2024 Pragati Singh

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Dr. Pragati Singh is a health professional, researcher, social entrepreneur, and an internationally renowned sexual and reproductive health and rights changemaker. She is known for her unique initiatives in niche fields, such as Indian Aces: India’s first initiative working towards asexuality, PanACEa: Asexuality Asia Conference; PLatonicity.co: Matchmaking for nonsexual alliances, Qrate: An ecosystem to improve healthcare access for women and LGBTQIA+ people in India, and more. She has been recognized globally with numerous awards and prizes, and was also featured in the BBC’s list of 100 most inspiring, innovative, and influential women from around the world in 2019. Her works have been published internationally and she is also working on her first book: Asexual Lives.

Pragati will be here at the university 15-June to 13-July-2024. If you wish to contact Pragati then please email Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender (sexgencentre@brighton.ac.uk).

 

2023-2024  Evie Browne

Evie Browne
Dr Evie Browne has a PhD in International Development from the University of Sussex with a focus on LGBTQI+ issues and gender normativity among lesbian and bisexual women in Cuba. Her research interests centre on sexualities, gender norms and normativity, intersectional feminism, rights, and social justice. Evie works at ODI as a Research Fellow in the Gender Equality and Social Inclusion team (https://odi.org/en/about/our-work/gender-equality-and-social-inclusion/), bringing a queer lens to work on gender norms. At ODI, Evie’s piece on gender norms and LGBTQI+ issues remains continually popular (Browne, E. (2019). Gender norms, LGBTQI issues and development: a topic guide. Discussion Paper. ALIGN: ODI, London. https://www.alignplatform.org/resources/2019/02/gender-norms-lgbtqi-issues-and-development).

At CTSG, Evie aims to bring together academic, policy, and activist communities across London and Brighton, with a particular focus on exploring how LGBTQI+ movements are resisting the contemporary anti-gender backlash.

Prior to joining ODI, Evie was a Research Fellow at GSDRC, providing a bridge between academic experts and donor agencies and government policy departments, delivering rapid response research services for DFID, AusAID and the EC. Evie has worked as a research consultant in international development since 2011, supporting policy-oriented research with  IDS, the World Bank and International Alert, among others. She speaks English and has a working proficiency in Spanish.

Evie has published three peer-reviewed articles from their PhD research:

2022-2023 Annukka Lahti 

Annukka Lahti is an Academy of Finland postdoctoral fellow at the University of Eastern Finland, Finland. The interrelations of intimacy, power, sexuality, gender and affect are at the heart of her research inquiry. She has studied them from queer theoretical and affect theoretical, and recently posthuman perspectives. She has published studies on affective inequalities and intimacies, queer and heterosexual relationship contexts, singlehood and LGBTIQ+ breakups. In her PhD research, she developed a queer psychosocial approach to the study of bisexuality in relationships. Thereafter, she worked as the principal investigator on a project studying sexual harassment in Finnish competitive sports. In 2020, she began her postdoctoral project on Finnish LGBTIQ+ separations, funded by the Finnish Kone Foundation. Currently, she is exploring LGBTIQ+ separations in two different cultural locations in the Academy of Finland-funded project Where the rainbow ends: the becoming of LGBTIQ+ separations (project 349408). To read more about the project, please see: https://www.wheretherainbowends.info/

Annukka has authored publications in several high-quality journals, such as Sociology, NORA—Nordic Journal of Gender and Feminist Research, Subjectivity and Feminism & Psychology, among others. She is a co-editor of the edited volume Affective Intimacies, published by Manchester University Press (2022), and of a special issue on affective intimacies published in NORA (2021). Her co-edited book Family and Personal Relationships Under the Rainbow (in Finnish) was published in 2020. Currently, she is co-editing a special issue titled ‘Queering intimacies, families and companionships’ for lambda nordica (to be published in 2024/25).

To read more about Annukka, please see:

UEFConnect

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2613-933X

2022-2023 Ahmet Atay

Ahmet Atay (Ph.D. Southern Illinois University- Carbondale) is Professor of Global Media and Communication Studies at the College of Wooster. His research falls into two categories. Although they might seem distinct, both categories revolve around the issues of culture and the differences (such as queer, transnationality, post coloniality, and decoloniality) and diversity in mediated texts, cyberspace, and everyday situations. More specifically, his research at large focuses on transnational, diasporic and queer experiences and communities. He often writes about the transnational flow of texts, information, and bodies. While some of his current projects are focused on the distinct aspects of transnational and diasporic communities (particularly transnational and diasporic bodies), others explore the aspects of transnational media and the representations of transnational and queer bodies in global media. His research often employs textual analysis, queer and feminist analysis, critical and cyber ethnography, autoethnography (decolonizing autoethnography and digital/cyber autoethnography), and other transnational and postcolonial media and cultural methods. He is the author of Globalization’s Impact on Identity Formation: Queer Diasporic Males in Cyberspace (2015) and the co-editor of several books. His scholarship appeared in number of journals and edited books. He served as the chair of Global Media and Digital Studies and Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies departments at the College of Wooster. Currently he is serving as the First Vice President (and the program planner of 2023 conference) of Central States Communication Association. He will become the president of the organization in April 2023.

2022-2023  Louka Maju Goetzke

Louka Maju Goetzke is Research Associate and a third-year PhD candidate in Sociology at Goethe University Frankfurt/Main in Germany. Their doctoral project explores how gender transitions unfold, with a focus on processes of differentiation and in/exclusion. Louka’s broader research interests include sociological theory, feminist critique of science, trans studies, and socio- or new materialist approaches. They are part of the research network Inter*_Trans*_Wissenschaftsnetzwerk (ITW) bringing together people who research and/or work on inter and trans issues, taking a non-pathologising approach. In 2021, Louka participated in the #GenderStruggles: Building Community Resilience via Creativity and Digital Media project, investigating feminist and queer responses to anti-gender-mobilizations among researchers and activists in Turkey, Sweden and Germany.

Louka holds an MA in Critical and Creative Analysis from Goldsmiths University of London, Department of Sociology, as well as an MA in Socio-cultural Studies from Paris 8 University in France and European University Viadrina in Germany, and a BA in Cultural Studies and Political Science from Leuphana University Lüneburg in Germany. To read more about Louka see loukagoetzke.net.

2021-2022 Lena Mattheis

Dr Lena Matteis

Dr Lena Mattheis is a lecturer in contemporary literature at the University of Surrey, where she is currently pursuing research interests in queer forms in literature, in literary urban studies and in spoken word poetry. She has previously worked at the University of Duisburg-Essen in Germany and at the University of Namibia. Her work has been published in peer-reviewed journals (Narrative, Literary Geographies, Transnational Literature, among others) and in her monograph ‘Translocality in Contemporary City Novels’ (Palgrave, 2021). Lena is very pleased to be the host and creator of the Queer Lit podcast, a podcast about LGBTQIA2S+* literature and culture, in which she gets to talk to inspiring queer scholars and creatives across disciplines.

In early 2022, Lena was able to spend some time in Brighton and record several episodes with the motto “Meet the CTSG”. Click the link  to find out which amazing CTSG members Lena got to talk to.

2021-2022 Flavia Meireles

Flavia Meireles

Flavia Meireles is Dance Professor and Professor at the Graduate Program of Ethnical-racial Relationships (PPRER) at Cefet/RJ (Brazil). She holds a Ph.D. in Communication and Culture at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). She was Visiting Researcher at the Angewandte Theaterwissenchaft (ATW) at Justus-Liebeg Universität (Giessen/DE) in 2018/19. She is also an Associate Researcher of the Research Network in Queer Studies, Decolonial Feminisms and Cultural Transformations (QDFCT) at Justus-Liebeg Universität (Giessen/DE). Her thesis received honourable mention at the ABEH Prize 2021 for thesis and dissertations, from the Brazilian Association of Gender and Sexuality Studies (ABEH). Her main interests are grassroots social movements in Brazil and Latin America, especially indigenous movements and the plurality of feminists LGBTQIA struggles and discourses; politics of body; decolonial feminism from Global South perspectives; conditions and work of the artist; dance, cinema, visual arts and visual culture; all themes intersected by politics of race, gender and sexuality.

To read more about Flavia see: https://cefet-rj.academia.edu/flavia_meireles

2020-2022 C. Serena Santonocito (June 2022)

Visiting Research Fellow

Serena is a visiting research fellow at the CTGS. She is currently conducting comparative institutional discourse analysis research onto the issue of same-sex unions and its development in the much discussed institution of marriage (in the UK) and civil unions (in Italy). Within the many branches offered by linguistic research, she uses a critical and queer perspective which she supplements with corpus-based methods. Her research, focusing on the creation of same-sex unions’ discursive identity, fosters for greater linguistic inclusivity while elaborating on how institutionalized language-use shapes collective understandings of sexuality and gender.

2020-2022 Sebastian Collado  (Jan Feb 2022)

Visiting Research Fellow

Artist and researcher. Sebastian studied theatre at the Chilean Catholic University and dance with various teachers both in Chile and abroad. During the last 10 years, he developed his career as a dancer and performer in countries such as Germany, Italy, Norway and Austria. In addition, in these countries, he worked as a choreographer and teacher in various educational institutions. Since 2015, Sebastian has specialized in psychosocial intervention through art, highlighting his project “Tutopia” which was financed by the German Ministry of Education (Kultur macht stark) for two years. This project is currently being carried out in Chile with the support of the Chilean Ministry of Culture and the Arts. As a researcher, Sebastián studied for a Master’s degree in Gender, Culture and Social Change at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) and currently, with the support of Chilean Ministery of Science, he is doing a PhD in psychology at the Alberto Hurtado University, where he specializes in the study of the creation of non-heterosexual sexual identities in the context of homophobic violence from a linguistic and performative/artistic perspective.

2020-2021 Catherine Meads (online)

Visiting Research Fellow

Catherine Meads is a Professor of Health at Anglia Ruskin University and a senior systematic reviewer. She has published numerous systematic reviews and health technology assessments, including music for recuperation after surgery, therapeutic writing in long-term conditions, and interventions to promote wellbeing. Previously, Catherine was Research Leader at RAND Europe in Cambridge, Reader in Health Technology Assessment at Brunel University, Senior Lecturer at Bart’s and The London School of Medicine and Dentistry, and at the University of Birmingham. She has been conducting research into lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) health since 1992 and has published a number of papers. Recently she completed a best-evidence review for Public Health England on health and healthcare experiences of UK sexual minority women. She has also delivered numerous public lectures, spoken at All Party Parliamentary Committees, taught undergraduate medical and nursing students, helped develop an elearning package for GPs and has been on several LGBT conference steering committees. She is currently a member of the UK Government Equalities Office LGBT Advisory Panel.

2018-2019 Elisa Garcia-Mingo (June 2019)

Assistant Professor Elisa Garcia-Mingo worked with Drs Patricia Prieto-Blanco and Olu Jenzen from the Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender. During her stay at Brighton, she worked on her ongoing research project about Sexual Violence in Digital Environments.

“I found a very rich space to exchange ideas and methodological concerns with members of the Centre for Transforming and Sexuality Gender working on topics including digital images, affordances of digital technologies, mediations of bodies, feminist activism and regimes of digital representation of harm.”
(Assistant Professor Elisa Garcia-Mingo)

After her time as a Visiting Fellow, she was elected for a full-time position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociological Theory and Social Research Methods at Universidad Complutense de Madrid, one of the leading universities in Spain. Her growing expertise on Digital Culture made her eligible to be a lecturer of Research Methods in Digital Environments and she has also become a member of Cibersomosaguas, a research group on Digital Culture and Social Movements based at Universidad Complutense de Madrid.

Currently, Elisa Garcia-Mingo is working with Patricia Prieto-Blanco on a research project about hashtag activism against sexual violence in Spain. The results of the ongoing research will be discussed at the annual MeCCSA Conference that will take place at the University of Brighton in January 2020.