Digital borders and queer migrations
This panel brings together a discussion on digital borders and queer migration, examining how technologies shape contemporary experiences of mobility, belonging, and exclusion.
The conversation explores how borders are produced and contested in digital and urban contexts, with particular attention to queer lives and migrant subjectivities. By placing queer migration in dialogue with critical perspectives on digital governance and everyday life, the event reflects on forms of control and resistance and considers possibilities for imagining more just and humane futures for people living across borders.
Meet our chair and speakers:
Debanuj DasGupta is Associate Professor of Feminist Studies at University of California, Santa Barbara. Debanuj’s research and teaching focuses on the global governance of migration, sexuality, and HIV. Debanuj utilizes collaborative scholar & activist research methods in order to write about the political potentials of trauma experienced by LGBTQ immigrants, refugees and asylum seekers. Prior to UCSB, Debanuj was Assistant Professor of Geography and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at the University of Connecticut (2016-2020). Debanuj served as Board Co-Chair of the Center for LGBTQ Studies (CLAGS) at the City University of New York, between 2017-2022, and is on the editorial board of Geography Compass.
Myria Georgiou is a professor in the Department of Media and Communications at LSE. Professor Georgiou researches and teaches on migration and urbanisation in the context of their increasing mediation and digitisation. In research conducted across 8 countries over the last 25 years, she has been studying communication practices and media representations that profoundly, but unevenly, shape meanings and experiences of citizenship and identity. Her latest book is Being Human in Digital Cities (Polity/Wiley 2024, winner of the Jane Jacobs Urban Communication book award, 2025). She is also the author and editor of five other books, including The Digital Border (2022, NYU Press, with L.Chouliaraki) and The Sage Handbook of Media and Migration (2019, with co-editors K.Smets, K.Leurs, S.Witteborn, R.Gajjala).
Leticia Sabsay is Associate Professor in Gender and Contemporary Culture in the Department of Gender Studies. Dr Sabsay’s work interrogates the entanglement between sexuality, subjectivity and political ideals of freedom and justice as processes of cultural translation, both across disciplines and transnational contexts. Throughout her career, Leticia also developed an enduring interest in theories of performativity and discourse, which led her to publish extensively on Judith’s Butler work. This perspective has been central to her research on disputed ideas of democracy and contemporary struggles over how bodies are differently valued across gender, sexual, and racial lines, with a focus on how these are framed in political discourse, and embodied in cultural and artistic practices, activism and social movements.
Any questions?
Contact gender.events@lse.ac.uk.
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