RESEARCH

My current research: UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship (ESRC)

My UKRI Future Leaders Fellowship examines how asylum systems can become more humane, equitable, and responsive to the realities of LGBTIQ+ people seeking protection. Despite the rising number of displaced people worldwide, there remains limited data, policy attention, and cross-sector coordination focused on the specific risks faced by LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers including homophobia and transphobia, barriers to legal and social support, economic precarity, and heightened vulnerability to violence. In the UK, for example, government data collection has often been partial, with gaps around gender identity.

The fellowship begins with the UK as a core case study, then expands to comparative analysis across selected European Union states, and extends to three key sites along global asylum routes: Mexico, Lebanon, and Kenya. Across these contexts, the project uses mixed methods within a decolonial framework and is built around collaboration with activists, NGOs, policymakers, researchers, and people with lived experience.

The fellowship has three aims:

1. Analyse existing policies and practices to identify gaps and biases that undermine LGBTIQ+ protection. 
2. Co-design practical guidelines and tools that strengthen LGBTIQ+-inclusive decision-making and services. 
3. Advocate for systemic change by translating evidence into recommendations for policymakers, legislators, and civil society. 

Alongside academic outputs, the project prioritises public engagement—through creative and participatory approaches, including exhibitions, documentary work, and theatre—to widen understanding and build solidarity.

Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship (Jan 2023–Jan 2026)

During my Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Nottingham, I explored the experiences of LGBTIQ+ religious refugees and people seeking asylum in the UK, with particular attention to how faith and spirituality intersect with asylum governance, “credibility” assessments, and expectations of what it means to be legibly queer.

Background Across policy, activism, and some strands of scholarship, queerness is often positioned as inherently secular—producing what has been described as homosecularframeworks. In asylum contexts, this can translate into an assumption that “credible” LGBTIQ+ testimonies should narrate escape from religion and tradition into a secular, gay-friendly Global North. Yet many LGBTIQ+ asylum seekers practise faith, draw strength from spirituality, and refuse the idea that religion and queerness are opposites.

What the project did The fellowship examined how Muslim and Christian LGBTIQ+ refugees and asylum seekers lived and narrated faith, and how these realities interacted with institutional logics within the UK asylum system.

Core objectives

• Religion, spirituality, and everyday life: How do LGBTIQ+ refugees and people seeking asylum engage in individual and collective religious/spiritual practices, and what do these practices do in their lives (belonging, resilience, community, ethical selfhood)? 
• Negotiating secular “liberation” narratives: How do participants respond to (and sometimes resist) queer liberationist discourses that assume secularity, and what alternative vocabularies of dignity, rights, and flourishing become possible? 
• Asylum governance and credibility: How do institutional expectations about “authentic” LGBTIQ+ identities shape decision-making, and how can faith and spirituality complicate (or be used to undermine) claims? 

Contribution 

The project advanced an approach to queer religious agency that challenges the idea that queer emancipation must be grounded in secularity alone, while showing how credibility processes can reproduce sexual, gendered, racialised, and colonial power structures.

Previous research: HIV, treatment experiences, and patient-centred care (PEDAL Study)

From 2020 to 2021, I worked as a researcher on the PEDAL Study at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (University of Sussex / University of Brighton). The study explored the experiences and perceptions of people living with HIV receiving care at the Lawson Unit in Brighton, focusing on dual- and triple-drug combination therapies.

Using a hybrid online/in-person approach (including cultural domain analysis, focus group discussions, and semi-structured interviews), the study examined experiences of safety, effectiveness, tolerability, and unmet needs, compared treatment regimens, and generated recommendations to strengthen doctor–patient communication and holistic, patient-centred care.

My PhD research: Indonesia, Islam, and queer lives

From 2014 to 2019, Indonesia (especially Java) was the main location of my doctoral research on gender, sexuality, religion, and activism. My work examined how queer Muslims and their allies negotiated religious, sexual, and gendered subjectivities, and how religious practice can be a site of agency rather than simply constraint.

My first book, Gender, Sexuality, and Islam in Contemporary Indonesia: Queer Muslims and Their Allies (Routledge), was published in August 2023.

Impact and contribution The research contributed to debates across Indonesian studies, gender and sexuality studies, and the study of religion by challenging narrow ideas of agency as resistance alone. It also offered empirically grounded insights into pro-queer Muslim activism, progressive religious politics, and the strategies allies use to advance inclusion—contesting assumptions that Islam is inherently incompatible with queer life.