England. (In)visibility here refers to the experience of being “Othered” through perceived racial distinctions within a diverse urban context, as well as to a process of securing political representation that was felt to be lacking from the local city council. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork in and out of shops on the neighbourhood’s high street, I explore how my co-conversationalists self-identify as “Africans” in a multicultural cityscape. I argue that while “Africans” was used as a political category to access political representation from the city council (Rapport, 2002), it was also a moral category to reconfigure the stigmatised image of Black people in Grandville. To exemplify these processes, this presentation shows how local Black traders present themselves to the council and fellow residents as “good” people; and that is, responsible citizens who look after themselves, others and their neighbourhood. In this regard, the paper illustrates how my co-conversationalists’ efforts of visibility build on ideas of “moral citizenship” as it is understood in advanced liberalism (Hyatt, 1997). By tracing how (in)visibility is enacted and negotiated, I show how Black traders purposefully make (in)visible the heterogeneity of their group through the “elegant category” of “Africans” (Gilroy, 2003). And yet, it is through the very (in)visibility of their group that, I argue, they achieve visibility in political contexts.
Paper short abstract
Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork, this account will position the work of collective making in sex worker networks in India alongside other labours in the lives of sex workers-productive, reproductive, and otherwise, to offer a counter-narrative to the sex-work-identity-morality nexus.
Paper long abstract
Sex worker collectives in India were created in the 1980s-1990s as AIDS response community healthcare projects. In recent years, these collectives have been formalising into Community-Based Organisations (CBOs) to advocate for sex workers’ socio-legal rights, decriminalisation, better working conditions, building cross-movement solidarities and unionisation efforts.
Few studies exist in India about local sex work activism (beyond sex and work itself) and collective identity formation in layered global-local contexts where sex workers work for global decriminalisation, with anti-racist, abolitionist movements, local and global workers’ movements, against poverty, all in the background of right-wing nationalism, among other crises.
The sex workers I work with contend with multiple identities- being women/transgender people/men who have sex with men, caste oppressed, as well as that of being “informal workers”. The labour of advocacy, community making, activism and ensuring a future for themselves lies in these multiple identities and negotiations that they have to use/deploy/employ based on the situation. The identity of the sex worker has both “freed” sex workers from previously stigmatising language, but also created an umbrella identity that has pushed different localised experiences into one identity marker. The paper will investigate what the work of sex worker activism based on this identity is, and the usefulness of identity markers in this context (following Dutta and Roy’s work on “Transgender”, and Boyce and Cataldo on “MSM”), to see how people negotiate identities; what they get to proudly use, and what they occupy even if they are barred from using it.
Paper short abstract
This study explores identity negotiations among LGBTQIA+ refugees in Italy during the post-asylum phase. Based on ongoing fieldwork, it reconstructs alternative narratives to challenge dominant “victimizing” and “liberating” scripts, to capture the complex and dynamic nature of identities.
Paper long abstract
The asylum process often subjects LGBTQIA+ individuals to a pervasive “culture of disbelief”, requiring them to align their life stories with rigid, Westernized categories of sexual orientation and gender identity to be deemed credible. Within the field of Queer Migration Studies, significant attention has been paid to the narratives expected during the asylum claim; however, a crucial question remains insufficiently explored in the literature: what happens once international protection is granted?
This paper explores the identity negotiation processes and narratives deployed by refugees self-identifying as LGBTQIA+ in Italy, during the “post-asylum” phase. It challenges two dominant and oversimplified narratives often reproduced within institutional, humanitarian and academic contexts: the “victimizing script”, which considers refugees merely as passive victims, and the “migration to liberation narrative”, which assumes that obtaining international protection represents necessarily a liberation moment. Such narratives fail to capture the complex, multidimensional and dynamic nature of identities.
The theoretical framework combines Symbolic Interactionism and Intersectionality, while methodologically the study employs Constructivist Grounded Theory, to explore how LGBTQIA+ refugees narrate themselves and strategically negotiate their multiple intersecting identities in everyday social settings and interactions.
This paper presents preliminary findings from ongoing fieldwork for a PhD research project, based on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with refugees and professionals. Its aim is to reconstruct alternative narratives for LGBTQIA+ refugees directly from participants’ voices. By following an iterative and reflexive approach, the research moves beyond essentialised categories, offering a deeper understanding of the complexities of LGBTQIA+ refugees in the Italian context.
Paper short abstract
In this paper, I ethnographically explore how members of an ecumenical LGBTQ+-affirming church based in Metropolitan Manila, Philippines, mediate marginality and privilege by curating their identities as Christian, queer, metropolitan Filipinos oscillating between the fringe and the mainstream.
Paper long abstract
Amidst the rise of right-wing populism across the globe, the identifications of ‘being queer’ and ‘being religious’ have seemingly never been more at odds; queer theory conceptualises sexuality/gender identity as being neither binary nor static, while many long-held religious ideologies tout heterosexuality and binarised gender as divinely imparted truths from which deviation is fundamentally ‘unnatural’. Yet, the queer faithful undoubtedly exist amidst this conceptual gulf despite their marginality. In this paper, I explore this supposed gulf by drawing on ethnographic research conducted amongst an ecumenical LGBTQ+-affirming congregation based in Metropolitan Manila, Philippines. While ‘progressive’ queer movements (particularly those which originate from Euro-American metropoles) often set themselves in opposition to ‘traditional’ religiosity to distance itself from the latter’s conservative elements, I argue that congregants here account for the interplay of seemingly contradictory ideas and influences as LGBTQ+ urbanites living amidst colonially-rooted Christian ideology embedded within contemporary Filipino national identity and culture through careful everyday identity curation. Such practices enable congregants to make sense of and mediate the marginality and privilege that shape their day-to-day lives as well as how they envision idealised forms of selfhood and community as religious, queer, metropolitan Filipinos constantly oscillating between the fringe and the mainstream. Thus, I demonstrate how congregants dispute reductive narratives of ubiquitous queer suffering under religion and homophobic discourses that dismiss LGBTQ+ identities as antithetical to Christianity or a Western import and, thus, un-Filipino despite the historical and contemporary significance of local queerness evident throughout popular and pre-colonial culture.
Paper short abstract
This paper challenges the “convert” versus “heritage Muslim” binary in the study of religious conversion. Drawing on ethnographic material from Kazakhstan, it examines how Slavic converts to Islam create communities based on shared commitment that exceed ethnic-religious and other binaries.
Paper long abstract
This paper challenges the analytical adequacy of the “convert” versus “heritage Muslim” (or “ethnic Muslim”) binary. In a context where Muslim belonging is commonly framed as ethnic inheritance, one might expect clear boundaries between those “born Muslim” and those who adopt Islam through conversion. However, ongoing fieldwork conducted since 2024 demonstrates how this categorical distinction becomes unstable through shared practices and community formation.
Ethnic Kazakhs who become religiously observant describe experiences that closely resemble those of Slavic converts: accounts of “coming to Islam,” conscious commitments to religious practice, and efforts to distinguish themselves from “non-practicing Muslims.” Across both groups, participants emphasise personal choice, knowledge acquisition, and disciplined practice over inherited affiliation. They similarly navigate questions of authenticity, sincerity, and motivation, positioning themselves as believers whose Muslim identity is actively cultivated rather than passively received. These parallels suggest that the key analytical distinction lies not in ethnic background but in the process through which Muslim identity is consciously constructed through practice, keeping the boundaries dynamic.
Moreover, converts and heritage Muslims participate in shared religious spaces that transcend ethnic categorisation. Russian-language study circles, mixed prayer groups, and informal mentorship networks, alongside Kazakh-majority mosques, bring together individuals of diverse origins based on shared commitment. In these settings, the widely used “neophyte” label loses much of its purchase, even as Slavic converts continue to encounter and negotiate it. The paper argues that attending to these dynamics allows us to reconsider categorical definitions of religious conversion.
Paper short abstract
This paper examines how members of the Arabic-speaking Orthodox community from Turkey narrate identity as they move from a minority to a migrant regime through migration to Greece. Drawing on ethnography in Istanbul and Athens, it shows how scripts of belonging shape recognition and legitimisation.
Paper long abstract
This paper examines how members of the Arabic-speaking Orthodox community from Turkey narrate identity and belonging as they move from a minority regime to a migrant regime through migration to Greece. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in both Istanbul and Athens, it analyses how marginality is produced and managed across two distinct institutional systems that regulate recognition and legitimacy in different ways.
In Turkey, members of the Arabic-speaking Orthodox community occupy a marginal position within the larger Greek Orthodox minority, where minority status itself is shaped by institutional suspicion, legal constraint, and state surveillance. Arabic language and Arabness further mark internal differentiation, producing marginalisation within an already regulated minority framework. In Athens, migration places these individuals within a migrant regime characterised less by overt surveillance than by institutional ambiguity and classificatory awkwardness. Here, individuals are no longer governed through minority law but are reclassified through migration and citizenship systems in which they may be recognised as co-ethnics, treated as foreigners, or rendered legible only through vague or “unspecified” categories of origin.
The paper analyses how individuals navigate these contrasting regimes by strategically mobilising narratives of Orthodoxy, Greekness, and diaspora. These narrative practices are closely tied to institutional survival across both sites, enabling access to education, residence, and long-term settlement in Greece. Recognition functions as a source of institutional stability, while prolonged non-recognition or recognition under inappropriate categories produces uncertainty, leaving individuals in extended states of bureaucratic and social ambiguity.vTogether, these regimes enable survival while reproducing vulnerability across polarisation.
Paper short abstract
This study will explore the way in which these oral traditions serve as a means through which Santhal people can voice their concerns and reclaim their historical identities.
Paper long abstract
This study investigates the ways that Santhal oral traditions disrupt the conventional historiography of India by providing counter-narratives that challenge both the racialization and developmentalist narrative of Indian historiography. Traditional histories of indigenous peoples, at best, present them as fragmented and incomprehensible within the official historical documents that serve as the primary evidence for how the official archives are constructed. Such fragmented and incomprehensible documents are the result of centuries of colonial ethnographic writings, the expertise of missionizing agents, and the contemporary bureaucratic imposition of official postcolonial historical representations. These archives thus portray Santhal communities as readable subjects of the government, with corresponding concepts of "primitive," "tribal," and "ahistorical." Therefore, within the current research project, the ways in which Santhal communities have used myths, “ritual” narratives, collective memory through landscape, and performance storytelling to create an alternative way to construct knowledge and understanding are documented. The current study builds on these first-person accounts to demonstrate the usefulness of Santhal narrative methods as a powerful way of reinterpreting the past. Storytelling in India serves a dual role. It is not simply a way of preserving and passing on culture but also a way for marginalized communities to assert their rights to land, their histories, and their moral authority in the face of increasing political disenfranchisement. This present study also builds on the concept that highlighting the margin in a narrative representation provides a powerful way to illustrate the epistemic violence that exists in the representation of official history and academic knowledge.