Presenters

Carole Ammann (she/her) is a senior researcher with an interdisciplinary background in social anthropology and African studies at the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at the University of Lucerne. Her specialisation is the anthropology of gender, focusing specifically on femininities, masculinities, and intersectionality. Carole Amman is currently the principal investigator of the mixed-methods research project ‘Queer Families in Switzerland’, which is funded by the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF).

Kaue F. N. Crima Bellini is a PhD candidate and Project Assistant in Social Anthropology at the University of Basel, with research interests that include political economy, queer anthropology, migration, embodiment, affect theory, and space. Their current work, which attends to intimacy, mobility, and belonging as they unfold in contemporary landscapes of all-gay cruises and cruising grounds in London, is funded by the Humer Foundation for Academic Talent and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). Crima Bellini holds a master's degree in African Studies from the Centre for African Studies (University of Basel), with a thesis that examined the adaptation process of queer African migrants living in Basel (CH). They also earned a Licentiate degree in Social Sciences fromthe State University of Maringá (UEM), Brazil.

Tamara Bosshardt (she/no pronouns) is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Lucerne on Dr. Carole Ammann’s project on queer parenthood in Switzerland, studying how queer people form families, experience everyday family life, and navigate challenges in a cisheteronormative society. Tamara Bosshardt studied sociology, modern history, and economic history at the University of Zurich. This was followed by a dissertation on intergenerational financial transfers in Switzerland, showing how financial support between adults and their parents can reduce inequalities within families while increasing inequality between families. Tamara Bosshardt’s research interests include solidarity, intersectional empirical analyses of inequality, diverse forms of social relationships, queer perspectives, and critical social science.

Caroline Chautems (PhD) is a social and medical anthropologist, specializing in sexual and reproductive health. Grounded in a reproductive justice framework, her work investigates health disparities and the stratification of access to healthcare, considering factors such as gender identity, sexual and affective orientation, race, literacy, and digital literacy. She currently leads a research project on health equity for queer parents in Switzerland at the University of Lausanne. In 2024–2025, she was a Fulbright Visiting Scholar at the University of California, Santa Barbara, where her research focused on queer reproductive justice and doula care.

Elisabeth Lund Engebretsen (she/they) is Professor of Gender Research at the University of Stavanger and a social anthropologist whose work explores gender, sexuality, climate and social justice through ethnographic and interdisciplinary approaches. Drawing on research in China and the Nordic region, Engebretsen examines questions of queer lives, political mobilization, academic freedom, and contemporary anti-gender mobilizations. Engebretsen is the author of Queer Women in Urban China: An Ethnography (2014), an award-recognized study of queer culture in China, and co-founded ENQA back in 2013.

Banhishikha Ghosh is a Lecturer in Health and Social Care (Faculty of Education and Society) at the University of Sunderland. Her research deals with sexual lives in the Global South and care regulatory frameworks in the United Kingdom. Her monograph Sexually Liminal Lives (2026), based on her doctoral work at the University of Zurich, has been published by Cambridge University Press. She is currently a PI in the UKRI-funded project: Reimagining Care: Embedding Equity and Support in Healthcare Training in the Digital Age.

Inga Haaland is a medical anthropologist working at the intersection of medical anthropology, global health and African queer studies. Her PhD research, based in Dar es Salaam, examined how queer people engaged in biomedical HIV prevention through a global health intervention, and furthermore how they navigated gender expressions, stigma and the moral expectations embedded in donor-driven programs. Her current work from Kisumu, Kenya, focuses on how people living with HIV, queer people, and the health care workers in the AIDS industry negotiate shifting health infrastructures, donor withdrawal, and the reconfiguration of everyday practices of protection and survival.

Tianyu Jiang (they/she) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Music Sociology at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna (mdw). They received a PhD in 2025 through the interdisciplinary structured doctoral programme “Music Matters” at mdw, with a dissertation examining Shanghai’s underground queer and women-centered electronic dance music scene. Their research interests include electronic dance music culture, digital culture, urban space and place, and time-based media. Alongside academic research, Tianyu is a writer and film critic, with texts published in Talking Shorts and yanco magazine.

Matea Korda holds the Teaching and Research Assistant position at the Department of Ethnology and Anthropology at the University of Zadar since the 2025/2026 academic year. She graduated in 2023 with an MA in Nationalism Studies from Central European University in Vienna, and in 2021 she graduated with a dual MA degree in Anthropology & Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb. She is the author and co-author of several scholarly publications and contributor to several research projects. Her academic interests span across creative and experimental methodology, ethnography, migration studies, queer anthropology, anthropology of social memory, political and medical anthropology.

Vasiliki (Bessy) Polykarpou (she/they) is a PhD candidate in Social Anthropology at Panteion University. Their doctoral research develops an intersectional feminist ethnography of coalitional politics in Athens, Greece, with a focus on queer, feminist, and anti-racist struggles, as well as the multiple forms of political and epistemic violence that shape them. Their work engages questions of positionality, relationality, and the tensions and possibilities of political alliance-making in fragmented urban contexts. They co-edited the volume Epistemic Resistance, Radical Politics, Positionality (De Gruyter Brill 2025), to which they also contributed a chapter. Parts of their research have been presented in conferences and workshops and published in academic and public-facing venues. They are a board member of the European Network for Queer Anthropology (ENQA), part of the European Association of Social Anthropologists, and a member of the Association of Social Anthropologists Greece.

Kumud Rana is a Lecturer in Sociology at Lancaster University whose research examines the intersections of caste, class, gender and queer Indigeneity in Nepal. She currently leads a creative, collaborative research project on queer heritage making and collective care among transfeminine performers, undertaken in partnership with Indigenous and queer activists and artists. Her earlier work analysed the influence of foreign aid and transnational activist networks on LGBTI+ organising in Nepal.

Uddipta Roy is a PhD student in Anthropology at the University of Maryland, College Park. Their research lies at the intersections of waste and discard studies, queer and trans studies, and the politics of social difference in South Asia. Their ongoing doctoral work is an examination of how transgender life-worlds are crafted in the wake of waste, environmental destruction, and embodied inequalities in eastern India. They have presented research at various international conferences, including the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) and the Annual Conference on South Asia, and have organized collaborative academic panels across anthropological and interdisciplinary contexts. Their writing has appeared in the Journal of Gender Studies, with additional work forthcoming and under review in anthropology, ethnic studies, and gender and sexuality studies journals. Their work draws on long-term community collaboration and activist involvements with queer and trans-led collectives and organizations in eastern India.

Elif Sarı is a queer feminist sociocultural anthropologist and an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. Her work focuses on migration, asylum, and refugee waiting, with a particular focus on queer and trans refugee communities in the Middle East and its diasporas. Dr. Sarı received her PhD in Anthropology from Cornell University. She holds an MA in Near Eastern Studies from New York University and completed her BA in Political Science at Boğaziçi University in Turkey, where she was born and raised. Elif’s current book project is based on a decade-long ethnographic fieldwork and community engagements with Iranian LGBTQ refugees waiting in Turkey. The book develops the concept of stuckness, as well as LGBTQ refugees’ creative, resilient, and fugitive strategies for carving ways out of the multiple forms of stuckness produced by the asylum regime.

Max Schnepf (he/they) is a research associate at the Institute for Social and Cultural Anthropology at Freie Universität Berlin, working at the intersection of medical and queer anthropology. Their research explores the entanglements of pharmaceuticals, affect, and sexual cultures, with a particular focus on HIV prevention and PrEP. Max’s ethnographic work traces how biomedical technologies shape queer intimacies, everyday practices, and imaginaries of health across different contexts, including Germany, Colombia, and Australia.

Qing Shen (he/him) (PhD in anthropology, Uppsala University) is a postdoc fellow at ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry. He was previously a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Transforming Sexuality and Gender at the University of Brighton. He specializes in gender, sexuality, and media culture in contemporary China and East Asia.

Leo Valentin Theissing (they/them) is a PhD candidate in social anthropology at the University of Lucerne, researching trans parenting and queer care networks, as part of an SNSF-funded mixed-methods research project “Queer Families in Switzerland”. Besides academia, they are a local trans community organizer.