Paper short abstract

This paper examines the selective inclusion of trans people in the institution of marriage in India, to raise questions about marriage as a technology of governance, its role in reproducing desirable citizens and fracturing community solidarities in the context of growing Hindu nationalism.

Paper long abstract

In the context of growing Hindu nationalism in India, the country’s legal and political landscape has been witness to a narrowing of the vision of citizenship, trivializing differences of caste, disability, race, gender, and religion; and excluding them while entrenching the oppressions they face.

Against this backdrop of the shrinking definition of Indian-ness both in law and the popular imagination, the institution of marriage has become key to the shaping of desirable Indian citizens. Marriage in India has consistently been a fraught issue, arranged between families, key to maintaining caste, religious and class endogamy and controlling sexuality. Today, in addition to existing barriers to the exercise of marital choice, a plethora of new laws requiring the registration of live-in relationships and criminalizing inter-religious unions have intensified the State’s policing of young people’s intimacy and desire.

Though the demand for marriage equality was defeated in the Supreme Court, partial marriage rights have been secured, recognizing the rights of trans people to enter apparently heterosexual marriages and to adopt, thus affirming trans identities further. However, this serves to exclude all other queer people from the institution of marriage. Such selective inclusion demonstrates an instance of differential integration and creates a division within the already fractured queer community in India. This paper examines the process through which this inclusion and consequent exclusion is effected, revealing the centrality of marriage as an institution to the politics of desirability and the Indian State’s stake in controlling marriage as a technology of reproducing desirable citizens.

Paper short abstract

Arguing for intersex epistemologies within queer and material feminist thought, my paper articulates the concept of "embo‑died‑ment" as an analytic lens that renders visible the tension between forms of necropolitical differential inclusion and embodied persistence.

Paper long abstract

Situated amid the resurgence of authoritarian formations in the Italian neo‑fascist landscape, increasingly invested in regulating social reproduction along racialized and gendered lines of selective exclusion, the paper analyzes how “normalizing” interventions on non‑dyadic bodies reveal differential regimes of care that reproduce hierarchies of desirability and livability.

Extending debates on desirability to intersex politics, the paper interrogates how the fantasy of protecting life legitimizes non‑consensual interventions on those deemed ‘ambiguously‘, ‘insufficiently‘ or ‘excessively‘ sexed. I argue that the medical, social, and political “correction” of non‑normative corporeality constitutes a mechanism of differential inclusion—granting recognition to some (normative‑sexed) bodies while producing (im)possibilities of existence over which bodies count as life.

Recent political/media discourses in Italy – such as the coverage of the 2024 Olympics vis-à-vis the Meloni government’s discourse of ‘protecting women athletes’ – reveal how the non‑dyadic body becomes a polarized site where expectations of normalcy, desirability, and life itself are continuously negotiated and constricted.

In this configuration, embo‑died‑ment emerges as a conceptual intervention grounded in non‑dyadic remembrance and intersex activism. Drawing on Berlant’s slow death (2011) and Raha’s trans‑Marxist elaboration (2017), it theorizes the necropolitical condition of non‑normative and intersex bodies under medical, social, and state normalization, shaping differential livabilities. Engaging feminist materialism, queer necropolitics, and intersex activist epistemologies, I situate this concept within a critique of racial capitalism and biopolitical governance, linking intersex struggles to broader intersectional contestations over which forms of life are permitted to exist, be desired, and be cared for.

Paper short abstract

This paper examines the ambivalence between the ideological embrace and practice of state officials in relation to dealing with marginalised groups through the lens of the contemporary Cuban government towards LGBTQ+, with focus on trans community.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines the ambivalence between the ideological embrace and practice of state officials in relation to dealing with marginalised groups through the lens of the contemporary Cuban government towards LGBTQ+, with focus on trans community.

Cuba, while ideologically a socialist state has been undergoing a prolonged crisis in which led to the dismantlement of its welfare systems, institutional decay and what some Cubans call “covert capitalism” as everyone fends for themselves in order to make a living, mainly through informal work. This polycrisis that Cuba has been experiencing involves massive emigration, rising poverty and product scarcity, as well as crisis of care affecting the entire population.

Meanwhile, Cuban government adapted a number of progressive, leftist discourses in its ideology, including the LGBTQ+ rights. After years of persecution of non-heteronormative groups, the country allowed for the gender reassignment surgeries, legalised same-sex marriage and been open to LGBTQ+ rights organisations, CENESEX and TransCuba under the patronage of Mariela Castro. Moreover, Cuba has been offering healthcare to people infected with HIV, that disproportionately affected the LGBTQ+ community. On the other hand, many other LGBTQ+ organisations have been critical of hijacking the movement by government-funded institutions and not allowing dissenting voices, especially from queer Afro-Cuban groups. Moreover, many people, especially trans women experience police harassment, arbitrary arrests and violence.

This clash between official ideology and practice raises questions about how trans community relates to the state’s institutional systems, how they position themselves as citizens and what are their goals, dreams and ambitions.

Paper short abstract

The paper examines the position of Czech Roma after 2022 through a fatal Roma–Ukrainian conflict. It analyses anti-Ukrainian resentment, Roma marginalisation, and far-right mobilisation, showing how contested belonging and selective inclusion reshape hierarchies of deservingness in Czech society.

Paper long abstract

This paper analyses the position of Czech Roma in Czech society in the context of the arrival of a significant number of Ukrainian refugees after February 2022. Specifically, it elaborates on a particular conflict between young people in a Czech city, in which a young Roma man died and a non-Roma Ukrainian was identified as the attacker. This culminated in strong anti-Ukrainian sentiments among Roma in Czechia in the summer of 2023. The paper analyses these events in broader social processes on several levels. First, there are the broader anti-Ukrainian attitudes of anti-government far-right movements, which, paradoxically, mobilised Roma as partners in defending "national" interests. On the other hand, there is the specific Romani experience of marginalisation in Czech society, which, on the Roma side, led to a contestation of hierarchies of deservingness amid a dominant moral appeal for solidarity with Ukrainians. Thirdly, there are broader aspects of Roma-Ukrainian relations in Czechia. These stem from a deeper history of encounters in precarious socio-economic niches, the failure of the integration of Ukrainians into Czech society after 2022, and finally the issue of strong anti-Roma racism within Ukrainian society. Inspired by theories of racial hierarchies and relational racialisations, this article calls for conceptualising Roma sociability beyond majority-minority narratives. This leads to a more nuanced understanding of the various (and unexpected) aspects of their social belonging.

Paper short abstract

An exploration of how the "social life of documents" shapes the lives of transnational workers in the Swiss international and education sector. The subtopics include how internationalization breeds diversity and exclusion; new diasporic, gendered and racial orders, and the datafication of borders.

Paper long abstract

This presentation explores the social life of documents that shape the lives of skilled labourers in Switzerland, who hold work or study permits. Focusing on the international and education sectors, I use documents to investigate the anatomy of “smart” borders in Switzerland and Europe. Subtopics include how internationalization breeds diversity and exclusion; new diasporic, gendered and racial orders, and the datafication of borders.

I’ll describe how this transnational population find themselves confronted with what I call the “regime of letters” that differentially structures horizons of possibilities in stark terms. For example, nationals from the European Economic Area (EEA) who acquire a “B permit” are often provided paper permits with privileges distinct from non-EEA nationals, who are provided plastic biometric ones. Paper B permits usually confer 5 years of residency, whereas plastic ones vary based on nationality and the purpose of stay. If one acquires an "L" or "F" permit, the duration of the stay is drastically shorter, and privileges are curtailed. Secondly, as some racialized bodies slip through the cracks of the selectively permeable border, we increasingly see racialized Western political protagonists such as Toni Iwobi in Italy, or Kemi Badenoch in the UK, who advocate for stricter migratory regimes imposed on bodies where racialization and geographic provenance overlap more concretely. Lastly, this presentation examines public-private partnerships that datify the regulation of bodies and borders. It explores how European and/or African countries adopt similar datafication strategies at their borders and how these strategies “connect” a new datafied colonial world order.

Paper short abstract

Based on ethnography with a Black and Brown migrant football club in Budapest, this paper explores how a new moral economy creates hierarchies of desirability for non-white footballers, differentially integrating elites while deeming grassroots players undeserving.

Paper long abstract

Since 2010, Viktor Orbán’s governments have promoted an ethnically homogeneous nation, depicting racilaized minorities as threats while pragmatically embracing elite non-white athletes whose victories boost nationalist prestige. This creates a deep hierarchy of desirability within a 'new moral economy' that ties social value to productivity, justifying the neglect of those deemed unproductive, - like the Roma who are cast as 'dirty white' to purify the national body. This paper ethnographically traces how this logic extends to the football pitch. Focusing on a fourth-division club of non-white migrant players in Budapest, it reveals their consequent positioning as 'undeserving'. Excluded from the state's nationalist spectacle and facing racial abuse as 'space invaders' in a white-coded institution, their club is a direct byproduct of this differential integration. In response, the players reshape the club into a key site of subtle resistance - a constructed Black social space of care, mutual aid, and solidarity that sustains them against systemic abandonment. This grassroots community embodies the yearnings for an inclusive world from within the margins. Analysing this tension, the paper demonstrates how illiberal states like Hungary employ a double-edged logic of deservingness to manage racial capitalism: strategically integrating a celebrated few to legitimize the abandonment of the many, thereby consolidating an exclusionary national order.

Paper short abstract

Institutional care in Slovakia traps "disabled" people in maintenance, not progress through minimal resources and division of care, affecting their statehood and personhood. Ethnography together with volunteer experience, explores community based care tensions and change efforts.

Paper long abstract

The individual based, institutional care model, where all the responsibility over a person is put either on close family or entirely on caregivers, creates a reality where the distribution of the care is minimal. In combination with the lack of resources invested in social care, the caregivers are only able to maintain the state of the client, as opposed to advancing it. In some cases, even maintaining the currents state of a person proves to be a difficult ordeal. Hence, also the awareness of options towards a better life is absent or very low. As a result of that, the statehood, as well as personhood are at loss. The desirability of the people labelled as “disabled” is actively being lowered. Community based care, where people labelled as “disabled“ live in smaller communities, in supported housing, seems to be a solution. However, the tension between this model of care and the prevailing institutional care model is ever so present.

Through ethnographic research inside and outside of institutions, working with people labelled as “disabled“ in Slovakia, I would like to explain how these tensions affect the people and what are the efforts of the state, the institutions, and the communities towards a change. My ethnographical research is enriched by my experience as a volunteer in a foundation focused on social inclusion and social rehabilitation of people labelled as “disabled”.